Lots of talk about Obama's appearance on Fox this weekend. One of Obama's advisors had promised on Friday that he was going there "to take Fox on," and the consensus seems to be that he did not deliver.
TPM has put together the highlights. Judge for yourself:
My reaction? I wish he had confronted Fox directly about their role in debasing our public discourse. He had a huge opportunity here to galvanize the Democratic Party's base, and he missed it. That's unfortunate.
Moreover, if his goal was to use the appearance to reach out to independents and Reagan Democrats, and thus felt the need to take a less confrontational approach, I wish he had waited until the fall to do so.
But... there is a reason I run a blog and Plouffe and Axelrod run Obama's campaign, and this piece in Sunday's NYT was clearly a signal from the campaign that they are going to begin a major effort to reach out to working class voters now, and not wait until September. Its unfortunate that they felt the need to legitimize Fox News in the process, but given the remaining primary states - WV, KY, IN, NC, SD, MT, and PR - it might have been unavoidable.
Nevertheless, this leaves me uneasy. One of the things we haven't seen enough of from Barack is his willingness to fight, and this interview was a perfect opportunity to fight cleanly.
UPDATE: Josh Patashnik highlights part of the interview that I didn't consider carefully enough:
Obama pushed back against "top-down, command-and-control" regulation that was popular with the left in the '60s and '70s. He credited the GOP with pushing market-oriented solutions and cited his support of a cap-and-trade system for controlling carbon emissions.
"I think that the Republican Party and people who thought about the markets came up with the notion that, you know, what if you simply set some guidelines, some rules and incentives for businesses, let them figure out how they're going to, for example, reduce pollution. It's a smarter way of doing it,"
This is very clearly part of Obama's attempt to drive a full scale political realignment through. America is ready to leave conservatism behind, but they are not yet convinced that liberalism is safe enough to return to. Conservatives have spent more than 30 years convincing the public that their caricature of liberalism is the real thing, and its going to take some hard work to undo that. We won't be able to change minds if we don't reach out to the voters whose minds are changeable, and sadly that is going at times to mean reaching out through Fox News.
But it is also, as I mentioned above, going to at times mean taking on Fox News directly., something Obama did not do enough of here. It is possible to do both simultaneously. Here's hoping that in the future Obama will remember that.
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