In 1929, just after he was elected governor of New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the headline speaker at a dinner organized by Tammany Hall. The theme of the night was political oratory, and in his remarks, FDR talked about the importance of political speech in the formation of the republic. As H.W. Brands records in his new biography, Roosevelt told the audience, “Elections were won or lost, parties were driven out or swept into power entirely as the public speakers of one side or the other proved most able and convincing. It was the golden age of the silver tongue.”
That tradition, however, had changed with the advent of mass media in the form of the newspapers. Then, as now, publishers seldom printed speeches in their entirety, and voters learned to take their cues from quotes that reporters and editors chose to excerpt.
But on that night eighty years ago, FDR saw a new technological revolution taking hold. He told the guests:

The pendulum is rapidly swinging back to the old condition of things. One can only guess at the figure, but I think it is a conservative estimate to say that whereas five years ago 99 out of 100 took their arguments from the editorials and the news columns of the daily press, today at least half the voters, sitting at their own fireside, listen to the actual words of the political leaders on both sides and make their decisions based on what they hear rather than what they read. I think it is almost safe to say that in reaching their decisions as to which party they will support, what is heard over the radio decides as many people as what is printed in the newspapers.

Roosevelt’s recognition of this change and his success in using radio to appeal directly to voters made up no small part of his political genius. For the next sixteen years, when he needed to win a political argument, Roosevelt took the discussion straight from the White House into the homes of ordinary citizens, and the nation’s voters sided with FDR time and time again. Roosevelt didn’t just win elections; he changed the way that politics in America were practiced.
But time didn’t stand still, and politics changed again in 1960. Television became the dominant medium, and that in turn forced voters to process information in a new way.The most successful politicians were those who had the discipline to harness the format and the wealth to run slick media campaigns. Operatives adapted political speech to the new paradigm, and the soundbite was born.
In less than a week, we will swear in a new president who has already shown an extraordinary capacity to use the emerging technologies of the Internet to break through the television mindset and the scripted candidacy it produces. But there is a important difference between using the Internet to campaign and using the Internet to govern.
To make the transition from politics to policy, Obama should look to FDR.
The day after he took office, Roosevelt made his first policy decision as president and issued an order to declare a national bank holiday. His goal was to end the panic that led thousands to descend on financial institutions and withdraw the entirety of their savings.
In less than a week, Congress passed the Emergency Banking Act, granting Roosevelt new powers to deal with the crisis. Three days after that, nearly 1,000 banks across the country were up and running again. Many who had withdrawn their wealth in the weeks before lined up to deposit it back again.
Exactly one week after issuing that first executive order, at 10 o’clock in the evening on the East Coast, FDR settled into his study in the White House and gave a short talk about his decision and the actions he took. He explained why some banks would reopen and some would remain closed. He closed saying, “You people must have faith; you must not be stampeded by rumors or guesses. Let us unite in banishing fear. We have provided the machinery to restore our financial system; it is up to you to support and make it work. It is your problem no less than it is mine. Together we cannot fail.”
The entire address was broadcast live over the radio, lasted for just a few minutes, and history remembers it as the first fireside chat. Will Rogers later said that the remarkable thing about Roosevelt’s talk was that he took “such a dry subject as banking and made everyone understand it, even the bankers.”
Roosevelt never believed that the problems of Washington, as difficult as they appeared, were too complex for the American people to understand. The genius of that first fireside chat and those that followed was that FDR spoke directly to his fellow citizens with respect, explained his actions as best he could, and as a peer, he asked the people of this country to join him in his work. “Together, he said, “We cannot fail.”
The tools of the Internet give Obama the same opportunity today.
When the president-elect gives his inaugural address on Tuesday, it will be watched in person by millions of people gathered in Washington to see it live. It will be watched by millions more across the world who will turn on their televisions to hear what Obama has to say.
But as the rest of Washington prepares to celebrate the new administration, a team working for the president will take the video of that speech, edit it for the web, and upload it to YouTube. And in the days that follow, it will almost certainly be watched from beginning to end, millions and millions of times.
This new political reality is an opportunity. It is a chance for a teaching moment.
With the network he built during the campaign, the pulpit offered by the White House, and the tools available to Obama online, the new president can appeal directly to the American people and do what FDR did: ask the people of this country to join with him in solving the problems we face as a nation.

