Claremont Professor John Pitney observes that the White House is still searching for bogeymen with which to ward off a wave of Republican victories on election day. Professor Pitney finds the silver lining in the White House’s now discarded attack on House Minority Leader John Boehner:
The search for demons is getting desperate. For a brief time, the president aimed at House GOP Leader John Boehner, even though the minority party in the House has practically no say over anything. The short-lived assault had little impact: Two-thirds of respondents in an NBC-Wall Street Journal poll either did not know the well-tanned Boehner or were neutral. The good news is that there doesn’t seem to be any deep prejudice against orange people.
The White House has “moved on” in search of bogemen to furriners allegedly financing advertisements supporting Republican candidates. What is the good news? Rich Lowry holds:
It should be taken as an axiom of political life that if your argument is about the other side’s advertisements, you’re losing. If your argument is about who’s funding the other side’s advertisements, you’re losing badly. And if your argument is about how foreigners might — lack of evidence notwithstanding — be secretly funneling cash into the other side’s advertisements, you’re losing in a historic landslide.
Rich notes the irony and raises a question: “Bizarrely, the party that’s content to let millions of foreigners cross our southern border to live and work here without our permission has otherwise become a locus of foreigner-baiting political advocacy. Is it possible to be post-American and xenophobic at the same time?”
I can handle that one. The answer is no. They aren’t really concerned about furriners; they just want to shut up the opposition.
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