Republicans' Strident Protests Against Obama's Reversals of Bush Policies are Falling on Deaf Ears, While Right-Wing Fox News and Talk-Radio Commentators Resort to Increasingly Bitter Anti-Obama Rhetoric in a So-Far Futile Effort to Turn Back the Voters' Clear Mandate for Change
(Posted 5:00 a.m. EDT Monday, April 27, 2009)
(Updated 5:00 p.m. EDT Monday, April 27, 2009)
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A 'SKEETER BITES REPORT EDITORIAL
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Dear Readers,
This week, specifically Wednesday, marks the completion of President Obama's first 100 days in office. And the tone he has set in those 100 days is driving conservatives and their Republican allies -- who until Obama's election last November had dominated the national political discourse for a generation -- absolutely bonkers.
Adding to the conservatives' frustration: Nobody other than Republicans are listening to them. And the Republicans' protests against the president's policies are falling on deaf ears -- except those of right-wing talk-radio hosts such as Rush Limbaugh and the conservative-leaning Fox News Channel, whose commentators have as of late taken an increasingly bitter hard line against the Obama administration and the president himself.
Fox News has now come under criticism from the public for being too critical of the president, according to a recent survey by the Pew Center for the People and the Press. Nearly three-in-ten respondents (29 percent) selected Fox when asked which of six broadcast and cable news networks have been too critical of the new Democratic president, a far greater share than any other network.
By contrast, no one TV network is singled out for being too easy on Obama. Each of five networks (CNN, MSNBC, NBC, ABC and CBS) was named by about one in six respondents in this regard. Again, Fox News stands apart -- just five percent named Fox as being too easy on the president, the Pew survey found.
But Fox News, owned by billionaire media magnate Rupert Murdoch's News Corp., isn't alone in coming under fire. Readers of the News Corp.-owned New York Post are also registering their dissatisfaction with the hard-right-leaning tabloid -- by abandoning it altogether.
The latest circulation figures released Monday by the Audit Bureau of Circulations for the six months ending March 31 found that the money-losing Post suffered the worst decline of any American daily newspaper in an industry battered by the recession -- a staggering 20.5 percent, or about 144,000 copies -- to its lowest circulation in more than 30 years, to 558,140.
A MINORITY PARTY FALLING DEEPER INTO MINORITY STATUS
The Republicans have been effectively relegated to irrelevancy by the voters, who not only handed Obama the keys to the White House, but also gave his Democratic Party bigger majorities in both houses of Congress, a majority (27-23) of the 50 state governorships and majority control (27-14) of the 50 state legislatures (Eight legislatures are under split control; although Nebraska's 49-member, single-chamber legislature is officially nonpartisan, Republicans hold a 32-17 majority).
It gets worse: The Republicans are being forced to confront the very real prospect of remaining cast out in the political wilderness for at least a decade or longer -- perhaps even a generation. Having long ago lost the support of African Americans and women, the GOP has now lost the support of Latinos.
More ominously, the Republicans have lost the support of young people, who went more than 2-1 for Obama and the Democrats. Young people -- who now outnumber their 76-million-strong Baby Boomer elders -- are by far the most socially liberal of all voters, with overwhelming majorities of young people supporting abortion rights and same-gender marriage fiercely opposed by conservatives.
One of the country's most prominent social conservatives, Dr. James Dobson, who recently retired as head of Focus on the Family, conceded, in a farewell address to Focus on the Family staff, that with Obama's election and the Democrats' tighter grip on Congress, conservatives have lost the culture wars.
"We tried to defend the unborn child, the dignity of the family, but it was a holding action," he said. "We are awash in evil and the battle is still to be waged. We are right now in the most discouraging period of that long conflict. Humanly speaking, we can say we have lost all those battles."
While Dobson acknowledged that social conservatives' association with the deeply unpopular Bush administration -- combined with a series of sex and corruption scandals that plagued congressional Republicans -- contributed to the failure of the key objectives of social conservatives' 30-year struggle, he also acknowledged what many of his peers would not: That the social conservatives failed to win over the hearts and minds of young people.
GOP A SHELL OF ITS ONCE-DOMINANT SELF
The shellacking handed to the Republicans by the voters in 2008 -- on top of mass defections from the party since 2006 -- has left the GOP a shell of its once-dominant self: A rapidly-shrinking regional party of the Deep South, the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountain West dominated by mostly rural, middle-aged-and-older white conservative males.
Moderate suburban voters who have long identified themselves as Republicans have abandoned the party in droves, saying that the GOP has moved too far to the right. Most of those moderate former Republicans are now independents, with some -- particularly in the Northeast -- having gone all the way and switched to the Democrats.
The Northeast is now by far the most solidly Democratic region in the country, where Republicans have rapidly become an endangered species. The already solid-blue West Coast is more Democratic than ever and, thanks to the economic downturn, the Midwest and vast swaths of the desert Southwest have moved into the Democratic column.