At the American Prospect site, Paul Waldman’s written a good summary of the demographic trends that have largely doomed the Republican Party’s ancient strategy of winning national majorities by appealing to the “upoor, the unblack, and the unyoung.” And as Waldman notes, there aren’t too many signs that today’s Republicans understand that the old strategy won’t work anymore.
I’d go a bit further than Waldman, whose main evidence for GOP cluelessness involves the “Barack the Magic Negro” incident. That’s bad enough, but there’s every indication that Republicans (beyond a few smart but powerless intellectuals like Ross Douthat or David Frum) are thoroughly united in the belief that a more rigorous fidelity to conservative ideology in all its particulars is not only consistent with the party’s strategic needs, but is essential to their achievement.
Even RNC Chair candidate Michael Steele, who has consistently condemned Chip Saltsman’s tone-deaf racist “jokes” as damaging to the party, still buys into the idea that there’s an audience of Democratic and independent–and African-American and Latino–voters who would gravitate to the GOP if they understood how thoroughly the party has resolved to eschew “moderate” heresies. The manifesto for his candidacy is very blunt on this central issue:

Moderates in our party, and liberal elements outside it, have tried to steer this debate toward the suggestion that we need to change our core views, desert our convictions and give up our conservative philosophy. This is nonsense. The country did not become liberal on November 4. In fact, just the reverse is true.

So speaks the “moderate” candidate for RNC chair.
This raises a very simple question: is it possible to be rigorously conservative at this particular moment in history while successfully reaching out to demographic categories of voters who either have always been or are trending in the direction of a firm attachment to the Democratic Party? Or to put it another way, are the attitudes that have repelled, say, minority voters truly detachable from conservative ideology?
In my opinion, the true test of these dubious “move right and win more voters” hypotheses isn’t whether Republicans repudiate stupidly racist tactics and messages, but whether they repudiate sophisticated racist tactics and messages that amount to the same thing. And for that reason, it’s extremely telling that none of the candidates for RNC chairman, or any other conservative thinker or talker that I’ve heard, has yet to express any doubts about the demographic impact of the McCain-Palin message down the homestretch of the presidential campaign, which was heavily based on the argument that Barack Obama and the Democratic Party were determined to ruin the country on behalf of its unworthy minority-group constituencies.
Did efforts to promote minority homeownership actually cause the financial crisis? Is a progressive tax code truly “socialist?” Are refundable income tax credits really “welfare?” Is a presumption in favor of the right to vote geniunely “voter fraud?” Are doubts about the Iraq War in fact “treason” or “a failure to support the troops?” Is support for comprehensive immigration reform indeed a matter of subordinating the very idea of citizenship to a crass desire to build a dependent Latino political base? Are women seeking legal abortions carrying out an American Holocaust? Are gays and lesbians determined to destroy the institutions of marriage and family?
All these conservative talking points during the campaign carried all sorts of nasty and exclusive demographic freight, as evidenced by the fact that they were generally delivered by politicians who avoided the more hamhanded “Barack the Magic Negro” types of rhetorical overkill.
This is not to say that conservatives are subjectively racist, homophobic, nativist, or antifeminist. But conservatives need to come to grips with the very real possibility that large elements of their ideology are leading them ineluctably to political appeals that are perceived by people outside their coalition as excluding them or as terribly hostile to their own interests.
All things being equal, it’s probably good for the GOP to avoid sounding like Jesse Helms, to express at least occasional contempt for their talk-radio or Fox TV clowns, to recruit candidates who aren’t white men, and to do all the other practical things “reformers” are suggesting to improve the party’s mechanics and outreach. But all things aren’t equal when it comes to what Republicans need in order to break out of their demographic box. “Moving to the right” or even “clearly conveying core conservative values” are basically attractive to the same old coalition that is now failing the GOP. Perhaps more votes can be squeezed out of the old turnip with better technology, more attractive candidates, and a clearer message. And maybe fidelity to what conservatives consider to be the eternal truth of their ideology is worth losing a few more elections.
But the widespread, almost universal conservative search for anything, everything, other than ideology as the source of the GOP’s demographic problems could well be a blind spot that keeps them wandering in the wilderness, endlessly looking for more attractive ways to package the same product. It would be nice to see a few more conservatives consider that possibility.

