A New England Congregational Church

Partisan political change tends to move glacially. The South was ruled by Democrats pretty much forever until Lyndon Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act and Richard Nixon discovered the “Southern Strategy.” Even then it took another 20 years for Republicans to make the South their center.

Likewise New England was rock-ribbed Republican from the Civil War until cracks began to show in the sixties. Only in the last decade has New Hampshire lost much of its GOP sheen and Maine still has two Republican Senators.

The turning point was the same — civil rights — but the signals that change was complete have come at different times and in different ways. From 1980 to 2009 seventeen Congressmen switched from the Democratic to the Republican Party. In those same 29 years just 2 Republicans went the other way. Most of the Democratic defectors were in the South — the Republican switchers were from Pennsylvania and New York. 

In the South 1996 marked the end for Democrats when a popular Southern President (Clinton) lost all the states of the Deep South other than his home (Arkansas) and Louisiana (which until Katrina, was a reliably “interesting” Presidential election state). The South became winnable almost exclusively only by candidates with conservative social — read religious — values. Statewide candidates who believed in abortion rights need not apply.

The end for Republicans in New England may be now as Maine’s Governor signed into law same-sex marriage Wednesday. That means all the states of New England save Rhode Island either allow same-sex marriage or have a bill on the governor’s desk (New Hampshire) to make it the law. In November New England lost it’s last Republican House member (Connecticut’s Chris Shays) and with Arlen Specter’s defection to the Dems notable conservative voices (Rush) called on two of the three Republican Senators from New England to join him (Maine’s Snowe and Collins). Seems like the GOP would prefer to be done with the birthplace of the nation.

It seems kind of funny that traditional New Englanders would be the ones to make same-sex marriage happen in a big way but it also makes a lot of sense. New England states have a long history of independence and a strong libertarian streak. That’s why they used to be Republicans because those used to be Republican values. New Hampshire’s license plates famously read “Live Free or Die”. So while there’s a lot of conservative tradition in those handsome towns with their pretty white-spired Congregational Churches, that tradition is the small ‘c’ conservatism that our country’s founders believed in and brought with them from England.

The irony is that same-sex marriage is nearing a tipping point just as those most opposed to it reach their nadir. Surely same-sex marriage will not be made legal in many states any time soon but in choosing the issue as one to run on (see: Iowa, see: Rudy Giuliani) conservatives are battling a demographic and regional tide. Polls in most New England states have shown a majority of residents support same-sex marriage (when not offered a third choice of civil unions) and national polls (even of self-identified evangelical Christians) show younger voters far more supportive of same-sex marriage than their elders.

Plain and simple — this is a bad issue for Republicans. And just as Barack Obama made a concerted effort to win votes in the South and try to begin reversing the Republican domination there (he won North Carolina and Virginia), Republicans need to figure out how to bring naturally conservative (small ‘c’) New England voters back into the fold. This may be bottom for the GOP in the region but banking on social issues like same-sex marriage to turn things around here could keep them sinking.

For now New England, once solidly red, is not only deep blue, but sort of pink too. Who’d a thunk it?

Pennsylvania

Is there an echo in Pennsylvania? You better you bet.

Republicans and especially hard-core conservatives are foaming at the mouth over the defection of Pennsylvania Republican Senator Arlen Specter, decrying him as another Benedict Arnold. One of the most fevered cries is that Specter put politics ahead of principle. Whether you believe that or not (if the principle Specter is upholding is to win then I guess he’s being principled…) it has brought the battle for the soul of the GOP to the forefront. And the front page of the New York Times.

The question, which to be fair has been central to the Republican conversation at least since Rudy Giuliani first started talking about running for President, is whether Republicans need to become more purely conservative or need to do a Reagan and open up the tent. For the Republicans in charge of the effort to reclaim some of the 15 Senate seats lost in the last two years, the answer is clear:

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, the head of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said he would seek to recruit candidates who he thought could win in Democratic or swing states, even if it meant supporting candidates who might disagree with his own conservative views.

Mr. Cornyn said he was taking a page from Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, the last head of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, who led his party to big gains by embracing candidates who, for example, opposed abortion rights or gun control.

“If you think about it, Schumer has been very good at this; I complimented him this morning in the gym,” Mr. Cornyn said, adding, “Some conservatives would rather lose than be seen as compromising on what they regard as inviolable principles.”