Even Texas -- a longtime Republican bastion that hasn't voted for a Democratic presidential nominee since native-son Lyndon Johnson in 1964 or a Democrat for governor since Anne Richards in 1990 -- is becoming more and more "purple," as growing numbers of voters, particularly moderates, are becoming increasingly turned off by the right-wing domination of the state GOP and the party itself is on the brink of an all-out ideological civil war sparked by Governor Rick Perry's ill-conceived remarks about the state seceding from the Union.
Meanwhile, social conservatives are screaming for GOP National Chairman Michael Steele's head for having dared to say, in an interview with the men's lifestyle magazine GQ, that abortion "is an individual choice" and that the matter should be left up to the states to decide.
But does anybody outside the GOP really give a damn about Steele's ultimate fate? It doesn't appear to be so, as this writer sees it.
'TEFLON' OBAMA ENJOYING HIGHEST APPROVAL RATINGS AT 100-DAY MARK SINCE REAGAN
Nor does it appear that anybody outside the GOP gives a damn what the Republicans are saying about the Obama administration's policies. Indeed, as he marks his 100th day in office on Wednesday, Obama is enjoying the highest job-approval and personal favorability ratings of any president at the 100-day mark since Ronald Reagan's 67 percent rating in 1981.
With the public solidly behind him, Obama has become as much of a "Teflon president" as Reagan was, impervious to the slings and arrows of criticism hurled at him by the opposing party.
According to an analysis of opinion polls by the Pew Center, Obama is enjoying a 63 percent job-approval rating, matching that of Jimmy Carter in 1977, but much higher than his most recent Democratic predecessor Bill Clinton (55 percent in 1993) and Republicans George H.W. Bush (58 percent in 1989) and George W. Bush (56 percent in 2001).
Obama's personal favorability ratings have soared even higher, to a whopping 73 percent, according to Pew -- with 38 percent viewing him very favorably. This is far higher than either the younger Bush (61 percent in July 2001) and Clinton (60 percent in May 1993). The president is basking in the highest job-approval ratings among Democrats of any president since Franklin D. Roosevelt -- an overwhelming 93 percent positive. And he's enjoying a nearly 2-1 approval rating among independents: 58 percent to 27 percent.
Only among Republicans does Obama rack up a majority negative job approval rating, with 56 percent of Republicans giving him negative marks and only 30 percent of GOPers, mostly moderates, giving him positive reviews. A strong 42 percent of Republicans -- principally the party's hard-core conservative base -- views Obama very negatively. Only Bill Clinton draws even higher negative ratings (65 percent) from Republicans than Obama.
CONGRESSIONAL REPUBLICANS DRAWING RECORD-LOW APPROVAL RATINGS
But with Republicans now comprising a paltry 21 percent of the nation's registered voters -- outnumbered by both Democrats (45 percent) and independents (34 percent), according to a recent state-by-state analysis of voters' party affiliations by Gallup, the opposition to Obama is a muted one, much to the chagrin of conservatives.
By contrast, Republicans in Congress are drawing record-low approval ratings -- lower than even those of former President Bush, according to Gallup, which found that 69 percent of Americans disapprove of congressional Republicans' job performance and only 25 percent approve.
Bush, the most unpopular president in America's post-World War II history, left office in January with a 67 percent negative and 29 percent positive job-approval rating.
The 25 percent positive approval rating for the Republicans in Congress is a new Gallup Poll low, surpassing the previous record-low 26 percent measured about this time last year. Gallup first began asking about approval of the Congressional parties in 1999.
OBAMA TAKING FULL ADVANTAGE OF HIS MANDATE
The president is now taking full advantage of his political capital by doing to congressional Republicans what Reagan did to congressional Democrats in 1981: Repeatedly reminding them of his electoral mandate to do things differently from Bush.
At a closed-door meeting Thursday at the White House with GOP leaders, the president reminded the minority that the last time he reached out to them, they reacted in the House with zero votes -- twice -- for his stimulus package, according to the liberal-leaning Web site HuffingtonPost.com.
The Web site quoted GOP sources as saying that the president raised the specter of giving Senate Democrats the green light to put his health-care reform plan on the "fast track" next fall by using a legislative process known as reconciliation, eliminating the 60-vote requirement for passage and robbing the GOP of its power to block the measure with a filibuster.
Remember the furor during the Democratic primary campaign when Obama praised Reagan's effectiveness as president? Well, who would have thought back then that the Democratic 44th president would employ the iron will of the Republican 40th president to push through his agenda for change?
I certainly didn't. But I'm very satisfied that he is.
Sincerely,
Skeeter Sanders,
Editor & Publisher,
The 'Skeeter Bites Report
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Copyright 2009, Skeeter Sanders. All rights reserved.