Some of you may remember the skirmishing over the language about abortion in the Democratic platform earlier this year. A straightforward endorsement of abortion rights was combined with a commitment to help reduce the need for abortion. The latter material was widely hailed as a victory by those Democrats–many of them supporters of abortion restrictions–who consider “abortion reduction” the common ground on which pro-choice and pro-life Americans can cooperate.
While it’s always an accomplishment when platform drafters can make everybody happy, the concept of “abortion reduction” by means other than direct restrictions on the legality of abortion is not a universal crowdpleaser, particularly among reproductive rights advocates who view this approach as an unacceptable concession to the assumption that abortion is inherently immoral.
At The American Prospect, Sarah Posner has a solid write-up today on how the platform skirmishing might play itself out during the first year of the Obama administration, with “abortion reduction” legislation sponsored by Democratic Reps. Tim Ryan of OH and Rosa DeLauro of CT being the lightning rod:

Passing a comprehensive bill like Ryan-DeLauro could be complicated not only by the reluctance of reproductive-rights advocates to get behind it but also by the refusal of some Catholic groups, under pressure from church hierarchy, to endorse a bill that includes contraception. Many evangelicals are similarly loathe to endorse contraception, as evidenced by the forced resignation of Richard Cizik, the chief lobbyist for the National Association of Evangelicals, after he told National Public Radio’s Fresh Air host Terri Gross that he favored government supplying contraception [note: Cizik also signaled he was becoming more open to gay marriage, which may have been an even bigger deal].

Overshadowing this debate are doubts about the exact position of Barack Obama, who has an impeccable pro-choice voting record but who has also done a lot to encourage “abortion reduction” supporters.

Between the economic meltdown and the uplifting election, Americans have had something of a respite for a few months from dispiriting headlines concerning wars and terrorism. But now the horrific atrocities in Mumbai bring a sobering reminder that the Obama administration will face a continuing, if not growing, threat of global terror, much of it directed against Americans.
As a presidential candidate, Senator Obama had to talk tough about confronting terrorists with military force. He wasn’t just overcompensating because of his opponent’s impressive military record. The cold, hard reality is that we do need enhanced military and intelligence capabilities to deal with the threat of terrorism. But our policy must be a lot smarter, with more precision in targeting military action when it’s really necessary and much stronger on-the-ground intelligence. It will require a major reformulation of our strategic goals at DOD, State, and intelligence agencies.
But the greatest challenge facing the Obama administration in confronting the threat of global terror is creating a more effective strategy for winning the struggle for hearts and minds.

