Dog Training

In his new NYT column "Time for This Big Dog to Bite Back" Frank Rich recommends that Obama forcefully illustrate the class warfare that has been waged for decades in the U.S. You know, the redistribution of wealth that has resulted in the decimation of the middle class and the concentration of 25% of the nation's wealth into the hands of 1% of its people.

Though F.D.R. was predictably accused of “class warfare,” his antibusiness “radicalism,” was, in Kennedy’s words, “a carefully staged political performance, an attack not on the capitalist system itself but on a few high-profile capitalists.” Roosevelt was trying to co-opt the populist rage of his economically despondent era, some of it uncannily Tea Party-esque in its hysteria, before it threatened that system, let alone his presidency. Only the crazy right confused F.D.R. with communists for taking on capitalism’s greediest players, and since our crazy right has portrayed Obama as a communist, socialist and Nazi for months, he’s already paid that political price without gaining any of the benefits of bringing on this fight in earnest.

F.D.R. presided over a landslide in 1936. The best the Democrats can hope for in 2010 is smaller-than-expected losses. To achieve even that, Obama will have to give an F.D.R.-size performance — which he can do credibly and forcibly only if he really means it. So far, his administration’s seeming coziness with some of the same powerful interests now vilifying him has left middle-class voters, including Democrats suffering that enthusiasm gap, confused as to which side he is on. If ever there was a time for him to clear up the ambiguity, this is it.

 Word.

Driving While Hispanic, Being Presidential While Black

Frank Rich looks at the connections between Arizona's new "arrested for driving while Latino" law and the radical right's growing "Take Back America" campaign complete with its Birther members who would be so funny if they were not so sad and so scary. The GOP is bending over in full kowtow to the Teabaggers and I'm starting to think the overt racism of the past was less dangerous than the tide that is currently on the rise.

It's difficult, as always, to choose from among Rich's high-fidelity paragraphs a couple to quote. These were chosen sort of randomly:

It's harder and harder to cling to the conventional wisdom that the Tea Party is merely an element in the G.O.P., not the party's controlling force -- the tail that's wagging the snarling dog. It's also hard to maintain that the Tea Party's nuttier elements are merely a fringe of a fringe. The first national Tea Party convention, in Nashville in February, chose as its kickoff speaker the former presidential candidate Tom Tancredo, a notorious nativist who surely was enlisted precisely because he runs around saying things like he has ''no idea where Obama was born.'' The Times/CBS poll of the Tea Party movement found that only 41 percent of its supporters believe that the president was born in the United States.

The angry right and its apologists also keep insisting that race has nothing to do with their political passions. Thus Sarah Palin explained that it's Obama and the ''lamestream media'' that are responsible for ''perpetuating this myth that racial profiling is a part'' of Arizona's law. So how does that profiling work without race or ethnicity, exactly? Brian Bilbray, a Republican Congressman from California and another supporter of the law, rode to the rescue by suggesting ''they will look at the kind of dress you wear.'' Wise Latinas better start shopping at Talbots!

Oh gosh, I can't resist adding one more paragraph:

In a development that can only be described as startling, the G.O.P.'s one visible black leader, the party chairman Michael Steele, went off message when appearing at DePaul University on April 20. He conceded that African-Americans ''really don't have a reason'' to vote Republican, citing his party's pursuit of a race-baiting ''Southern strategy'' since the Nixon-Agnew era. For this he was attacked by conservatives who denied there had ever been such a strategy. That bit of historical revisionism would require erasing, for starters, Strom Thurmond and Jesse Helms, not to mention the Willie Horton campaign that helped to propel Bush 41 into the White House in 1988.

 Frank Rich so skillfully melds his pieces. He knits and purls together his thoughts, the news, our political history, and "startling" quotes you may not have heard about before. A read of the whole rather lengthy op-ed piece is highly recommended.

Journalist of the Day: re Mr Smith goes to Washington

The best article I've seen thus far explaining McCain's decision to land in D.C. (one can see the orange jumpsuit, the deck of the aircraft carrier, the Mission Accomplished banner ... oh, wait, that was that other macho American) and then pretend to have been acting in the interest of The People ...

Frank Rich in today's NYT. Warning, Rich is pissed. Perhaps not appropriate material for folks who prefer their politics air-brushed. Here's a sample:

The question is why would a man who forever advertises his own honor toy so selfishly with our national interest at a time of crisis. I’ll leave any physiological explanations to gerontologists — if they can get hold of his complete medical records — and any armchair psychoanalysis to the sundry McCain press acolytes who have sorrowfully tried to rationalize his erratic behavior this year. The other answers, all putting politics first, can be found by examining the 24 hours before he decided to “suspend” campaigning and swoop down on the Capitol to save America from the Sunnis or the Shia, or whoever perpetrated all those credit-default swaps.

To put these 24 hours in context, you must remember that McCain not only knows little about the economy but that he has not previously expressed any urgency about its meltdown. It was on Sept. 15 — the day after his former idol Alan Greenspan pronounced the current crisis a “once-in-a-century” catastrophe — that McCain reaffirmed for the umpteenth time that the “fundamentals of our economy are strong.” As recently as Tuesday he had not yet even read the two-and-a-half-page bailout proposal first circulated by Hank Paulson last weekend. “I have not had a chance to see it in writing,” he explained. (Maybe he was waiting for it to arrive by Western Union instead of PDF.)