How Blagojevich will lead Republicans further into the woods

Someone ought to tell the Republicans to stop being so upbeat over this. The incoming Democratic President just got caught turning down a bribe. Whatever damage this does to the Democratic Party and whether that damage is national or localized, Obama will emerge unscathed at the least. The Republicans will try, certainly:

Fitzgerald says President-elect Obama was not implicated in the plethora of charges against Democrats Blago and Harris. The national media went out of their way to absolve him, too. But declaring Team Obama’s hands clean — especially with Blago crony and indicted Obama donor Tony Rezko in the middle of it all — is premature.

See that? That's exactly how Republicans are going to behave for the next four years. Nothing is too tangential to be considered a deeply meaningful, tit-for-tat, close personal relationship with Barack Obama. They acted the same way over the course of the presidential campaign with then uber-villains Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers. Republicans would criticize those men and think they were campaigning against Barack Obama. They put Obama on the line for black liberation theology and the Weather Underground despite his having nothing to do with them.

That tactic that they've apparently settled on with regards to Barack Obama could be called suggestion spamming. Republican pundits will make purposefully vague arguments against Obama using these characters, perhaps by insisting how they prove his judgment is bad, but stop short of actually describing what Obama might actually do in office. The propaganda component of conservative media takes over from there. The mindless automatons that constitute the conservative base have extremely vivid imaginations, and all they need to hear is that Obama went to Wright's church before they can start envisioning a United States where Barack Obama is President. To some people, that means afternoon tea with Iran. To others, it means the Black Panthers move into the White House. Others just go on and on about socialism and Karl Marx and the Nazis. It's better this way for the Republicans. Sean Hannity would like to just come and tell his followers not to vote for Obama because he's black, but he needs to keep up appearances. With a little subtlety, you can just throw out the suggestion, and the base is free to conjure up whatever insane conspiracy theories they like.

The strategy of suggestion has served Republicans well in the Bush years, but dismally failed when utilized against Barack Obama, who by any metric should have been more susceptible to these sorts of attacks. Republicans have simply done too much damage to their own credibility for moderate and independent voters to respond to these sorts of attacks. We're also headed into a recession, which was refocused the country on issues, not politics. Nobody cared about Barack Obama's connection to William Ayers because the economy was collapsing. The seriousness of that issue and others will be dominating political consciousness in this country for some time, and it will have the effect of inoculating people against giving a shit about any of the expanding cast of characters the Republicans seem so desperate to rely on in their opposition.