Obama’s McCarthyite Moment

Is it possible to be post-American and xenophobic at the same time?

Rich Lowry
Tuesday, October 12, 2010

When Barack Obama went to the 2004 Democratic convention, where he made a splash as a mere U.S. Senate candidate, he told a reporter: “I’m LeBron, baby. I can play at this level.”

If he has a modicum of self-awareness, when he reflects on his closing argument during this campaign he’ll tell himself: “I’m McCarthy, baby. I can play in the gutter.”

President Obama has discovered a nefarious plot by foreigners to influence the U.S. election, and included it in his stump speech. He wants voters to focus on the truly important question before this historic midterm: whether the Chamber of Commerce has properly segregated $100,000 in dues from foreign-member affiliates away from its $50 million advertising campaign.

There’s no evidence that it hasn’t acted in compliance with the law, but let’s not let such trifling details get in the way of inflammatory innuendo. On Face the Nation over the weekend, Bob Schieffer asked Obama adviser David Axelrod if he had any evidence that the foreign money the Chamber gets is anything other than “peanuts” for an organization with a $200 million annual budget. Axelrod shot back a killer rejoinder, “Well, do you have any evidence that it’s not, Bob?”

And so the White House has embraced an epistemological standard worthy of the birthers. It’s almost not worth recalling that Obama once promised to elevate American politics. He never was going to live up to his exalted advertisement, but did he have to make it a tawdry lie?

Obama has become a master at the art of self-diminishment. He’s working his way down the food chain of targets for shrill attacks. He started at George W. Bush (who is out of office but at least a former president), descended to John Boehner (the House minority leader people have barely heard of), and finally alighted on Karl Rove (who is a political operative and pundit).

Rove’s offense is helping Republican outside organizations raise money for political advertisements. Obama excoriated him by name the other day. The equivalent would have been President Bush attacking a longtime Democratic politico like Bob Shrum or John Podesta. Bush’s sense of the dignity of the office kept him from ever sinking so low. Obama is not so inhibited.

It should be taken as an axiom of political life that if your argument is about the other side’s advertisements, you’re losing. If your argument is about who’s funding the other side’s advertisements, you’re losing badly. And if your argument is about how foreigners might — lack of evidence notwithstanding — be secretly funneling cash into the other side’s advertisements, you’re losing in a historic landslide.

The Democratic National Committee takes Obama’s crude attack and makes it even more witless and ham-handed. In a new TV ad, it accuses the Chamber and Rove of “stealing our democracy,” as a shadowy man snatches a woman’s purse in a garage. “It appears they’ve even taken secret foreign money to influence our elections,” the ad intones, with images of ominous Chinese currency flashing in the background. “It’s incredible: Republicans benefiting from secret foreign money.”

If you haven’t noticed, the Democrats love the word “foreign,” almost as much as “corporate” and “Wall Street.” In a typical Democratic ad, embattled majority leader Harry Reid has a new spot labeling Republican Sharron Angle as “a foreign worker’s best friend.” It’s not meant as a compliment. Angle supposedly supports shipping jobs to China and India, home to billions of workers who are inarguably foreign (although it’s more doubtful that many of them are stealing U.S. jobs).

Bizarrely, the party that’s content to let millions of foreigners cross our southern border to live and work here without our permission has otherwise become a locus of foreigner-baiting political advocacy. Is it possible to be post-American and xenophobic at the same time? Suffice it to say that with the prospect of a November drubbing in the offing, the Obama Democrats are doing all they can to demonstrate they deserve it.