![](\"https:\/\/live-rush-limbaugh.pantheonsite.io\/wp-content\/uploads\/Obama-bad-luck.jpg\"\/)
RUSH: From Walter Russell Mead in the American Interest. “Kevin Drum at Mother Jones –” these are the same people helping the occupiers. No, that was Rolling Stone. Sorry. I don\u2019t know if Mother Jones is involved in helping or not. It was Matt Taibbi and Dylan Ratigan at MSNBC who are helping the occupiers shape and form their message. Anyway, “Kevin Drum at Mother Jones has a chart showing that in the last five months President Obama was hammered by the mainstream press harder than any of his GOP rivals; there was a 25 point gap between the percentage of his coverage that was positive and the negative stories. These charts and other methods to referee the press are generally lame; assessing press coverage inevitably involved tricky qualitative questions.”<\/p>\n
“The problem is not, as Drum seems to imply, that the mainstream press is full of closet Republicans who can\u00c2\u2019t wait to turn on Obama the moment they sense weakness. It is more that many in the press are convinced that Blue Liberal ideas and policies could solve all our problems if forcefully advocated and consistently applied. When a Democrat gets into the White House and things aren\u00c2\u2019t going well, liberals are much more likely to blame the incompetence of the officeholder than the shortcomings of the ideology. If he had tried harder, spoken more forcefully, negotiated less fecklessly, everything would be fine.” Just the same way the communists look at it. It wasn\u2019t that communism was a problem. It was that idiot Gorbachev. It wasn\u2019t that Roosevelt was the problem. He didn\u2019t spend enough money soon enough. <\/p>\n
“What you will not hear often in the torrent of liberal criticism now enveloping the White House, is that regardless of their intrinsic merit in a country in which self described liberals are a tiny minority (less than a fifth), liberal ideas don\u00c2\u2019t work very well as a governing platform. A Congress seen as too liberal won\u00c2\u2019t get re-elected; a President seen as too liberal loses political authority and is steadily pushed to the right. The mainstream media tone on Obama has lightened up since he decided to rebrand himself as a mild populist and \u00c2\u2018get tough\u00c2\u2019 with the GOP. <\/p>\n
“If the poll numbers go up, we will hear much about the revived Obama presidency. If they go down, the press will blame Obama for flawed execution, not the idea that populism could save his presidency. … Efforts to measure bias are tricky, and none of them ever impressed me. But if you want to predict how the tone of President Obama\u00c2\u2019s coverage will change, watch his success or lack of it at translating standard liberal ideas into law and policy. The more he succeeds, the more he will be seen as \u00c2\u2018historic\u00c2\u2019, \u00c2\u2018visionary\u00c2\u2019 and, magic word of hope and wonder, \u00c2\u2018transformational\u00c2\u2019. The progress will be hailed, the direction for the most part not questioned.”<\/p>\n
So it\u2019s all about the ideology. It\u2019s exactly as my instincts have told me and as I have imparted to you. It\u2019s all about the ideology. They\u2019re turning on Obama because he\u2019s failing in their minds to make liberalism work. So what I\u2019ve said is Obama\u2019s problem with the media and the left, poll numbers, pure and simple. He\u2019s getting a lot of stuff. All the stimulus bills, all the wreckage of the private sector, Obamacare. But he\u2019s not popular, and that they hate. They think this stuff is magical. Save the world kind of stuff. And whoever does it right and implements it ought to be loved and adored. And if he isn\u2019t, that\u2019s his problem, not the policies\u2019 faults, not the failings of the ideology. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
RUSH: From Walter Russell Mead in the American Interest. “Kevin Drum at Mother Jones –” these are the same people helping the occupiers. No, that was Rolling Stone. Sorry. I don\u2019t know if Mother Jones is involved in helping or not. It was Matt Taibbi and Dylan Ratigan at MSNBC who are helping the occupiers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":14,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17692","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry"],"yoast_head":"\n