“You see folks waving tea bags around; let me just remind them that I am happy to have a serious conversation about how we are going to cut our health care costs down over the long term, how we’re going to stabilize Social Security. . . . But let’s not play games and pretend that the reason is because of the Recovery Act. . . .” He went on, again, to shift blame to the previous administration. His condescending attitude served only to further motivate the Tea Partiers he was dismissing.
I have taken to calling the Tea Party phenomenon the American Movement. They represent a cross section of average Americans who pay their taxes, play by the rules, and work for a living. To me, they are a hopeful sign of civic activism and mainstream, commonsense values. But to President Obama and his followers, the Tea Party activists are annoying obstacles or worse.
THE DIARY OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
THE WHITE HOUSE
March 24, 2010
Those tea-baggers won’t be able to weather the storm I’ve prepared for them. The tactics we have set in motion are unbelievable. They put me through hell over the last year. Now it’s their turn. First, we rammed the health-care bill down their miserable throats; now we’re discrediting them faster than the Palin clan can clean out a room full of swag bags!
It came to me during a call with Louise Slaughter the day of the health-care vote. She was relaying the discontent in her district over the way we ignored the will of the people. The Tea Partiers are jamming the congressional phone lines, saying that come November, there’ll be “hell to pay.” This is always the last cry of the oppressors as they fall. As a community organizer, I’ve heard this talk my whole life. There’s only one way to fight back. Do horrible things in the name of the enemy and make sure somebody covers it!
Papa Alinsky said: “The first step in community organization is community disorganization.” I told Louise to get some of her staffers to chuck a few bricks through the front window of her offices in New York—then weep and moan about it in the morning to the press. Blame it all on the tea-baggers. Valerie thought it would be even better if they could tape some tea bags to the bricks. I agreed.
Meanwhile, we got a few of our SEIU activists to do some lesser things around the country: egg a few residences, throw toilet paper in the trees, cut some propane lines on outdoor grills. They’re not doing any of this at the homes of the congressmen (and this was sheer genius on my part). Instead, it’ll all happen at the houses of congressional relatives! I figured that’s exactly what these goofball Republicans would do, right? Flip through the phone book, get the wrong address, and go on a destructive spree. The coverage is already a thing of beauty.
Then we’ve got the racist, homophobic tactical front. On the day of the vote, Nancy and the gang walked right through the tea-baggers to draw their fire—and they didn’t do a thing! Plouffe thought they would at least throw a bucket of water on Pelosi or toss a rotten tomato or two at Rosa DeLauro—something. But since Nancy and the others reached the Capitol unscathed, they turned to plan B: spread the story that the protesters verbally and physically attacked congressmen. Some old white man was apparently screaming at a member of the Black Caucus, congressman Emanuel Cleaver, about his taxes going up, when a little saliva flew out. The headline in the Post the next day read: “ ‘Tea Party’ Protesters Accused of Spitting on Lawmaker.” You can’t make this stuff up. The press is saying this shows the racism of the tea-baggers. If drops of saliva flying during a conversation are the new standard for racism, somebody better write up Barney Frank for attacking the person of the president. When he addresses me I feel like I should be wearing a Hazmat Suit— the saliva flies all over my jacket. Reggie says it’s impossible to get those stains out.
Speaking of Frank, he’s now making the rounds saying that the Tea Partiers screamed “anti-gay” chants as he crossed the Capitol grounds. I don’t have the heart to tell him that those T-shirted throngs were probably all Organizing for America volunteers. This thing is working like a charm; even the victims are playing along . . .
Throughout the spring and into the summer, the loosely organized Tea Party (not really a party at all) became more popular and more powerful. Tea Party ralliers assailed big government in all its Obama-iterations. They were anti-big-spending and therefore fought vigorously against Obama’s proposed health-care reform. Enter House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who gladly jumped atop the left-wing pigpile. In early August 2009, she sniffed that the populist protesters at congressional town hall meetings were “Astroturf” (in contrast, of course, to the genuine, left-wing grassroots gatherings that Nancy supports). “They’re carrying swastikas and symbols like that to a town meeting on health care,” she told a reporter, maligning thousands of law-abiding, patriotic Americans nationwide. Few media outlets other than Fox News reported on her vicious, defamatory comments, despite the fact that the video was almost instantly posted on YouTube.
