It's Time to Stop Fox News:: "The Right Wing Wants to Destroy Everything Great About This Country” [View all]

[xchrom]

http://www.alternet.org/its-time-stop-fox-news-right-wing-wants-destroy-everything-great-about-country



During the 2012 election, President Obama spoke hopefully that his reelection might break the fever in the GOP, so that something might be accomplished in his second term. By now, that hope is pretty much gone, which is why we belatedly have the EPA’s global warming regulations, and rumblings about executive action on immigration policy.

We also have the first inklings of talk about Obama’s legacy, and how to take all that fanatical opposition into account. Last Saturday, on “Up With Steve Kornacki,” Erica Payne of the Agenda Project made an argument you might have heard some time ago in the blogosphere, but on cable TV, not so such: that the right was never going to cooperate with Obama, from the very beginning, and that the best thing he can do now to secure his legacy “is to actually build out the intellectual and communications infrastructure of the left,” because that’s how you build the foundations of the politically possible for the future.

“We’ve got to go back and look at Rahm Emanuel becoming chief of staff at the White House when President Obama first went into office,” Payne said. “Rahm Emanuel had lived through the Clinton years. If anyone knew what the right wing of this country is capable of it’s Rahm Emanuel, and the Clintons. And I think he just fundamentally did not prepare President Obama for what he was going to face.”

And what was that, in her view? Payne explained:

You’re never going to break this fever. This fever has been going on since Bill Clinton went into office. And we had Vince foster and blah blah blah, all of the things that the right wing threw at him, you know, and I think that President Obama very naively thought — and it’s the best spirit of hopefulness — but thought he could come in and work with these people.