That is, of course, not how everyone sees it. Here was Rush Limbaugh’s take on Wednesday:

The Republican Party is moving left and that is why it is in trouble, and there is certainly a greater diversity of viewpoint in the Republican Party. For crying out loud, I guarantee you the Democrat (sic) Party would never, ever nominate their equivalent of John McCain. 

I guarantee you The Democrat (sic) Party would never, ever nominate somebody who rips, and has made his name by ripping and criticizing, his own party and his own presidents. That would never happen. Democrats throw those people out of the party or they bury them. We nominated a guy whose claim to fame is criticizing his own president and criticizing his own party, and they say we’re monolithic. The monolith is the Democrat (sic) Party. 

But as usual, Rush either has amnesia, is lying, or is simply entertaining his gullible audience. But he’s missing something crazy obvious. Rush is just like Kos (in one respect anyway). Really! Let me explain.

Democrats were once a pretty ideologically pure party while Republicans (under Nixon and the Reagan) made less of ideology and more of winning.

That changed a bit when Bill Clinton was elected but soon the party was in what seemed to be a downward spiral of alleged liberal thinking and hidebound candidates. After the drubbing in 2004, things changed. Howard Dean took over at the DNC pushing the 50-state strategy and embracing the netroots. And New York Senator Chuck Schumer (the hardest-working man in politics) took over the reigns at the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee. Schumer lined up candidates he thought could win even if that meant pissing off the liberal version of the conservative blogosphere — the netroots.

In Ohio Schumer forced a progressive Iraq war vet out of the Senate race in 2006 to clear the way for a veteran Ohio politician named Sherrod Brown. That’s Senator Brown to you.

In North Carolina Schumer encouraged a progressive gay candidate to step aside (and was slammed by a blog named “down with Tyranny” — ring any bells, conservatives?) so that a woman named Kay Hagen could run against Libby Dole. That’s Senator Hagen to you.

And in Pennsylvania Schumer encouraged Bob Casey Jr. to run despite being anti-abortion rights. Liberals — especially women’s groups were enraged — but Casey won the primary against pro-choice candidates and wiped Republican Senator Rick Santorum from office.

Republicans should linger in Pennsylvania a bit longer because the echo there is even stronger: Casey’s pro-life father was refused a spot at the Democratic National Convention in 1992 when he wanted to speak about abortion. The tent wasn’t big enough for that. At the convention in Denver last year, his son got a prime speaking spot where he spoke about his disagreement with Obama (and much of the party) on abortion.

And the change didn’t only come from Schumer. The netroots actually fought for a few candidates that did not follow the pure Democratic line. Gun-toting Montana Senator Jon Tester was not the choice of the establishment but won his primary in 2006 thanks to support from liberal activists. 

So when “pure” conservatives say Specter’s defection is welcome because it cleanses the party, they ought to consider what the Democrats learned in Pennsylvania about ideology. There’s a reason there are only 40 Republican Senators right now and it’s not because they’re all too liberal.

Who Me?

It’s a recurring theme of Get Real but only because Republicans keep doing things that prove the point. The Pity Party seems absolutely bent on self-destruction by following all the old rules for the old game that they can’t stop playing.

Take John Boehner, leader of the House Republican minority. Sunday George Stephanopoulos had him on to talk about the Republican alternatives to Barack Obama’s proposals including on global warming:

…the idea that carbon dioxide is a carcinogen that is harmful to our environment is almost comical. Every time we exhale, we exhale carbon dioxide. Every cow in the world, you know, when they do what they do, you’ve got more carbon dioxide.

There he goes again. Boehner, like so many other Republicans wishing Ronald Reagan could be brought back to life (and the White House), still thinks like this is an era when politicians can get away with saying trees cause air pollution. And ketchup is a vegetable.

Actually Boehner’s scientific analysis of cow farts wasn’t the funniest part of his interview. After trying, to no avail, to get Boehner to say anything about a Republican energy plan, Stephanopoulos threw out one last question to wrap up the segment:

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you are committed to coming up with a plan?

BOEHNER: I think you’ll see a plan from us. Just like you’ve seen a plan from us on the stimulus bill and a better plan on the budget.

And we know how much voters liked those plans.

The GOP is living in some kind of wonderland where conservatives believe the same ideas that lost them the last two elections will somehow work now. They voted unanimously against Obama’s budget and stimulus bills (actually 3 GOP Senators voted for the stimulus but have been vilified by their rank-and-file for doing so). They lined up behind Rush Limbaugh’s old-timey ranting like soldiers on review. And those tea parties.