Read more…

Progressive bloggers are having great sport this week with high-decibal conservative warnings that Democrats are plotting to censor conservative opinion through a restoration of the old “fairness doctrine” that used to theoretically govern broadcast television and radio. That “doctrine” was actually a Federal Communications Commission regulation requiring users of the public broadcast spectrum to provide reasonable access to points of view contrary to their own. It was rarely enforced, and was repealed in 1987, as a vestige of the long-lost days when three television networks completely dominated opinion media.
The unsubstantiated claim that “liberals” want to reimpose the fairness doctrine to destroy conservative opinion media has been a hardy perennial issue for Rush Limbaugh since at least the early 1990s. And during this election year, in association with a variety of other lurid assertions about the radically different way of life Americans would experience in a country governed by Barack Obama and a Democratic Congress, the “fairness” meme went viral.
Marin Cogan of The New Republic has penned a fine background piece on this strange furor, and on the highly relevant fact that it’s all a complete hoax.
The Obama campaign explicitly opposed reimposition of the fairness doctrine, and virtually no one in Congress or in progressive “media reform” circles has any interest whatsoever in raising the issue. Notes Matt Yglesias: “Political movements mischaracterize the other side’s general goals all the time. But I’ve never heard of anything like the current conservative mania for blocking a particular legislative provision that nobody is trying to enact.” Some cynics even believe the whole thing is intended to create a phantom menace that conservative gabbers can then take credit for defeating when it doesn’t actually emerge. Cogan chalks it all up to “paranoia and self-pity” among conservatives in the wake of their electoral defeat.
All this may well be true, but I think there’s something deeper going on here: the fruits of conservative demonization of “the Left” over a long period of time.
One of the hallmarks of “movement conservative” opinion in recent years has been the growing tendency to treat itself not simply as a legitimate or “correct” point of view, or one that promotes policies good for the country, but as a cause that is synonymous with American self-interest, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and indeed, Western Civilization. This trend has naturally led to the depiction of its opponents as un-American, immoral and anti-religious, and, well, barbaric. Within the Christian Right, the need to demonize has become even more intense, in justification of the extraordinary step taken by religious leaders to adopt a “prophetic stance” against the wickedness of society and harness their pulpits and their flocks to the secular goals of the Republican Party.
From this point of view, “liberals” can’t simply be wrong or ill-informed or open to persuasion. Those supporting a woman’s right to choose must actually favor infanticide, euthanasia and human cloning. Advocates of a less militaristic foreign policy must be consciously aligned with America’s enemies. “People for the American Way” favoring mild church-state separation rules must really aim at systemic descrimination against Christians. Proponents of marriage equality for gays and lesbians are actually bent on destroying the traditional family.
Ironically, this tendency to attribute sinister and deeply deceptive motives to the opposition grew even more pervasive during the Bush-DeLay era, when conservatives controlled the White House, the federal bureaucracy, and both Houses of Congress. Indeed, Republican electoral success created still another curse to hurl at the hated liberals: they were “elitists” who were undermining democracy through their control of Hollywood, the news media, academia and the judiciary, with complicity from treasonous fifth-columnists in the GOP.
So now, with Democrats actually in a position to wield real power for the first time since 1994, is it really any wonder that some conservatives feel the need to convince their audiences, and perhaps even themselves, that we are on the brink of a totalitarian revolution? Anyone who’s paid attention to the distorted world view of much of the Right over the last decade or two shouldn’t be surprised. When you see devil’s horns on your political opponents, there’s hell to pay when they win.

Media critic Leslie Savan’s post “GOP Plays a Mean Saxby” at The Nation spotlights a half-dozen of the recent political ads of the Martin-Chambliss race in Georgia. Chamblis’s central theme this time around is taxes, along with predictable name-calling about Martin being a liberal. Savan believes Chambliss’s ads are tame compared to his ’02 race against Cleland:

What Chambliss wants to do is bring out his base without provoking anyone on the other side. While both camps may spend as much or more on TV advertising in this four-week period before the run-off than they did in the months-long general election, the odds that Chambliss would walk on the wild side with another cut-throat ad are long.