After bank bailouts, the stimulus plan, and then health-care reform, hardworking taxpayers had had enough. Since their calls, e-mails, faxes, and town hall pleas failed to get the attention of their elected representatives or the White House, they decided to do what the liberals had done for decades—they started to organize protests and rallies. One would imagine that the Organizer-in-Chief would have lauded their efforts. This may not have been his Organizing for America, but it certainly was America Organizing—and Obama couldn’t stand it. The truth is, the only kind of organizing he likes is the left-wing variety. Organizing by mothers, fathers, grandparents, and young people who don’t expect or want a government handout is for Obama something to be feared and destroyed. To his way of thinking they must be dangerous extremists, racists, homophobes, or possibly all three.
To understand this particular Obama tactic against the Tea Party activists, we have to go back to April 9, 2009. That’s when Obama’s Department of Homeland Security issued a report titled “Rightwing Extremism: Current Economic and Political Climate Fueling Resurgence in Radicalization and Recruitment.” It was distributed to law enforcement officials all over the country. The report suggested that the Obama presidency had spurred a rise in activity among racist groups, hate groups, and antigovernment groups. The report said that this right-wing extremism “may include groups and individuals that are dedicated to a single-issue, such as opposition to abortion or immigration.” (Had Homeland Security secretary Janet Napolitano waited a few months, she could have included other “single-issues” on her warning list—like opposition to health-care reform or hatred of the White House vegetable garden.) The report also warned: “Right-wing extremists will attempt to recruit and radicalize returning veterans in order to exploit their skills and knowledge derived from military training and combat.”
For those who might have missed it, the Obama administration had officially classified pro-lifers, anyone hostile to high taxes, veterans, and any citizen opposed to illegal immigration as “right-wing extremists.” A year later, the significance of this dossier would become readily apparent. The new extremists were the people who had gathered at the U.S. Capitol on March 21, on the eve of the Democrats’ historic vote to pass health-care reform. Now all that was required to finish off the Tea Party activists (or so Team Obama thought) was to identify examples of hateful behavior in order to marginalize them as a dangerous fringe group.
The Democrats’ use of parliamentary tactics and government pork to buy votes incensed the public. Before the vote, the entire Democratic caucus paraded from the House offices to the Capitol through hundreds of protesters. It was an act of defiance and hubris by Speaker Pelosi and her minions; a provocative act meant to incite a reaction. They could have easily taken the tunnel that runs between the congressional office buildings and the Capitol, as most of them do each day. But this was an historic moment that called for a dramatic display.
Following the march across the Capitol grounds, Congressman John Lewis, a longtime civil rights leader, claimed that protesters chanted the “n-word” as he passed. Another black cong
ressman, Emanuel Cleaver, charged that a protester spit on him. And Barney Frank of Massachusetts contended that the protesters shouted a derogatory term in his direction. In the days that followed, no footage or sound bites could be discovered to substantiate any of these claims. Andrew Breitbart (of Breitbart.com, Big Hollywood.com fame) offered a ten-thousand-dollar reward for anyone who could produce evidence of these incidents. He had no takers. The only bit of footage that did emerge discredited the spitting charge and showed only an excited protester with an overactive saliva gland, screaming at a congressman. Whatever the protester was doing, he was not purposely spitting on anyone. Not that that stopped the Obama narrative.
On April 6, 2010, Fox News reported that Tennessee Democratic representative Steve Cohen had received three threatening e-mails. In response, Cohen appeared on an Internet radio show, where he compared Tea Party activists to Klansmen, perpetuating the racially charged Democratic smear campaign. “Tea Party people are kind of like Klansmen without robes and hoods,” Cohen said. “They have really shown a very hard core, a very angry side of America that is against any type of diversity.” Since Cohen is white, he recited the familiar list of baseless charges involving John Lewis and Emanuel Cleaver to substantiate his argument.
