There are fans of President Obama who insist that every move made by the Administration has eight-thousand levels of three-dimensional chess choreographed by the grand master of karmic jujitsu. I'm far too cynical to buy into that particular fable. But I do want to take note of a pretty obvious strategic campaign on the part of the White House that hasn't generated much comment.
Here's the executive summary for you bullet point types:
1. Health care reform is quickly gaining strength after a horrendous summer of political malaise on the left.
2. The right is increasingly outraged by the Administration's box-out of Fox News, and its reframing of mainstream political argument in general.
3. These two trends are not unrelated.
Strip away a lot of the noise and heat surrounding the public diss Obama is laying on Fox News, and what you're left with is a classic misdirection. It's Patton's phantom army massing to invade the Pas de Calais. It's Peyton Manning's audibles and play fakes before pounding it into the endzone. It's Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown.
Over the summer, the President and his party was in full, disastrous backpedal. This was decidedly not jujitsu - this was poor planning, a drift in framing the storyline. A tiny minority of Tea Party types, sporting all manner of racist and divisive signage and spewing the infectious sputum of know-nothingitis, grabbed the momentum away from a Democratic Party that seemed increasingly splintered. The President's popularity dropped. The public option, centerpiece to the most important initiative of Obama's domestic agenda, lacked even a faint pulse. What to do?
Feint and jab for the fleshy and painful midsection. Who could have known the punch would hurt so much - and be such effective strategy? You see, the people at Fox News actually believe that "fair and balanced" malarkey. Enervated and slowed to slurred and drunken speech by eight years of Bush-favored ascendancy, Roger Ailes and Company actually began to believe their own press clippings; they thought they were part of the mainstream establishment, a "real" news organization respected by their peers and feared by the very government they covered.
So the freeze-out on Pennsylvania Avenue actually hurt, inducing tears of pain and rage beyond even the salty ducts of Glenn Beck's hateful nativist tribe. It hurts not to be invited to the party.
Neutralizing the largest media outlet of the opposition - by inducing a great sob of self-pity - is simply good strategy. Meanwhile, there's a whole lotta policy shakin' going on. The Fox Hunt, the Great Rush Limbaugh NFL Blitz, and the White House's new willingness - nay, eagerness - to throw the penalty flag on crazy right-wing stuff in the media - it's all good strategy.
It also has others in the so-called mainstream press - your ABC News, your Joe Kleins - tut-tutting about the rights of their "sister" news organization, or providing false advice on how the President's taking his eyes off the ball.
But the opposite is true. The Administration, after a tough summer, has its eyes on the ball and it's moving down the field with some momentum. Meanwhile Fox News is tangled in a pile of slow-moving linemen about 20 yards behind the play.