Fox News showed it’s true colors with it’s slavish coverage of the tea parties it helped sponsor last week. But almost everyone else treated it like a joke. Or worse — like a big gathering of your crazy uncle and his friends. These coast-to-coast gatherings were in many cases the wing-nut conservatives’ version of a wing-nut liberal conference on impeaching then-President Bush. Wackos to the left of me, wackos to the right, here I am, stuck in the middle…. 

The problem for Republicans is many of the people who showed don’t represent a majority and seem far more likely to vote for Ron Paul than a mainstream GOP candidate.  Tying the Republican brand to a fringe anti-tax message is probably not the way Madison Avenue would have gone about it but what the heck? Nothing else it working.

Actually that message seems to finally be seeping through the cracks in the Republicans coalition. As Get Real has repeatedly pointed out, Republicans are losing everyone but their aging, male, white, Southern base and hence, any chance at winning elections. The majority of voters now do not remember socialism. Do not have the visceral reaction to the term ‘facism’ (which has been stripped of all meaning lately). Do not buy into the tax-cuts-at-all-costs ideal. Are not impressed with the tried-and-true Republican talking points they have heard their entire lives.

Meagan McCain, John’s daughter, is getting the most play in this, mainly from liberal bloggers who love her in the same way conservatives loved Zell Miller and Joe Lieberman — as apparent apostates. Saturday she spoke at the Log Cabin Republican National Convention (insert joke here about oxymorons) and laid it on pretty thick after mentioning that she had gone after Ann Coulter in column and paid the price:

People in our country have much more important issues to deal with on a daily basis. But the experience did reinforce what I learned on the campaign trail in some major ways.

I’ll summarize them in three points:

1. Most of our nation wants our nation to succeed.
2. Most people are ready to move on to the future, not live in the past.
3. Most of the old school Republicans are scared shitless of that future.

McCain went on:

I feel too many Republicans want to cling to past successes. There are those who think we can win the White House and Congress back by being “more” conservative. Worse, there are those who think we can win by changing nothing at all about what our party has become. They just want to wait for the other side to be perceived as worse than us. I think we’re seeing a war brewing in the Republican party, but it is not between us and Democrats. It is not between us and liberals. It is between the future and the past. I believe most people are ready to move on to that future.

Her most damning line followed shortly thereafter:

Simply embracing technology isn’t going to fix our problem either. Republicans using Twitter and Facebook isn’t going to miraculously make people think we’re cool again. Breaking free from obsolete positions and providing real solutions that don’t divide our nation further will. That’s why some in our party are scared. They sense the world around them is changing and they are unable to take the risk to jump free of what’s keeping our party down.

Republicans ought to be listening to people like Megan McCain. Sure she’s not as popular as Rush or Sean or the certifiable Glenn Beck but that begs the question: Are the people those blowhards are popular with the solution to what ills Republicans or are they the disease?

Youth isn’t the answer to everything and experience counts for a lot. But we’re not talking about kids when we say thata good size majority of American voters don’t much like Republican positions on so many issues. McCain and other (older) Republicans recognize the problem but the party’s Stalinist-style loyalty demands will keep them marginalized until someone new and fresh can begin to draw moderates, suburbanites, and immigrants back into the GOP.

It will happen. But in whose generation?

Ahoy There!

There a few things more certain in life than this: Hyper-partisans (left and right) will twist everything and anything to fit their worldview. Today’s case in point comes courtesy of Red State and a contributor who speculates that the Somali pirates who have attacked and apparently captured an American-flagged cargo vessel did so because they know Barack Obama is a wuss.

While the author is correct no U.S. flagged vessel has been successfully attacked by pirates to this point it’s worth noting how few American-flagged vessels there are any more. The number of major cargo ships flagged (registered) in the U.S. is fewer than 200 because it is so much more expensive for shipping companies to register in the U.S. than in countries like Panama and Liberia which have low costs (and large fleets as a result — check page 36 of this report if you’re really really interested).

It’s also worth noting American-flagged and owned vessels have been attacked since piracy took off in 2005 during the time when the presumably frighteningly-tough-as-nails President George W. Bush was in the White House including two U.S. Navy ships, two large passenger cruise liners, and two large bulk cargo ships. Perhaps the best reason to question the author’s premise was Saturday’s attack on an Israeli cargo ship.

If these guys will attack an Israeli ship they’ve either never heard of the Raid on Entebbe or they’ll go after any ship they see. I’d bet on the latter.

