The Pre-Election Push To Delegitimize A Potential Obama Win

SIMON MALOY/media matters for america

It's obviously too early to know for certain, but on the final day of the 2012 presidential campaign  there seems to be a general consensus forming that President Obama is well-positioned to beat Mitt Romney at the polls tomorrow. And in the face of that prospect, some in the media are already beginning to challenge the legitimacy of Obama's reelection.

On November 4, Politico published an article enumerating the "lessons learned" from the 2012 campaign. Among them was the surprising assertion that the coalition Obama put together to win reelection -- "Hispanics, African-Americans, single women and highly educated urban whites" -- is insufficient to provide the incumbent the political capital he might otherwise enjoy were he to have the support of independents and white voters. "A broad mandate this is not," declared authors Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen.

Politico didn't explain why broad mandates rest on the shoulders of whites and independents, simply asserting instead that Obama, should he win, will win in a way that lacks legitimacy. Part of their analysis, however, rested on the myth that the United States is "a center-right country," which certainly helps to explain why they'd view an electoral coalition that excludes the center-right's top constituency -- white men -- as a political nonstarter.

While Politico went the route of demography, conservative pundits are instead opting for catastrophe. Specifically, the devastation wrought by Hurricane Sandy, suggesting that Romney was poised to run away with the election until Sandy halted his "momentum" and gave Obama a boost in public opinion going into the campaign's final week. 

Karl Rove told the Washington Post: "If you hadn't had the storm, there would have been more of a chance for the [Mitt] Romney campaign to talk about the deficit, the debt, the economy. There was a stutter in the campaign. When you have attention drawn away to somewhere else, to something else, it is not to his [Romney's] advantage." He added: "Obama has temporarily been a bipartisan figure this week. He has been the comforter-in-chief and that helps." (Rove, who wheedled millions of dollars from wealthy conservatives with promises that his American Crossroads Super PAC would help take down Obama, obviously has an ulterior motive for pinning Obama's reelection on an exogenous event.)

Pundits like Joe Scarborough and Mark Halperin eagerly passed along and adopted Republican complaints that the storm had halted Romney's political ascendancy. GOP insiders like Haley Barbour all but creditedSandy with helping Obama across the finish line.

There was also a rush among conservatives to attack New Jersey governor Chris Christie, a Republican and Romney surrogate, for praising Obama's response to the storm and appearing with the president to discuss federal and state responses to the devastation. The Daily Caller's Matt Lewis wrote on October 31: "The question is whether -- with just days left before Election Day -- Christie should have gone out of his way to lavish praise on Obama, and to provide him with a terrific photo-op for which to look presidential."

The problems with this notion of Sandy saving Obama from Romney's relentless momentum are obvious. As theNew York Times' Nate Silver points out, by the time Sandy hit the east coast Obama "had already been rebounding in the polls, slowly but steadily, from his lows in early October -- in contrast to a common narrative in the news media that contended, without much evidence, that Mr. Romney still had the momentum in the race."

At a more basic level, the claim directly contradicts a longstanding conservative attack on Obama -- that he tends toward fecklessness and "leads from behind." One would think that the occasion of a devastating storm would serve to highlight that supposed lack of leadership. And yet, conservatives are complaining that the storm helped Obama by allowing him to be the national healer for a few days. Essentially, Obama doesn't demonstrate leadership, but when he does it's not fair.

This all fits into the four-year pattern of conservative assaults on the legitimacy of Obama's presidency -- from the undiluted toxicity of the birther movement to the many trumped-up "scandals" of Obama's first term to the claims that Obama won election in 2008 owing to insufficient "vetting" by the press. The possibility of a second term requires new rationalizations (like a patchwork coalition that isn't representative of the country, or a fortuitous disaster) to explain why Obama really doesn't belong in the Oval Office.

The Republican Party's War on Black People?

