A year ago, frustrated at the apparent acceptability of Republican candidates in those early head-to-head match-up polls, I wrote:
So my question is why the hell are Republicans doing this well in these match-ups? Why are they seen as even within the realm of acceptability when in poll after poll people are sending a dramatic message that the country, after 6 years of all Republican rule all the time, is on the wrong track (71% and 69% in the LA Times/Bloomberg and NBC/WSJ polls respectively.) Clearly, Democrats have not made the case that the failures of the Bush presidency are more than the sum of the errors in judgment of one man but rather are the result of Republican policies and governance (or lack there of) at every level. They need to start.
Barack Obama's particular reluctance to speak in partisan terms and to brand the GOP as unacceptable -- and in fact, on the contrary, his willingness to promote a unity message as though Republicans are interested in anything other than obstruction -- was especially frustrating to me, so when he became the nominee I was even more concerned that our Democratic standard-bearer would roll over when it came to branding the opposition. I was wrong.
Not only, as I wrote yesterday, has Obama been effectively and swiftly returning fire against McCain and company on their claims that he is "naive" when it comes to terrorism, but try googling "Obama GOP" and you get a sense of how Obama's position is generally being framed by the media:
The Chicago Tribune's The Swamp:
Obama: GOP Not Credible On TerrorBarack Obama told reporters today that he would take no lectures from Republicans on which candidate would keep the nation safer from terrorism, rebuking John McCain aides who tried to portray him as naive on the struggle against Al Qaeda, according to the Associated Press.
Obama: GOP Tactics The Reason Bin Laden Is Still FreeA defiant Barack Obama said Tuesday he would take no lectures from Republicans on which candidate would keep the U.S. safer, a sharp rebuke to John McCain's aides who said the Democrat had a naive, Sept. 10 mind-set toward terrorism.
WNBC:
Obama: GOP Lacks Post-9/11 CredibilityDemocrat Barack Obama has signaled that he'll take no lectures from Republicans on who will keep America safer. [...]
Obama shot back to reporters that the Republicans have no "standing to suggest that they've learned a lot of lessons from 9/11."
He said they "helped to engineer the distraction of the war in Iraq at a time when we could have pinned down the people who actually committed 9/11."
He said Osama bin Laden is still at large in part because of their failed strategies
So, has Obama become some partisan warrior all of the sudden, railing against the opposition party? Hardly. Look at his comments to reporters over the past couple of days and you won't find one criticism of "Republicans" or "the GOP" anywhere. In fact, the only time he does use the party name is to indicate where he has agreed with them:
I have made the same arguments as Republicans like Arlen Specter, countless Generals and national security experts, and the largely Republican-appointed Supreme Court of the United States of America - which is that we need not throw away 200 years of American jurisprudence while we fight terrorism.
But when he is being critical of Republicans, he uses phrases such as "the other side," specifies "George Bush and John McCain" or uses a "the people who..." formulation like so:
Well I refuse to be lectured on national security by people who are responsible for the most disastrous set of foreign policy decisions in the recent history of the United States. The other side likes to use 9/11 as a political bludgeon. Well, let's talk about 9/11. [...]...George Bush and John McCain decided in 2002 that we should take our eye off of Afghanistan so that we could invade and occupy a country that had absolutely nothing to do with 9/11. The case for war in Iraq was so thin that George Bush and John McCain had to hype the threat of Saddam Hussein, and make false promises that we'd be greeted as liberators. They misled the American people, and took us into a misguided war.
Here are the results of their policy. Osama bin Laden and his top leadership - the people who murdered 3000 Americans - have a safe-haven in northwest Pakistan, where they operate with such freedom of action that they can still put out hate-filled audiotapes to the outside world. That's the result of the Bush-McCain approach to the war on terrorism.
Obama's true message, however, as the above media reports reflect, is crystal clear: it is the Republicans that got us into this mess and it is the Republicans who have no credibility on national security. And because Obama has the reputation for not being a partisan flame thrower, the media's framing of what he said in this way is actually likely to have more impact than it might coming from, say, Hillary Clinton.
Well played, Senator.
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