The Return Of "Obama Is Uppity"

Remember when House Republicans invited President Obama to talk to them in January and he answered a number of questions from them, live?  The Republicans don't.  And neither does Politico.

The roots of the partisan standoff that led to the postponement of the bipartisan White House summit scheduled for Thursday date back to January, when President Barack Obama crashed a GOP meeting in Baltimore to deliver a humiliating rebuke of House Republicans.

Obama's last-minute decision to address the House GOP retreat - and the one-sided televised presidential lecture many Republicans decried as a political ambush - has left a lingering distrust of Obama invitations and a wariness about accommodating every scheduling request emanating from the West Wing, aides tell POLITICO.

"He has a ways to go to rebuild the trust," said a top Republican Hill staffer. "The Baltimore thing was unbelievable. There were [House Republicans] who only knew Obama was coming when they saw Secret Service guys scouting out the place." 

Now, this supposed ambush and lecture in January is the reason the GOP is ducking out of meeting with the President this month.  He's uppity, arrogant, and narcissistic!  We don't want to talk to him!  We don't have time for his delusions that he's still relevant!

Only as Josh Marshall points out, it didn't happen that way.

Honestly, I'm not even sure what to make of this. Not only does this version of events seem preposterous on its face, I didn't even realize this was their storyline.

Let's start with this whole idea that Obama somehow just showed up and blew up their retreat. Crashed, ambushed, etc. This was definitely not my recollection. I thought that the House Republicans invited Obama. And he accepted. Indeed, I remember for what I think were several days in advance our Eric Kleefeld telling me how excited he was to see a US equivalent of the Brits' question time.

So was it an ambush? Well, My God, not even close. Here's the press release from Mike Pence, Chairman of the House Republican Conference, thanking the president on January 13th for "accept[ing] our invitation to meet with the Republican Conference later this month." And here's the Politico's write up from January 12th, the day before. In other words, that's more than two weeks before these House Republicans who must have spent the month in a sensory deprivation chamber were stunned to see the president's motorcade driving up announced to crash their party. And if they'd forgotten here's the write-up from The Hill the day before the event ...

Emboldened by an unexpected victory in Massachusetts and frustrated with a "partisan" State of the Union address, House Republicans are eager to meet with President Barack Obama on Friday.

So here they are all gunned up and eagerly awaiting President Obama's ambush of them that they didn't know anything about.

I have to confess that I find it genuinely distressing that these folks can whip up a heap of blatant nonsense like this and it gets played pretty much at face value when a simply look through the archives of the half dozen or more sites that cover Washington show that the whole idea is laughable. 

And yet that's exactly what the GOP and Politico are selling because it serves the "Obama is uppity" meme that's made a serious comeback since the midterms. As Roy Edroso explains, the "Is Obama relevant?" attacks heading into 2012 are going to continue.

The recent election was hard on Democrats, but Obama is still President, and the examples of the 1982 and 1994 midterms suggest that, like Reagan and Clinton, he could bounce back to reelection. Indeed, his approval rating has already bounced, despite the Dem devastation, and is about where Reagan's and Clinton's were after their midterm reversals.

So it's imperative for Obama's opponents that they dirty him up. And as much as they love the idea that he's a Marxist Hitler, they seem to have figured out that this abstruse notion doesn't have much visceral appeal for people who are not themselves. So they're going with something to which ordinary people, who sometimes like to see the lofty taken down, might possibility relate. And if the economy doesn't get much better, the notion that the President isn't fixing it because he looks down on everyone may just stick. So far it's a decidedly minority opinion, but give it time. 

Keep an eye on this one, folks.  No matter what Obama does, the Uppity Black Man meme is back for good.