October 06, 2011 08:34 PM UTC

Years of Smear Make Weird Things Happen

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• by: Colorado Pols

A report in The Hill this morning got us thinking:

Criticism of the president has long been a staple of politics, but experts say lawmakers are becoming more extreme in their rebukes of the commander in chief.

White House scholars say that although every president has suffered the slings and arrows of outrageous barbs, it has not historically been members of Congress hurling them. But more lawmakers are now doing so, and that has diminished the office of the presidency, historians say…

This summer, during the debt-ceiling debate, Rep. Doug Lamborn (R-Colo.) said he did not want to be associated with Obama.

“It is like touching a tar baby and you get it – you’re stuck, and you’re part of the problem now,” he said.

Lamborn subsequently issued a statement saying he simply meant to refer to a sticky situation and that he had sent an apology to the president…

And how does this “hostile moment,” this “mean as it’s ever been” political era, reflect on the presidency, the Congress and the nation?

“It’s a disturbing trend, which degrades democracy and a political process that was designed to bring out our best, not our worst,” Widmer said. “By dissing the president, they are dissing the presidency. And by extension, our country. It’s embarrassing.”

We’ve been thinking lately about the difference between the types of attacks leveled against Presidents going back in our nation’s history, versus the 24/7/365 onslaught of highly personal attacks from media-savvy conservatives endured by President Barack Obama since taking office in January of 2009. This story in The Hill points out some particularly nasty smear campaigns in American history, but notes correctly that the penetration of mass media has completely changed the distribution of these messages. A 24-hour internet and social media-driven news cycle has allowed a drumbeat of attacks against Obama that just wasn’t possible before–witnessed by and participated in by millions instead of a tiny political class.

As the Washington Post reports, this is having very unusual, perhaps even cognitively dissonant effects–where Obama is personaly unpopular, but his actual proposals enjoy broad support.

You can’t get 75 percent of people to agree to much of anything these days.

But according to a new Washington Post-ABC News poll, 75 percent of Americans agree that millionaires should have their taxes raised. This is the crux of President Obama’s tax policy and perhaps the best-known aspect of the jobs plan he has put before Congress.

But when voters are asked whether they support the president’s jobs plan, support drops to 52 percent. And when they are asked who they trust more to deal with the operative issue here – taxes – Republicans have a seven-point advantage on Obama, 46 percent to 39 percent. That’s actually a reversal of April, when more Americans trusted Obama (47 percent) than Republicans (42 percent) on taxes.

So if Obama’s idea on taxes is so popular and Republicans are fighting against it, why have people moved towards the GOP on taxes?

It’s all about branding…

Got that? 75% of Americans want the very thing Republicans are steadfastly refusing to budge on, that is raise taxes in high income households, but those same Americans say they trust Republicans more on taxes than they do Obama. If you itemize what is proposed in Obama’s American Jobs Act, respondents support it overwhelmingly. But as soon as you put Obama’s name on it, support plunges. You’ll recall that this was the same situation with health care reform, where the provisions of the bill were popular but “Obamacare” was panned.

And then you realize it: the years-long campaign to personally alienate Obama from the American public has succeeded. It overcomes the rational arguments against it, shifting overwhelming support away from issues simply by invoking his name.

How do you deal with a situation where 75% of the public agrees with you and disagrees with your opponents, but says in the same breath they trust your opponents to deal with the issue better? How do you pass the agenda that 75% of the public says they want when the same public hands their support to people who will never give them what they want? We don’t claim to have the answer to that contradiction, but when they talked above about this state of affairs being “degrading to democracy,” we definitely see what they mean.

And it’s not like this is a particularly good situation for Republicans, who, once you get past an historically successful personal character assassination of Obama, have totally failed to win the public over to their agenda based on these same poll results. If we don’t know exactly how Obama should extricate himself from this situation, we surely don’t know what Republicans would do if they achieve another victory at the polls in 2012, then face a public 75% opposed to their agenda.

But we really don’t think they care right now. Today, cognitive dissonance is winning elections.