By Keith Boykin/BET

Ever since President Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, African-Americans have held a somewhat different view of government than many white Americans. For whites, especially southern whites, government represented an outside institution taking away their "property" and destroying their businesses. For Blacks, however, government represented an institution that rescued them from the shackles of slavery and finally gave them a taste of the freedom enjoyed by the rest of society.

The memory of Lincoln's policies kept African-Americans in his Republican Party for two generations. That didn't change until President Franklin D. Roosevelt announced a "New Deal" to pull the country out of theGreat Depression with the help of vigorous government intervention. Once again, Black people signed on with the political party that was willing to use the government to help the people in times of crisis, and so they left the Republican Party in droves.

Racial segregation persisted with the help of both parties for another three decades until Democratic President Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964 that once again used the government to protect the interests of the powerless. After Johnson stood up for us, African-Americans grew more loyal to the Democratic Party, while Republicans, on the other hand, launched a cynical but successful decades-long "Southern strategy" to recruit disaffected white voters into the GOP.

Given that history, when Republicans complain that the evil "government" is taking away their freedom, Black people know exactly what they really mean. Even though white people are the biggest beneficiaries of government assistance and welfare, rich Republicans who don't give a hoot about the middle-class have cleverly deployed racially coded language to convince some poor and working-class whites that supporting the government means supporting Black people.

Ronald Reagan even constructed a phony image of a Cadillac-driving welfare queen in the projects to convince middle-class white voters that their tax dollars were supporting lazy African-Americans on food stamps instead of bolstering wealthy defense contractors and mostly white senior citizens on Social Security and Medicare.

Now the GOP is at it again. Taking a page out of Reagan's playbook, Mitt Romney is attacking government and trying to convince working-class white Americans that giving tax cuts for the rich will magically create jobs for them too.

Of course, giving out billions of dollars in tax breaks to wealthy people like himself would blow a huge hole in the federal deficit, so Romney's got to pay for his plans by cutting money somewhere else. Thus he re-invents the evil straw man called "government" which is stealing all our money and causing all our problems.

What Romney doesn't want to tell you is where your government money really goes. Two-thirds of the federal budget goes to defense, Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid, and interest on the debt. Only about 13 percent goes to so-called safety net programs, and 78 percent of that amount is spent on whites and other non-Blacks.

Republicans like Romney, the son of a wealthy business executive, love to talk about pulling themselves up from their bootstraps, but by attacking government and education, they're essentially making it harder for African-Americans to pull themselves up.

The unemployment rate for African-Americans stands at 13.6 percent. That's partly because cash-strapped state and local governments cut 280,000 workers last year. And that's also because of larger socioeconomic conditions Republicans never seem to address.

For many years, the only place where Blacks had a fair chance to get a job was in the military or the government. That's why Black workers are a third more likely than whites to be employed in the public sector that Romney wants to cut. Those government cuts are not just faceless bureaucrats at the IRS and DMV; they're real people we know. They're teachers, cops, firefighters, and even toll both operators. Many of them are our sisters and brothers, cousins and uncles, children and parents.

The best jobs policy is education. Americans with college degrees have a very low 3.9 percent unemployment rate. But unemployment stands at 13 percent for those without high school diplomas. Yet Romney wants tocut funding for education, which would help young people of all races go to college and make a living for themselves.

Billionaire and anti-union Las Vegas casino owner Sheldon Adelson has already spent $35 million of his own money on the Republican presidential campaign. When a rich guy spends that kind of money to affect an election, you can bet he's not trying to protect the middle class; he's trying to protect his own interests. But some middle-class white voters still don't get it. They're so busy buying the Republican spin about Blacks that they don't understand how the rich guys at the top in the GOP are simply exploiting them.

Come to think of it, maybe it's not a war on Black people they're waging, but a war on middle-class and working-class Americans, many of whom happen to be Black, but most of whom are actually white. The overwhelming majority of Black voters already get this. When middle-class white voters wake up, they'll see just whose side the GOP is really on.