I've been trying to stay in the friendly confines of dailykos and other like-minded blogs that I frequent in order to keep my blood pressure low, especially during these times - where getting high blood pressure would probably result in me getting dropped from my health care insurance for becoming a risk.... but today I got into a discussion with a Republican friend which definitely got my blood boiling, and I just needed to vent somewhere.
I apologize in advance for the rambling.
My Republican friend and I like to talk politics every now and then. He is usually very reasonable. He does not take Sarah Palin very seriously; he hates it when his kin keep talking about Obama's birth certificate; and he think Sean Hannity is a nincompoop. And I won't mention his name here so as to not throw him under the bus between our conservative friends, but he actually voted for Obama.
So today, as we usually do on Sundays, we started talking about politics at church and the conversation turned to the economy. I won't share the entire conversation with you. The main thing that I wanted to point out was the one statement he said that struck me and set me off:
Well, this is Obama's recession now.
Obama's recession??? Excuse me??!?
Remember, I like to think my friend is one of the reasonable ones. For some reason, he's forgotten about the last eight years and what led to this crisis. I had to remind him of this and pushed back strongly. I reminded him that the TARP started under Bush (we both read Bush speechwriter Matt Latimer's book Speech-Less, which helped me make my case since Latimer specifically talked about what they had to do when this mess started and so I reminded him of this). My friend reluctantly agreed, but settled on the point of view that Obama is making things worse.
What this is telling me is that if the "sane" ones on the other side (i.e., voting for Obama over McCain) are already forgetting what made them vote for the other party for one election cycle this early, then FOX and right wing radio are controlling the perception here.
Even SNL is already saying Obama has done nothing. Last night's skit on Obama and Jintao is already a big hit among the right wing blogs (check how many of them are pimping the video when you do a search on google). While I found it hilarious, this is yet another skit by SNL, who is supposedly on our side, that completely disregards anything Obama's administration has done. As if our economy would not be in another depression by now if McCain was the one in charge.
So here's what I plan to do from now on and I hope everyone who reads this diary does the same. I hope whenever you have to refer to this economy; whenever you have to talk about the "jobless recovery" or this "financial crisis," that you call this The Bush Recession. Because this is what this is. The nerve of these guys, pinning this all on Obama. I know we as a society tend to have a short memory now, but allowing the folks who forced us into this mess to control the narrative here is absolutely unacceptable, and we need to start reframing this now or we will lose the independents and the sane folk completely by the time 2010 comes around.
I'm reminded by the wonderful diary by NicolasC last month on Obama's "Grab a Mop" analogy - reminding us that he was not the one who get us into this mess and telling the GOP to stop obstructing and to finally start helping. Well, this isn't enough. If we keep bringing up that we are merely fixing Bush's mess, people will say, "there the left goes again, blaming Bush." While unfair, it is an understandable reaction.
So in my opinion, the easiest way to remind people about this without sounding like we're pointing fingers is to call this mess what it really is. The Bush Recession. We're not blaming anything on Bush directly. It is what it is.
(I don't claim to be the initiator of this of course. I'm sure I'm not the first to think of this. But damn it, I'll bring it up again and if people have better names for it, let's use it.)
And while I'm not a big Arianna Huffington fan as of late, I'm also reminded by Arianna's warnings when the whole "Rush Limbaugh is the GOP Leader" debacle started earlier this year - that it was distracting people from the real issue, that this economy is Bush's economy and we'd better not forget it. The whole time that was going on, the GOP already laid out their strategy on how to bring down Obama's administration:
Karl Rove is too smart to say he wants Obama to fail. But if Obama's recovery plan doesn't work -- and, if it doesn't, it'll be because it wasn't big and bold enough -- Rove and the gang have a highly polished narrative at the ready, one that succeeds at disconnecting what Obama had to do to stimulate to economy with what happened before he took office. Big government failed, according to this narrative. Let's bring back tax cuts and deregulation.
Please note that I'm not saying Obama's administration is blameless in the handling of this economy. I am not concerned with whether or not people here think Obama is a sellout or is as bad as Bush. My main concern here is to remind people where this all started and it would be in our best interest to help remind everyone else of that; in fact, it could make our critiques of how Obama is handling this crisis less "Obama-bashing" sounding and help us here keep focused on the policies.
Anyway, I end with a reminder of the political gold Obama supplied us last month...