The Magic 30 Percent

Speaking of that wuss of a President, the evidence is now awfully solid that the Republican game plan (the Party of No) has accomplished one thing: It has built and maintained Obama’s disapproval ratings…at 30%.

A new Marist Poll out right now (check out their new website too) gives Obama an approval rating of 56% with 30% saying they disapprove of the job he’s doing. Those numbers are in line with a series of other polls in the last month even if the approval number is on the lower end of the range. And while some might argue the bloom is off the rose, a quick look at Real Clear Politics’s or the Polling Report’s running averages of all polls proves the point.

Both averages put Obama’s approval rating at a steady 60%+ since January while his disapproval rate has gone from the teens to around 30% where it plateaued in mid-February. That should concern the GOP since Obama only got 53% of the vote in November to John McCain’s 46%. That means 16 percentage points worth of McCain voters still don’t buy the GOP’s opposing message (and most don’t buy Obama either).

The worst news for Republicans is in these numbers from the Gallup Poll:

Since his Inauguration Obama’s support among Democrats and independents has stayed roughly the same. Only Republicans have become more dissatisfied. With self-identifying Republicans dropping to levels rivalling post-Watergate, the GOP clearly needs a new plan. Unless they really enjoy being in the minority.

Number Crunchers Rejoice!

Bucolic Columbia County

If you can’t wait for the actual votes to get counted in the special election upstate to replace Kirsten Gillibrand in the House, Nate over at 538 has some analysis that indicates Democrat Scott Murphy could end up winning this most-Republican-district-in-New-York. What’s interesting is where the most absentee ballots are coming from: Columbia County, which we explained several times could prove pivotal because of all the second-home NYC residents who vote up there (where their votes obviously count far more because there are actually two parties in Columbia County).

Republican Jim Tedisco has been making the rounds to conservative radio shows and columnists making noises about Democratic intimidation of local election boards but as a weekend resident in the district (who does NOT vote there) I can tell you that any intimidation would probably be by the election board members. These are hardy peeps in the 20th who are unlikely to take any crap or suggestions from anybody. Further the notion that the state Board of Elections would be denying military ballots in order to favor a Democrat is equally absurd.

Remember this: Tedisco is being represented in any court action by former Republican Congressman James Walsh. Walsh is one of the four members of the State Board of Elections. So give it rest guys.

We should know who gets the distinct privilege of representing me (on weekends) in a week — or sooner.

The GOP's Platform

Nope. No way. Not gonna vote for it. Not gonna support it. Not gonna do it. Republicans are not gonna play ball with any Democratic bill, initiative, thought, proposal. House Dems could propose a resolution that “America is great” and Republicans would all vote “No” instead proposing a resolution stating “America is the greatest.”

That’s how Washington is working these days and it’s driving even some Republicans to warn the party is becoming the House of No to it’s own detriment.

Newt Gingrich told a group of Missouri college students that Republicans might be challenged by a third party of angry conservatives if they don’t figure out how to become both more fiscally conservative (remember that Bush and his GOP friends passed one budget after the next that spent far more than the government took in and even ditched the “pay as you go” rule Congress put into place a decade earlier) and more idea-oriented.

Gingrich railed on the GOP for becoming the Party of No in a cover piece last month in the New York Times magazine:

Most Republicans are not entrepreneurial. They’re corporatists. They like the security and the comfort of a well-thought-out, highly boring boardroom meeting in which they do a PowerPoint once. And it worries them to have ideas, because ideas have edges, and they’re not totally formed, and you’ve got to prove them, and they sound strange because they’re new, and if it’s new how do you know it’s any good, because, after all, it’s new and you’ve never heard it before.

So this week one of Gingrich’s acolytes, Wisconsin Representative Paul Ryan, wrote up a GOP alternative to Barack Obama’s budget. Sure enough Republicans held the line on the Obama plan — not a single Republican in either the House or Senate voted for Obama’s budget. Not one. (Their votes weren’t needed so it passed easily.)

It got better for the GOP after 20 Dems voted against their own President’s budget in the House. But party unity failed miserably when 38 Republicans voted “No” on Ryan’s alternative budget. That’s a much larger percentage of the GOP House delegation than the percentage of Democratic “No” votes on the Obama budget. So despite their best efforts, the GOP comes away again as the Party of No.

The problem for Republicans is that they really aren’t talking about any truly new ideas — or even ideas that the American voter might think of as being worth a try since the few ideas the GOP is pushing are eerily reminiscent of those promulgated by George W. Bush. That’s not the kind of linkage that helps.