As Savan notes, Chambliss is counting on a weak turnout. One obvious way for Martin to win is with a surprisingly large African American turnout in GA, although there are reports that early African American voting for the Senate run-off is lagging. African American turnout should get a boost from a reported influx of union volunteers. President-elect Obama has cut a radio ad for Martin, as Ed Kilgore noted yesterday. And yes, it would be good for Obama to come to GA for Martin in the closing days of the race. Obama’s rep as a ‘stand-up guy’ is one of his strongest political assets, and he is the leader of his party now, so I’m hoping he shows.
Another way to cut into Chambliss’s lead might be through creating more buzz among vets and supporters of the military about Chambliss’s numerous votes against vets’ interests. Martin has run a few ads on this theme, but he needs something more dramatic to generate some heat. I thought this powerful feature of the Democratic National Convention removed a lot of doubts viewers may have had about Obama’s national security creds. Why not get a few of the retired generals and admirals to do an ad for Jim Martin? Chambliss’s weak record on veterans benefits provides a lot of material for scripts, and I’ll bet a few of them wouldn’t mind coming out against Chambliss in return for his shameful ads questioning Cleland’s patriotism in ’02. Running such an ad in heavy rotation near GA’s military installations, as well as state-wide, just might sway enough voters who are slightly leaning toward Chambliss to vote for Martin. If this race is as close as recent polls indicate, such an ad just might make a difference.

As the number of Democratic U.S. Senators inches up towards the Big Goal of 60, and as Georgia inches towards a December 2 runoff between Republican incumbent Saxby Chambliss and Democratic challenger Jim Martin, the sixty-four-thousand dollar question is how much President-elect Barack Obama is willing to invest of his personal political capital in this race.
You’d have to guess that this is a question being batted around within Team Obama, in whatever time they have left in the midst of running a transition, vetting and choosing a Cabinet, and watching the economy contract.
The argument against direct intervention in GA by Obama is that the last thing he needs right now is to become embroiled in a highly partisan election that would be interpreted as the first personal defeat of his soon-to-be presidency. It’s also possible a high-profile Obama presence in the race would produce a large turnout for white conservatives eager to give him an early black eye.
The argument for it is that a Republican win will be interpreted as a rebuke to him no matter what he does, and that direct involvement is the only way to give Martin a fighting chance.
Polls show Chambliss with a narrow lead over Martin, amidst warnings that it’s almost impossible to measure likelihood to vote in this kind of stand-alone runoff.
More ominously for Martin, there are reports that African-American participation in early voting for the runoff is down sharply during its first few days. You can certainly argue that nothing short of a highly visible intervention by Obama could convince African-Americans, who may feel their mission was accomplished on November 4, to come back to the polls for the runoff.
Both candidates are runnning ads that essentially agree the runoff is about who would help or hinder the new Obama administration. Obama campaign volunteers are apparently all over the state, along with A-list Obama surrogates like Bill Clinton and Al Gore (John McCain’s campaigned for Chambliss). So it’s not clear Obama has that much to lose by getting personally involved, aside from national sentiment that he ought to be focused on preparing to govern.
Late today Chris Cillizza of the Washington Post reported that Obama’s cut a new 60-second radio ad for Martin. We obviously don’t know if this is the president-elect’s last toe in the water of this campaign, or a prelude to a plunge.

