Thread: America, we've seen worse

America, we've seen worse

President Obama has been shouted down as a liar, been compared to Hitler and had his right to hold office questioned. Has the political rancor ever been this bad? Actually, yes.

By Sandy Grady

All new presidents offer peace pabulum. But in the cold sunshine of Jan. 20, Barack Obama's voice edged with conviction: He would end the "petty grievances" and "recriminations" that "for far too long have strangled our politics."

Talk about bitter irony.

Nine months later, petty grievances would be genteel wrist taps compared with the nastiness exploding on talk radio and in town hall scream-athons.


Obama was dissed, "You lie!", by a congressional buffoon. He was cartooned on Tea Party placards as Adolf Hitler or Batman's Joker or an African witch doctor. Health care shouters bellowed about "death panels." "Birthers" insisted that Obama is a Kenyan or a Muslim. Either way, an illegitimate president in their eyes.

When Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize — admittedly in the first inning of a long game — his critics reacted as though it was a DUI arrest rather than signal of hope.

Sure, bipartisanship is a dead dream if Obama's lucky to win one or two lonely Republican votes for health care passage in the Senate. (Lyndon Johnson got 13 Republican senators for Medicare's final vote.)

Is this 2009 split a hissy fit over the first post-racial president or a society's nervous breakdown?

"The polarization between the political parties is greater than ever before in modern history," intones respected journalist Elizabeth Drew in The New York Review of Books.

Veteran reporters say the daily left vs. right barrage of insults makes Capitol Hill as rowdy as a food fight in a school cafeteria — with no adult supervision. An earlier Pew Research Center poll showed that Obama had the most polarized approval rating — a 61 percentage point gap between Democrats and Republicans — since tracking began when Richard Nixon was in the White House.

Ferocious, but not the worst
Is our ideological poison worse than ever? Well, no, we've seen far more turbulent times. Even so, I suspect there's something novel and menacing about the noisy ferocity of 2009 politics.

It's ridiculous to compare the current Tea Party tempest to, say, the run-up to the Civil War — when a Southern congressman caned an anti-slavery senator almost to death and slavery tore the nation apart. And David M. Kennedy's magisterial Freedom From Fear shows that enmity toward Obama doesn't compare with 1930s hostility toward Franklin D. Roosevelt, especially from such bellicose crackpots as the Rev. Charles Coughlin, Huey Long, Gerald L.K. Smith and business tycoons who detested FDR's New Deal. Maybe Obama should lose his famous cool as did FDR in his Madison Square Garden rouser: "They are unanimous in their hate for me — and I welcome their hatred!"

Our tin-pot 2009 divisiveness can't come close to the Joe McCarthy period or the 1960s furor over civil rights and the Vietnam War. Last month's Tea Party rally in Washington was a quaint echo of the thunderous 1967 anti-Vietnam War march, where I saw tear-gas clouds and troops with bayoneted rifles defend the Pentagon against scuffling protesters.

So our uncivil disorder is spurious, minor-league trifling compared with 1856 or 1936 or 1969. We don't even match the heated scapegoating of the Robert Bork and Clarence Thomas Supreme Court nominations of the '80s and '90s that still thrives in tribal Hatfield-McCoy feuding.

The non-stop echo chamber
But our 2009 partisan jostling has a new, maybe dangerous, twist — the Frankenstein technology of cable news, the Internet, Twitter and Facebook that created a deafening 24-hour echo chamber.

The rancor isn't worse, but it's far noisier.

After all, Roosevelt had to endure a few radio blowhards, and LBJ and Nixon had to cope with three bland TV networks. The 1987 death of the Fairness Doctrine plus high-tech media opened the gates of bedlam.

Now, radio-TV consumers are so divided that those on the right swear by Rush Limbaugh or Glenn Beck, while those on the left seek out Jon Stewart or Keith Olbermann. Thus, it was a dumb, understandable mistake when the White House sent out Anita Dunn to attack Fox News as a GOP ventriloquist's dummy.

But Obama's staff underestimates the Secret of the Echo Chamber: The louder the personal barbs and invective, the higher go ratings. The high-tech, smash-mouth style drifts down to congressional and town-hall copycats. So we get health care blather about death panels, government abortions, free care for illegal aliens.

"Political chaos is connected with the decay of language," wrote George Orwell, the prophet of 1984.

Sure, defenders see the multivoice raucousness of cable news and Internet bloggers as democracy spread wide. But the peril is rhetorical overkill. When pundits or protesters compare Obama to Hitler, a dictator who ignited a world war and killed 6 million Holocaust victims, that invites trouble.

The brutal lesson of the 1960s is that a climate of hate can breed national tragedies.

So far, we just have school food fights. Maybe we need an adult — for example, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., in the Nobel Prize flap — to speak firmly: Cool it, kids, before somebody gets hurt.

Sandy Grady, who has covered eight presidential campaigns, is a member of USA TODAY's board of contributors.

Posted at 12:16 AM/ET, October 22, 2009 in Forum commentary, Grady, Politics - Forum

http://blogs.usatoday.com/oped/2009/10/ ... .html#more

What a jerk. Getting rid of the Fairness Doctrine has created this nastiness? No, getting rid of the fairness doctrine and the access to the internet has provided the general population information that is screened out by the bland networks and the "controlled information" from the White House. And the tea parties and town hall meetings were simply raucus, rude shouting by the unwashed unenlightened? The DC demonstration was a pale reminder of the anti-war demonstrations in the '60's? Sandy, you just don't get it. There is a political revolution bubbling up. Political parties be damned! Bi-partisanship be damned! Partisanship be damned! Where do our elected leaders stand on the issues, and how will they vote? That is the overriding factor. Sandy, this is the silent majority rumbling. Anytime you can get over a million of us in one place protesting anything that is the equivalent of a 7.0 on the Richter scale.

Is this 2009 split a hissy fit over the first post-racial president or a society's nervous breakdown?

I vote for "societ's nervous breakdown"