A quick peak at the always-useful Real Clear Politics average of polls shows that Obama’s approval rating has stayed roughly the same for the past month at about 60%. Voters opinion of Republicans, on the other hand, has continued to sink (although there are far fewer polls asking this question so the trend is tougher to say exists with certainty) and hovers somewhere around 30%.

So despite warnings about, and even actions to stop being perceived as the Party of No, Republicans now own the label. The conservative blogs have been filled with passionate posts coming from all sides alternately lashing out at Democrats and perceived media favoritism and bemoaning the lack of party unity around anything other than “No”.

But the bottom line remains the same: Being perceived as against everything and for nothing is a losing strategy. Here’s an interesting read from Fox News about that very premise…from 2005…concerning Democrats.

The winner? Not so fast.

So the first special election of the new year has come and gone and like so many elections nowadays, it’s too close to call. With all the regular votes counted across 10 upstate New York counties Democrat Scott Murphy leads Republican Jim Tedisco by 59 votes out of the almost 145 thousand cast. We should have a winner, with any luck, in a few weeks…or months.

In the meantime there are a few things we now know that we could only guess at before the voters spoke:

• In claiming that this would be a referendum on Obama and the Democrats, national Republicans failed to heed the warnings of local party members who argued this contest would be very close despite it being the most Republican House district in the state.
• As Get Real pointed out over the weekend, the 20th is not so much a Republican district any more as it is an increasingly independent one and that appeared to favor the non-politician — Murphy. Look where he won — in precisely the places we noted had influxes of younger, high-tech workers (Warren and Rensselaer Counties) and relocated New York City refugees (Dutchess and Columbia).
• Voters are still engaged. Turnout appears to be around 36% which is pretty amazing for a special election called just months after the longest Presidential campaign in history. By comparison 54% of registered voters turned out for the regular election in 2006 in which Kirsten Gillibrand took the seat for Democrats. Turnout in the teens is not unexpected in most special elections.
• Democrats can still win in conservative districts because they have not been blamed by a majority of voters for the economic mess and the attempts to fix it. In fact polls in the 20th showed very broad support for the stimulus package. The flip side of this is that Republicans have done themselves no favors by being the party of “no.” Recognizing this Tedisco refused to take a position on the stimulus until last week. The party is doing some of it’s members no favors.
• The Obama campaign machine continues to be a formidable beast. Voters in the 20th who’d linked to the Obama campaign through email or text messages last year got at least two last minute emails “from” Obama urging them to go to the polls.

While these facts won’t stop both sides from spinning the fact that their won’t be an official winner for awhile is likely to mute the DC brigades and force them to look for other talismans as to what voters are thinking.

President Barack Obama on "The Tonight Show" (AP Photo)

At the risk of sounding like a broken record (kids: a long time ago people listened to music on things called records and sometimes they got scratched and skipped and played the same little section of a song over and over and over and…oh never mind) Republicans just don’t get it.

The kerfuffle over Barack Obama’s “Tonight Show” appearance is so incredibly telling — and sad if you were hoping for a reasonably adept opposition to push back on Barack occasionally. The usual suspects and brothers in arms — The New York Post and Fox News — were agog that the President “yuks it up on Leno as economy burns.”

The Post‘s am-I-a-journalist-or-an-opinionist? Charles Hurt penned a scathing column noting that while the “economy lies in ruin” Obama has “with great fanfare filled out his March Madness basketball bracket before flying off to California to parry and jest with Jay Leno….”

The conservative media was actually just riffing on a theme Republican Senators introduced Thursday during a news conference ostensibly held to discuss the AIG bonus boondoggle. Arizona Senator Jon Kyl set the tone:

He flies off to Los Angeles to be on the Jay Leno show. My suggestion is that he come back — since he’s taken the full responsibility — to get his people together and say ‘I want to know exactly what happened, who did what when and how are we going to prevent this from ever happening in the future, and how can we manage these taxpayer assets in a way to solve the banking and financial institution crisis.’

Putting aside all the times when Democrats were up-in-arms about President Bush doing things like staying on vacation in Texas for days after Katrina hit New Orleans while Republicans defended him there’s a real issue here that we’ve talked about here several times before. The electorate is not what Republicans seem to think it is.

For decades Democrats have sought the support of young voters hoping that this group could be motivated to vote in numbers similar to those of their parents. But it never happens. Sure younger voters have increasingly sided with Dems since the late 80s but the percentage of people over 45 who vote is much higher than the percentage of those under 30 who vote. That hasn’t changed much in 30 years.