As you probably have heard by now, Senate Democrats today voted by a considerable margin to let Joe Lieberman retain his chairmanship of the Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, and thus secure his continued participation in the Senate Democratic Caucus. His “punishment” for endorsing John McCain for President, for campaigning for him, for speaking at the Republican National Convention, and for repeating and even amplifying GOP talking points against Barack Obama, was to give up his spot on the Environment and Public Works Committee, including chairmanship of a climate change subcommittee. Off-the-record (of course), Senate Democrats were saying that President-elect Barack Obama’s encouragement of tolerance for Lieberman was a key factor in their decision.
Since everyone in the chattering classes will have an opinion on this development, I will note my longstanding personal opposition (here, and most recently here) to anything like a free pass for Joe Lieberman’s apostasy. While I’ve never been a Lieberman-hater, I simply think he crossed a line that incredibly few sitting members of Congress in either party have ever crossed, and even fewer (you have to go all the way back to 1956 for an parallel) have crossed without losing their seniority entirely. And this line–you do not endorse the other party’s presidential candidate–represents the absolute irreducible minimum of what we must expect of federal elected officials who want to affiliate in any way with the Democratic Party. The refusal to apply this principle–not angrily, or vengefully, but resolutely–is not some sort of signal of a “Big Tent” party; indeed, it most offends moderate-to-conservative Democrats past and present who have respected this one simple rule, and somehow managed to avoid Republican presidential campaign rallies. Reimposing this rule in the future will be difficult, and we all may come to regret that.
As it happens, I wound up appearing this afternoon on the syndicated public radio program “To the Point,” with Jane Hamsher of Firedoglake, and Jamie Kirchick of The New Republic, to discuss the Lieberman issue. I was rather lonely with my simple “minimum requirement to be a Democrat” argument, since Jane maintained that Lieberman’s poor handling of his committee chairmanship, not his endorsement of McCain, was the reason he should be relieved of his gavel. Meanwhile, Kirchick (generally an abrasive bait-the-left neocon zealot, and best I can tell, not any sort of Democrat) made the novel argument that having run against the Democratic nominee for the Senate in 2006, Lieberman had no obligation to support the Democratic nominee for president in 2008, on the theory, I suppose, that one act of apostasy justifies another. It had to make you wonder this: if John McCain had gotten his (apparent) wish, and Lieberman had been his running-mate and lost, would Senate Democrats still welcome him back into the fold? Are there any limits at all to the elastic definition of who can join the Democratic Caucus?
Well, whatever. While I remain upset at this decision to exempt Joe Lieberman from the most basic standards of party loyalty, I don’t plan to obsess about it; Senate Democrats, Barack Obama, and the Democratic Party have much bigger fish to fry. There’s some private talk in progressive circles in the wake of this event that Lieberman might now become slavishly loyal to Senate Democrats, and particularly to Obama, understanding that he’s dodged the very bullet he fired by his support for McCain. Maybe it will all work out for the best. And perhaps the political value of a Christlike gesture from Obama, to the benefit of a politician so recently spurned by the dominant conservative wing of the GOP, outweighs its cost. But no one is required to be happy about it.

Editor’s Note: We are very pleased to publish this constructive critique of field strategies for the unsuccessful effort to defeat the anti-gay-marriage Proposition 8 initiative in California. Its author is Jasmine Beach-Ferrara, a student at Harvard Divinity School and the director of The Progressive Project (TPP). During the 2008 election season, TPP worked in six cities across the nation to engage communities in actions to elect Barack Obama and to defeat Proposition 8 on the California ballot. This article is based upon her work on the No on 8 campaign, and on other campaigns to defeat similar ballot measures.
On November 4, Proposition 8 passed in California, enshrining in the state constitution a ban on same sex marriage. Similar amendments also passed in Florida and Arizona. We have now lost campaigns like this in 29 states; we have won only once – in Arizona in 2006. On a human level, these defeats are a blow to people across the nation who care about civil rights and equality. On a strategic level, they are explicable; after all, we continue to rely on the same strategies despite mounting evidence that they do not work.
What is required as the LGBT movement goes forward is a commitment to permanent political engagement and a national grassroots strategy and infrastructure that complement our national legal strategy. We must also finally do what our opponents have long been doing: treating each statewide ballot measure as a national campaign.
The loss in California is a particularly apt case study because it took place in our nation’s largest state and because the opposition made it a national campaign from the start. A full analysis of this loss falls into three overlapping categories:
–An aerial view of the infrastructure, strategies and mindset of the national LGBT movement;
–A “zoom-in” view of the specific field, messaging, and funding strategies used by the No on 8 campaign; and
–a similar “zoom-in” view of the strategies used by two concurrent, successful national campaigns: “Yes on 8” and the Obama campaign.
In this article, I will focus on an analysis of the field strategies used by the “No on 8” campaign
Proposition 8 passed by 510,591 votes. We don’t know if that gap could have been closed. But we do know that the “No on 8” campaign could have run a more visionary, nimble and aggressive field strategy. Ultimately the field strategy came up short in two critical, related areas:
First, the “No on 8” campaign did not become national until October, limiting both the volunteers and donors it could engage.
Second, the campaign’s field strategy failed to effectively reach enough swing voters enough times to turn them out as “no” voters.

