Finally, SNL manages to figure out how to have fun at Barack Obama’s expense, as they speculate on how Obama may spend his 30 minutes of network airtime next week.

My personal theme song (at the moment):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DrlTDDk5n-U

i know we’re going to meet some day 
in the crumbled financial institutions of this land
there will be tables and chairs
there’ll be pony rides and dancing bears
there’ll even be a band
cause listen, after the fall there will be no more countries
no currencies at all, we’re gonna live on our wits
we’re gonna throw away survival kits, 
trade butterfly-knives for adderal
and that’s not all
ooh-ooh, there will be snacks there will
there will be snacks, there will be snacks.

Yes, there will be snacks. There are snacks.

David Kurtz at TPM:

Barack Obama is noted for his powerful intellect, but I don’t think he gets nearly enough credit for the mental dexterity it takes to be simultaneously an Islamic theocrat, atheistic communist and national socialist while posing as a center left candidate. Those must be the compartmentalization skills they taught him at that Manchurian madrasah in Indonesia.

LOL.  Of course, what’s funny is that John Kerry was portrayed as merely a pinko commie coward who didn’t earn his medals, Al Gore was a tree-hugging limp-wristed elitist, and Bill Clinton was a womanizing creep.  The GOP’s depiction of Obama’s “evil” cranks the rhetoric up to nearly comic extremes, which I think in some ways indicates the desperation of the Republican high command.

What troubles me is how willing the Republican base is to believe that half the country (and I imagine, this would include me, my mother, my wife and most of my friends and associates) are either treacherous or naive in that we nominate and support candidates who the GOP claims are capable of such things.   

The irony is that a tactic that worked so well during the last couple elections does not seem to be working so well now.  Bush changed everything for the GOP — after ruining the economy, dragging the country into an unnecessary and costly war in Iraq, and presiding over corruptions and scandals and embarassements from Terry Schiavo to Katrina to Mark Foley and Larry Craig — he sunk his own party.  

I believe very strongly that most Americans are neither liberal or conservative, but exist in a middle area between the two parties.  They are not strongly idealogical — so appeals based on partisanship or idealogy are not effective coming from a party that has lost credibility.  It wasn’t that Americans agreed with the GOP so much as they trusted them in two major areas — national security and the economy.  And when the GOP was perceived to fail in those two areas, they no longer had the trust of the middle.  So these kinds of arguments fall on deaf ears, because the public just doesn’t trust the source.

If the Democratic party were to suddenly push a radical left agenda (despite what the GOP claims, there’s really nothing radical about the center-left policies Obama, or many of the Democrats are currently espousing), they would find themselves in much the same boat, particurlarly if they experienced a number of policy scandals.  Remember, the GOP rose to power in the 1970′s and 1980′s after decades of liberal policy failures.  The term “liberal” became a dirty word not only after the left’s opposition to Vietnam, but also due to what the public perceived as the excesses of the Great Society and various social welfare programs.  Welfare, particularly AFDC, was widely considered a failure.  Reagan’s “Welfare Queens” refrain about freeloading welfare mothers driving Cadillacs was successful because the public believed it to be true.

Bush has brought the GOP the same journey into the wilderness the Democrats took 20 years ago.  When a party has numerous policy failures and over reaches and pushes too ideological an agenda, that party gets a rebuke.  A generation of Americans turned their back on the Democrats, and now another generation is poised to turn their backs on the GOP.

Provided he wins, Obama will need to stay in the center and push a progressive agenda on the margins if he wants to stay successful and popular.  There will be a lot of pressure from the left for him to enact some radical social change, but if he’s smart (and I know he is), he will stay moderate and not push too far.  It’s a far cry from the risky, radical and extremist figure promoted by the GOP, but go back and read Obama’s books, particularly “Dreams From My Father,” and you will see that he is a very moderate and realistic man who knows not to overreach.  For instance, a lot of Democrats want a single-payer health care program, but they will have to live with Obama’s more modest approach which doesn’t include mandates for adults and relies on the existing insurance companies for delivery.

Some may want to believe the claims about the “dangers” of Obama, but I think the facts — and our future history — will prove the opposite.  Obama’s crime on the left will be that he is not progressive enough.  Just as many Democrats were disappointed that Bill Clinton governed as a centrist (despite being a part of the centrist DLC), many will be disppointed about Obama governing from the center.  The Republicans and the conservative base will claim that Obama is a radical socialist, and if they stick to those shrill remarks, they will continue to lose, because in practice he will be less of a socialist than George W. Bush and the “conservative” politicians who just nationalized the banking system.  And the public will know it.

Of course, Obama still needs to win the election.  I’m not a triumphalist — I know that McCain still stands a good chance to win.  And given McCain’s record, I suspect conservatives have much more to fear from him than they do Obama.  Because McCain holds no idealogical commitments, he is no party true believer — his only compass is his gut.  And I think we’ve seen in recent weeks how unreliable that compass is.