What received little attention was the fact that Eric Cantor, a Jewish Republican congressman from Virginia, had received a death threat and anti-Semitic slurs via YouTube. When a bullet was shot into Cantor’s campaign office, the congressman did not attempt to use the incident to engender sympathy or political support. He did not characterize liberals who disagreed with him as anti-Semitic or violent. This is the difference between how conservatives deal with the random acts of madmen, and liberals, who will use any incident (real or fabricated) to destroy their opponents.
THE DIARY OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
AIR FORCE ONE
April 15, 2010
Tax day, and for this president, it’s always taxing. These tea-baggers are wearing me out. Thousands of them have gathered around the nation. I’m going to give them my normal response: ridicule. I’d like to go out and tell those militant lunatics what I really think of them, but Clinton had a better idea.
Bill called the other night and offered his services. He’s going to do a big media tour for the fifteenth anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, and he’ll suggest that the Tea Party people and Timothy McVeigh share the same violent, antigovernment spirit. I told Bill: “I couldn’t have come up with a better tactic myself.” But let me be clear: I already have!
I got on the horn with Rachel Maddow over at MSNBC (easily the Edward R. Murrow of our age) and asked her to create a documentary on the Oklahoma City bomber. Voters need to be reminded of what happens when these crazy tea-baggers resist their government. It gets ugly. Rachel instantly agreed to help. I’ve got Gibbs working to get her some jailhouse recordings of McVeigh. Axe’s idea was to call the thing “The McVeigh Tapes.” Rachel loved the title, and she’s already written a promo.
Get this: “The McVeigh Tapes puts into perspective the threat posed by anti-government extremism. . . . We ignore this, our own very recent history of anti-government violence and the dangers of domestic terrorism, at our peril.” The woman’s a better writter than Olbermann, and honestly, he’s gotten too liberal for my tastes.
Well, I better get back to practicing the Español. I’m headed to Miami for a big fund-raiser at Gloria Estefan’s house. I just hope the Cubanos don’t give me any of that anti-Castro crap while I’m there. Look at the health-care plan that that man implemented for his people decades before the U.S. even thought of such a thing. Gloria told me that we might have to take a few photos of her and me solemnly looking at pictures of the Cuban refugees. This will give her some cover and make the Cubanos think that I give a damn. I hope Ricky Martin’s not there. Last time he showed up at a fund-raiser, he was bending my ear all night about lifting the “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” policy. But I’ve got an answer ready for him tonight: “For you, Ricky, I’m implementing a new policy: ‘Don’t Worry, We Already Know.’ ”
Appearing at a fund-raiser on tax day 2010 in Miami, the president said he was “amused” by the Tea Party movement and insisted that he had lowered the tax burden for Americans, adding, “You would think they’d be saying thank you. That’s what you’d think.” But the Tea Partiers weren’t saying thank you. Most were saying thank God for the upcoming midterm elections. Only the most arrogant of politicians would expect thanks from voters for his unprecedented expansion of federal power and spending. And it takes a special brand of audacity to think we are so stupid that we don’t know that eventually we and our children and their children are going to have to pay the tab.
Somehow the media even managed to turn the nationwide anti-tax protests into a story about race. The gatherings were judged not on the legitimacy of the protesters’ concerns, but by their “diversity.” According to an April 15, 2010, story by the Associated Press, a California Tea Party consisted of a “predominantly white crowd.” Stephanie Ebbert and Sarah Schweitzer of the Boston Globe wrote of the Boston Tea Party gathering: “Some have charged racism for its mostly white membership.” It was as if white, working-class people didn’t have the right to object to government spending and high taxes. The coverage also served to disenfranchise the black and Latino participants who did, in fact, show up for the rallies.
