Exciting New Horizons In Obama Derangement Syndrome

It's an oldie but goodie that proves everything old is new again:  Obama is a "Muslim" has always been a euphemism for Obama is something else...not M as in Muslim but N as in...well, you know.  Steve Benen:

President Obama sat down with NBC's Brian Williams yesterday, covering a fair amount of ground over the course of 22 minutes. Before I saw the interview, I saw a headline: "Obama blasts lies, disinformation." That's sort of true, but it's not quite how I'd characterize the discussion.

After talking at some length about the problems afflicting the Gulf Coast in general and Louisiana in particular, Williams noted public opinion polls showing significant numbers of Americans questioning the president's faith and birthplace. Obama more or less just shrugged off the nonsense. "The facts are the facts," he said, adding, "I'm not going to be worrying too much about whatever rumors are floating on out there. If I spend all my time chasing after that, then I wouldn't get much done.... I can't spend all my time with my birth certificate plastered on my forehead."

The president, in other words, treated this is a silly, trivial distraction, which it is.

Unfortunately, both Benen and Obama are going about this the wrong way.  Candidate Obama fought this kind of misinformation and was brutally effective.  President Obama on the other hand is remaining above the fray, and as E.J. Dionne rightly points out, that's leaving a vacuum for the Wingers to fill with misinformation and it is indicative of a much larger issue.

He and his party are often defensive when it comes to saying what they really believe: that government, well-executed, is a positive good; that too much economic inequality is both dysfunctional and unjust; that capitalism has never worked without regulation and a strong dose of social insurance. They no longer dare talk about public enterprise, a phrase my friend Chris Matthews reminded me of recently, visible in our great state universities, our best public schools, our road and transit systems, and in the research and development that government finances in areas where there is no immediate profit to be made.

The Obama press office, I know, can send me speeches in which he has made some of these points. But the president's efforts to lay down a consistent rationale, argument and philosophy have been sporadic. He has created a vacuum, filled by the wild charges of Glenn Beck, the disappointment of progressives who emphasize what he hasn't done and the tired "government is always the problem" rhetoric of his mainstream conservative opponents. He has thus left himself and his Democratic allies with weak defenses against a tide of economic melancholy.

It is too late to turn the midterm election into a triumph for the administration but not too late to salvage his party's congressional majorities. Given dismal Democratic expectations, that would now be rated as a victory. But doing so will require Obama to think anew about what "politicking" really means, to pick more than tactical fights with his adversaries, and to lay out, without equivocation or apology, where he is trying to move the country. It's just too bad he didn't start earlier. 

I miss Candidate Obama.  He was a hell of a fighter.  President Obama is too busy remaining above the fray and dismissing this Muslim euphemism as something not worth paying attention to.  All that does of course is allow the misinformation to fester allowing the wingers to go to the next step on this unopposed: the false notion and projection fantasy that Obama is dismissing large swaths of Americans as irrelevant as well.

This President's keeping his hands clean.  He really does have bigger problems to worry about...much, much bigger ones.  The problem is this small wound, allowed to fester, can be just as fatal to his presidency.