What has changed is that those younger voters have become older voters and the Democrats finally cashed in on that demographic truth in the last two elections. In general polling has shown people do tend to become more conservative as they age but not necessarily more Republican. Instead they tend to become more conservative within the party of their youth.

The other change is in the way people in various age groups get their news. Pew does great research about this and in the latest poll released at the end of last year, found that people under 30 now depend on the internet as much as television for their information. And the trend lines heavily favor the internet in the future.

More telling is what kind of television shows these voters get their news from. In another Pew poll released in January 2008, the trend towards people under 30 getting at least some of their campaign news from shows like Saturday Night Live and The Daily Show, coupled with that group’s high use of the internet to watch video clips speaks volumes about how a growing number of Americans gain an understanding of what’s going on.

When Obama’s people talk about wanting to “speak directly to Americans” or when Bush talked about going around “the filter” of the mainstream media, both are simply recognizing the truth: All the self-importance of the cable news channels and network anchors is delusional. Even the highly-rated prime-time cable shows (Olbermann, O’Reilly) get a smaller audience of people under 54 years old (a demographic threshold for advertisers and a majority of voters) than the lowest-rated shows on the lowest-rated CW network.

The fact is, reaching the people who will vote in the next election means speaking to them where they are: On the internet, on social-networking sites (Facebook isn’t for college students anymore — Al D’Amato recently friended me!), on You Tube, on late-night comedy shows, on daytime talk shows, on just about anything other than news shows.

So while Republicans and their media supplicants bellyache about Obama’s apparent major miscue of going on Leno, voters don’t really see what all the fuss is about. After all many Americans now get a better understanding of the critical issues facing America from the first 8 minutes of John Stewart than they do from 30 minutes of Couric or Gibson or 60 minutes of Maddow or Hannity or Cooper.

Rush Limbaugh

Rish Limbaugh is an idiot.

No, liberals, not because he makes outlandish statements about Democrats that rarely have even the scent of truth. Rush Limbaugh is an idiot for helping Barack Obama marginalize the Republican Party in it’s hour of need.

Some Obama supporters have worried that the President was foolish in even acknowledging the existence of Radio Rush after the talk-show host said he hoped Obama would fail. They said Obama only gave the Rotund One more attention and therefore more power.

Exactly.

At a time when the Republican Party is in a desperate search for it’s soul — the website GOP USA has a fundraising email out talking about “real Republicans” reclaiming their party — Obama has managed to make Rush Limbaugh the poster boy for the opposition. How do we know it’s worked? Lookie here.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page — widely understood to be somewhere to the right of Attila the Hun — has given over some of its valuable real estate to none other than Rush who uses his column to lambast Obama and the Democrats for their stimulus plan. His major theme is that since Obama “only” won 54% of the vote a real “compromise” would be for the stimulus plan to allow Dems to use 54% of the amount the way they want and 46% the way HE  wants — yes the way Rush Limbaugh, the self-proclaimed heart and soul of the Republican Party, wants. Remind me, did he advocate a similar sharing of power when Al Gore won slightly more votes than George Bush? I digress.

President Obama has surely awoken this Thursday morning with a smile on his face.

In choosing to confront Rush, Obama has found a way to keep the focus on a total doofus who commands great respect from a large audience (13 million weekly) of mainly older white guys who are of diminishing importance in American politics. Obama will never win them over and by stoking the anger of their dittomaster he wins. The rest of America — the majority as of November 2008 — sees Rush for what he is. A very handsomely paid comedian.

And Rush has done Obama even more good by pissing off Republicans. Earlier in the week some House Republicans reacted to Limbaugh’s contention that Obama was more afraid of him than of the Republican leadership. Then Bill Bennett — a dean of the modern Republican Party said on CNN, “The locution ‘I want him to fail’ is not what you say the first week the man’s been inaugurated.”

Obama is playing the oldest game in the book. Divide and conquer. Rush Limbaugh is Obama’s unwitting ally in this and Limbaugh probably wants it that way. His only real goal has always been himself. His ego is unmatched even by his reported $400 million 8-year contract (You read that right).

So for now Limbaugh fills the GOP void and forces Republican lawmakers to hew to his hard-right message (not a single GOP House member voted for the stimulus — whaddya think Rush will have to say about his role in that?) — good news for Rush but probably bad news for Republicans desperately trying to find a new way to appeal to a majority of the American people.

Score round one to Obama.