Read more…

After the 1992 election, it took over a year for the first signs of significant right-wing populist activity to appear in America – signs like the quasi-military “militia” movement in Michigan and elsewhere, the appearance of bunkered apocalyptic religious communities – Waco, etc, and the carefully nurtured paranoid rumors of “Black Helicopters”, UN invasion forces and the “cocaine/mafia hit men” working for Bill and Hillary Clinton.
This time very genuinely disturbing trends are starting to appear even before Obama takes office.
The reason, of course, is obvious. The insidious smears directed at Obama by McCain’s media operation, the right-wing media and third-party internet rumors directly identified him with violent political terrorism, Moslem extremism and thuggery and intimidation by Black militants. Nothing remotely this inflammatory was leveled at Clinton during the 1992 campaign.
Republicans will now try to dismiss this as just the natural excesses of a “hard-fought campaign” and more politically sophisticated Republicans will now ratchet down the rhetoric and concede that none of the charges were literally or even remotely true.
But this uniquely vile propaganda offensive has left a huge toxic residue. There are now millions of Americans who quite sincerely believe that all the accusations noted above about Obama are in large part or in complete measure true. They are particularly concentrated in working class and small town America, where informal “word of mouth” channels of communication are trusted more than national media. The core group that accepts this view are long time hard-right conservatives but their influence extends outward in concentric circles of person-to-person communication.
Many Obama supporters do not directly sense the extraordinary degree of cultural disenfranchisement and political isolation these people are feeling at this moment because they do not ordinarily socialize with this sector of America. But the sense of genuine shock and – yes – fear is very, very real.
Read the following digest of a call-in to G. Gordon Liddy’s radio show, reported by Media Matters:

On the November 4 broadcast of his nationally syndicated radio program, G. Gordon Liddy spoke to a caller who stated: “I’m ready to go to the concentration camp, that [Sen. Barack] Obama’s police force — he will round me up. Because I — I’m a white American.” Liddy then said, “Well, listen to this,” and aired an edited clip of Obama [talking about the America Corps program] saying in a July 2 speech in Colorado Springs: “We cannot continue to rely only on our military in order to achieve the national security objectives that we’ve set. We’ve got to have a civilian national security force that’s just as powerful, just as strong, just as well-funded.” Liddy then stated: “Shades of the Gestapo. The Geheime Staatspolizei,”

This kind of paranoid discourse could previously be assumed to be confined to a relatively small fringe of the conservative right. But, as the crowds at Sarah Palin’s speeches indicated, it has recently metastasised well beyond its traditional boundaries. This new and larger group is composed of basically decent people, but they are genuinely afraid.
As a result, Democrats must seriously anticipate that the increasingly extreme right-wing attitudes and social movements that developed over a three-four year period during Clinton’s first term may start to appear within a matter of a few months rather than years.
What can Dems do? First, while not compromising on needed programs and policies, they must maintain a sincere stance and attitude of inclusiveness – as Obama himself is doing. The basic fact is that these Americans are not our enemies. They are, in Obama’s excellent formulation, potential supporters we have yet to convince.
Second, Democrats at all levels should aggressively insist that the more sophisticated Republican advocates in the media and elsewhere who helped promulgate the vilest of the smears should not be “forgiven” for what they did until they make real and substantial efforts to remediate the toxic legacy of this campaign.
They poisoned people’s minds. That’s not “hardball” politics; that’s just disgusting. They have an obligation to help repair the damage they did to the United States of America.