The Obama Memos

From Ryan Lizza, at The New Yorker, "Barack Obama, Post-Partisan, Meets Washington Gridlock."

This is a progressive puff piece that paints the GOP as the polarizing bad guys and the Dems as jilted suitors in some woefully lost post-partisan nirvana. Despite assessing political science data, Lizza doesn't appear to have considered that today's Democrats are socialist partisans with a demonizing agenda or that this administration long ago abandoned any hopes of post-partisan happy talk. What the Lizza piece does do is provide a smokescreen for the MFM and progressive left. They can gleefully point to this article --- and many more like it no doubt on the way --- to tar Republicans as "obstructionist" and "racist" when in fact it's exactly the opposite that's true. See, for example, Victor Davis Hanson's piece at National Review: "Obama's Racial Politics":

Obama has mainstreamed the practice of profiling friends and enemies on this reactionary basis of racial identity. In a Democratic National Committee video in April 2010, Obama called on “young people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women . . . to stand together once again.” Are those not included in his categories, then, not to stand “together” again? Shortly before the November 2010 congressional elections, Obama suggested told a huge audience in Philadelphia that Republicans “are counting on black folks staying home.” In one of his most surreal speeches before the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama in affected fashion adopted the supposed patois of Black America in defining collective interests by shared race: “Stop grumblin’. Stop cryin’. We are going to press on. We’ve got work to do.” Separately, he appealed to Latino voters not to stay home from the 2010 election, but instead to “punish our enemies” — and not to fall prey to the Republicans’ “cynical attempt to discourage Latinos from voting.” I don’t think a president of the United States has ever, at least since the pre–Civil War era, openly called on a racial group to join with him to punish political adversaries.

I would love to see Hanson just destroy Lizza in a debate on this. What's funny though is folks like Lizza are actually convinced they're right. They've got data to prove it! Perhaps. But what they don't have is honesty and common sense, and that decency gap is going to come back and bite them in the ass in November.