Bozell Column: Obama 'Cements His Legacy'

Newsweek stopped its print edition at the end of 2012, but they still tried to scandalize the country by producing a fake cover honoring Obama’s second inauguration as “The Second Coming.” This absurd attempt at myth-making is a natural progression. The “cover” story was written by Evan Thomas, who proclaimed on MSNBC a few years ago that Obama was “sort of like God” in being above the gritty political fray.

It was just as absurd when Newsweek writer David Frum, the formerly conservative Bush speechwriter, tweeted this piece of media-elite nonsense: “First term Obama: punchee, 2nd term Obama, puncher.”

No one calling himself a “political observer” can say Obama was some sort of mute victim, consistently under fire, on defense over the last four years. Quote Obama from anywhere, and he’s fiercely bashing the GOP. In April 2011, he said the House GOP budget plan would force “poor children,” “children with autism,” and “kids with disabilities” to “fend for themselves.” In another 2011 speech, he described the Republican plan as “let’s have dirtier air, dirtier water, less people with health insurance.”

These aren’t even the Obama-Biden 2012 TV ads. They were pure gutter sleaze.

In truth, the media elites want Obama to destroy conservatives. Too far-fetched, you say? Slate.com published an article by John Dickerson on January 18 headlined “Go for the Throat! Why if he wants to transform American politics, Obama must declare war on the Republican Party.”

This “reporter” is the political director of CBS News. The spirit of Dan Rather remains.

Dickerson said Obama doesn’t want to rest on his first-term laurels. So “Obama’s only remaining option is to pulverize. Whether he succeeds in passing legislation or not, given his ambitions, his goal should be to delegitimize his opponents.” He needs “clarifying fights over controversial issues,” so “he can force Republicans to either side with their coalition's most extreme elements or cause a rift in the party that will leave it, at least temporarily, in disarray.”

We’re informed that “extreme” conservatism, as defined by the Tea Party or the NRA, should be “illegitimate.” This is precisely what CBS was selling about Ronald Reagan 32 years ago. Dickerson wants Obama to be liberal enough to spur “more tin-eared, dooming declarations of absolutism like those made by conservatives who sought to define the difference between legitimate and illegitimate rape – and handed control of the Senate to Democrats along the way.”

In imagining a slow political suicide of the American right, Dickerson isn’t so much out in front of Obama as helpfully channeling Obama. On Saturday’s “Early Show” on CBS, Dickerson explained Obama’s thinking: “We heard in his press conference this week – which is, confrontation has to be the order of the day. He’s tried to work with Republicans and as he said, you know, I could have more parties with them but it doesn’t change the way they behave.”

It’s preposterous that a “journalist” would say all this. It is mind-boggling to consider he actually believes this.

Another CBS star, Bob Schieffer, demonstrated the media’s impatience with anything but a fervently leftist Obama in a second term. After the president made a speech for more gun control, Schieffer leaned on history to insist that beating the “gun lobby” has to be easier than killing Osama bin Laden or “defeating the Nazis.”

Schieffer argued, “the president is going to have to do more than just make a speech about it. This is one of the best speeches I’ve ever heard him deliver, but it’s going to take more than that from the White House. He’s going to have to get his hands dirty.”

Liberal journalists don’t want lofty oratory in the second term. They want conservatives defeated and “delegitimized.” They want a smash-mouth Obama who accomplishes their agenda of “responding to the threat of climate change,” and marriages for our “gay brothers and sisters” in all 50 states, and amnesty for “bright young students” so they “will be enlisted in our workforce rather than expelled from our country.” All of these and more were promised to liberals in Obama’s second inaugural address. 

Richard Stevenson at The New York Times passed along the Orwellian echo of Obama’s “unapologetic argument that modern liberalism was perfectly consistent with the spirit of the founders.”

The battle is joined. The only question left is whether the Republicans will have the will to fight.