HITTING THE WRONG TARGET

Well, we aimed at Rush Limbaugh, in part because we wanted to undermine the entire panty-sniffing Republican Party, and, yes, we got Limbaugh:

Radio-Info.com reports that Premiere Networks, which syndicates the Rush Limbaugh show, told its affiliate radio stations that they are suspending national advertising for two weeks.... These spots are how Premiere makes its money off of Rush Limbaugh and other shows it syndicates....

But the Republican Party got away:

... At a time of rising gas prices, heightened talk of war with Iran and setbacks in Afghanistan, Mr. Obama's approval rating dropped substantially in recent weeks, the [New York Times/CBS] poll found, with 41 percent of respondents expressing approval of the job he is doing and 47 percent saying they disapprove....

In a hypothetical matchup against his most likely Republican opponent, Mitt Romney, Mr. Obama had a 47 percent to 44 percent advantage, a statistical dead heat given the poll’s margin of sampling error of 3 percentage points. Against Rick Santorum, the president drew 48 percent compared with 44 percent....

(And, of course, in the new ABC/Washington Post poll, which also shows a drop in Obama's approval, Romney is actually beating the president, and Santorum's just 3 points behind.)

The conventional wisdom is that the drop in Obama's numbers is all about gas prices, but no one's actually found a way to measure whether that's true -- the two things are happening simultaneously, so it's assumed there's a connection.

I suspect there might be a connection between Obama's numbers and the culture-war flareup. Thirty years of right-wing propaganda (eagerly retransmitted by mainstream-media centrists) have conditioned Americans to think liberalism is icky. Candidate Obama reinforced that message by running as a post-partisan in 2008, and by futilely trying to avoid partisan combat for most of his term. So now the White House and its allies are openly taking liberal positions. Eeeeeuuwwww! Icky liberals! And they're doing that when they should be drilling, baby, drilling, to get gas prices down! In the heartland, where there's nothing but right-wing talk and Jesus on the AM dial and the range of opinion extends from 57 varieties of extreme right wingery all the way to centrism and no further, I have to wonder whether that's the thinking. (And despite the Republican assault on reproductive rights, particularly in the states, I bet most of Heartland America thinks Democrats and liberals started this fight.)

And I'm not surprised that hitting Limbaugh doesn't even graze the Republican presidential candidates (not even Rick Santorum). Fox/talk-radio propaganda relentlessly informs right-wingers (and centrists) that liberalism and the "Democrat Party" are all one hydra-headed beast -- Barack Obama = Nancy Pelosi = Rosie O'Donnell = George Soros = the New Black Panthers = Sandra Fluke. Our side has never managed to make a similar case; we can't even seem to pull it off within the world of national politics, which means that Republican presidential candidates aren't even seen as being part of the same organization as the despised Republican members of Congress.

So congressional Republicans are despised, as is Limbaugh -- yet Romney and Santorum are competitive. There's no ripple effect from the anti-Limbaugh campaign. And there never will be until the Democratic/liberal message is that the Republican Party is the problem.