Even worse than being accused of racism is being accused of inciting violence. In an April 18, 2010 interview with ABC’s Jake Tapper, former President Bill Clinton implied that at least some of the Tea Partiers could become terrorists:
[W]hen I went back and started preparing for the fifteenth anniversary of Oklahoma City, I realized that there were a lot of parallels between the early ’90s and now . . . the rise of kind of identity politics. The rise of the militia movements and the right-wing talk radio with a lot of what’s going on in the blogosphere now . . . they create a climate in which people who are vulnerable to violence, because they are disoriented like Timothy McVeigh was, are more likely to act.
From these comments, it is obvious that President Clinton never forgave conservatives for what they did to expose him during the Lewinsky scandal. He will exact his revenge any way he can, and always with a smile on his face. But my favorite part of the interview was his Soviet-style treatment of dissent against government.
And we shouldn’t demonize the government or its public employees or its elected officials. We can disagree with them. We can harshly criticize them. But when we turn them into an object of demonization, you know, you—you increase the number of threats.
In other words, you can criticize a government run by Democrats, but you can’t be too effective. Ingraham Rule of Thumb: The more influential and popular a conservative movement or group becomes, the more likely it will be attacked by Democrats as “incendiary,” “racially insensitive,” or “intolerant.”
THE DIARY OF PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA
AIR FORCE ONE
March 25, 2010
I was in Iowa City, Iowa, today selling the health-care plan. It could very well be the most boring place on the planet. When you find yourself staring at tumbleweeds because the eye needs to see some movement, you know you’re in trouble. My speech today was clearly the cultural event of their year. I won’t return there until I start the reelection machine. Couldn’t wait to get back on this plane.
During the drive over, I had Reggie tune in the talk radio that the rubes out here in the dust bowl listen to, and I caught the end of old Sean Hannity. Pitiful how much this man needs me. I’m the fuel that keeps his whole operation going. He even calls his show “The Stop Obama Express,” rambling on about how “Obama ignores the will of the people.” Without me, he’d just be reading Michael Steele’s daily faxes and talking to Palin about how she gets her updo to stay in place even in the stiffest winds! No surprise that today he was ranting about how radical and dangerous I am. Dangerous?! It’s just like Papa Alinsky wrote: “The job of t
he organizer is to maneuver and bait the establishment so that it will publicly attack him as a ‘dangerous enemy.’” Mission accomplished, Papa.
I have another brilliant idea, too. Next time I’m up in the Big Apple, shutting down traffic for a date night with Miche, I’ll show up unannounced on the Great American Panel! I’d love to mix it up with those know-nothings and show them how pundintry [sic] is really done. Though when you are a progressive, you have to be careful around that Hannity. I mean think about it: what did he do with Alan Colmes? Where did that man go?
After Hannity signed off, this Mark Levin character came on air. The things this man says are outrageous—naturally Hannity calls him “the Great One”! Please! That title should be reserved for duly elected executives with incredible physiques, brilliant minds, and wives named Michelle. Period!
I must admit though—the show was fascinating. He played several unadulterated sound clips from my speech today and each one was more compelling than the last. The commentary in between I could have done without, but the source material was very well done. One of the callers mentioned a book Levin wrote about his dog, called Rescuing Sprite. Give me a break—try rescuing an economy!
SLIME THE MESSENGER
Ridicule is man’s most potent weapon. It is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule. Also it infuriates the opposition, who then react to your advantage.
—SAUL ALINSKY, RULES FOR RADICALS
The president added conservative media to his hit list on March 30, 2010. Since he is constitutionally incapable of admitting failure, he sought out a scapegoat—a perfect target for whipping up his fan base.
Appearing on the Today show, Obama picked up where Bill Clinton left off: “I do think that we now have a pattern of polarization . . . where the political culture gets so wound up—frankly, Matt [Lauer], it gets spun up partly because of the way the media covers politics these days in the twenty-four-hour news cycle, in the cable chatter, in the talk radio, in the Internet and the blogs, all of which tries to feed the more extreme sides of every issue.”
The Obama Diaries Page 29
