Fox News' Talking Point: 'We Don’t Want the Country to Fail, Obama Does' Gets Picked Up by GOP

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS
by Meg White

After Rush Limbaugh was eviscerated by White House Correspondents' Dinner featured entertainer Wanda Sykes for his ongoing crusade against the success of this country, the GOP seemed to take a step back from from the right-wing talk show host that they've been genuflecting in front of non-stop for the past few months. And not a moment too soon; when one's de facto ideological leader can be compared to the best-known terrorist in the world, you may want to distance yourself:

"He just wants the country to fail," Sykes said at the event this Saturday. "To me that's treason. He's not saying anything different than what Osama bin Laden is saying. You might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight."

And if that was too subtle, it's pretty clear that when the president tells your party's leader that they can't write off Rush Limbaugh as a "troubled asset," it's time to look elsewhere for talking points.

Think Progress points out today a shift in conservatives' attempts to make the financial crisis work for them in the ballot box by saying it's Obama, and not Rush et al., who wants the country to fail. But after digging into this latest shift, it looks like it comes originally from Fox News pundits, who have been suggesting this talking point for months now. Perhaps Rep. Pete Sessions (R-TX) has been watching Fox?

Sessions, the guy whose unenviable job it is to increase the number of Republicans in Congress, told The New York Times that Obama really wants this recession to keep going. The NYT's Sunday Caucus blog all but rolls its eyes at Sessions' transparent attempt to prevent the party from looking like it's rooting for failure by pointing fingers at the White House:

Representative Pete Sessions of Texas, may indeed face an uphill fight with his argument that Mr. Obama is not trying to create jobs. In an interview, Mr. Sessions cited rising unemployment in asserting that the administration intended to "diminish employment and diminish stock prices" as part of a "divide and conquer" strategy to consolidate power.

Mr. Sessions, in his seventh term, said Mr. Obama's agenda was "intended to inflict damage and hardship on the free enterprise system, if not to kill it." By next fall, he predicted, voters may regain appreciation for the era of Republican governance when "many dreams were achieved," the size of the economy doubled and employment and financial markets hit record levels.

Polls offer little evidence that Americans are prepared to accept those arguments.

Indeed, The New York Times piece could have referenced this April Fox News poll (also mentioned by Think Progress) that reveals that 23 percent of respondents think that Obama "wants the financial crisis to continue so government can take over more businesses." From the traditionally paranoid audience at Fox, this is probably a less-than-satisfying result for producers. Just a few months ago, the University of Texas at Austin found that same proportion -- 23 percent -- of Texans believe Obama is a Muslim.

The mere phrasing of the question is enough to qualify it as a push poll. Further, the fact that Fox was even asking this question suggests that they were trying to see how easy of a sell their theory will be.

Fox is trying to convince respondents that Obama wants the economy to fail so that he can take over more businesses. However, if that's really what Obama wanted he probably would have taken over the failing banks, etc. when economists such as Paul Krugman were begging him to. Instead, the president has done pretty much everything he can to avoid taking banks and other businesses over. Of course, the right wing has an answer to that one as well.

The "push poll" came out in the beginning of April, but it seems Fox has had this idea in mind before that. At the end of March, Fox News' Dick Morris accused Obama of wanting the bank bailout to fail on "Your World with Neil Cavuto."

Morris used confusing logic, saying Obama doesn't care about getting reelected; he just wants to nationalize the whole country. But Obama won't actually say he's going to nationalize it, because that would be unpopular. One wonders why he cares about being unpopular if he doesn't want to be reelected, but then logic is clearly not at work here:

"He just can't come out and say, 'I'm for nationalization,'" Morris said. "I think that his goal here is to dramatically increase federal spending in a host of areas and to nationalize the financial structures system. And if he can do both of those things using the recession/depression as his excuse, he's going to do it."

If Sessions did get this new "Obama wants the country to fail" idea from Fox, which appears to be the case, it certainly wouldn't be the first time the GOP took cues from the network. The lack of new ideas in the Republican Party is what caused a quick adoption of the Fox-sponsored tea parties into the conservative plan book, for better or worse.

Fox has been playing around with this idea for months. And the Republican Party has finally picked it up, as it plays nicely into the fears they've laid about how Obama's going to take away people's guns and turn the country into a fascist/socialist dictatorship. Will this finally be the winner that comes out of the Fox idea hopper? If so, the Republican Party is more trouble than previously thought.

The thing that makes this talking point so difficult to use, and doomed to fail unless Americans deserve a lot less credit than I'm giving them, is logic. A failing economy never helps the majority party; just look at the last election. Logic and reflection upon one's mistakes are not yet part of the GOP lexicon, though failure is.

A BUZZFLASH NEWS ANALYSIS

Image courtesy of New England Secession.

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