Pundits escalate attacks against Obama MEDIA

Marchers head up Market Street while hundreds gather in San Francisco, Calif. on Saturday March 21, 2009, for the, on what organizers called the, International Day of Action March on the 6th Anniversary of the Invasion of Iraq. less Marchers head up Market Street while hundreds gather in San Francisco, Calif. on Saturday March 21, 2009, for the, on what organizers called the, International Day of Action March on the 6th Anniversary of the ... more Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Photo: Michael Macor, The Chronicle Image 1 of / 1 Caption Close Pundits escalate attacks against Obama 1 / 1 Back to Gallery

It took fewer than 100 days for conservative critics to start lobbing the F-bomb at President Obama.

"F" as in "fascist."

Take Glenn Beck, the bombastic Fox News host, who in recent weeks has repeatedly used the term - along with references to Mussolini and pictures of Hitler and Lenin - to describe Obama's efforts to revive struggling banks and automakers.

The American Spectator, a conservative publication, earlier this month ran an essay on Obama titled "Il Duce, Redux?"

And TownHall.com's David Limbaugh went even further: He called Obama the head of a "Gestapo government" during a recent San Francisco radio interview.

Maybe it is the approach of Obama's 100-day milestone, the crowded agenda of domestic and international issues or the fact that the president is no longer a White House newbie. But the recent high level of hysteria from conservative pundits - which has been dubbed the "Obama Derangement Syndrome" by the leftist blogosphere - underscores a crucial marker that might say as much about Obama's critics as it does about Obama himself.

'Act of desperation'

Jack Glaser, associate professor of the Goldman School of Public Policy at UC Berkeley, says the use of such hyper-heated language from the right so early into the Obama administration "seems pretty clearly to be an act of desperation."

"They can't get any thing to stick to him," he said, citing a New York Times poll this week that showed that two-thirds of Americans approve of Obama's job performance in office, while a record low of 31 percent said they have a favorable view of the Republican Party.

Critics are "grabbing on to whatever they can," Glaser observed, a tactic that is sometimes head-spinning. During the 2008 election, Obama was accused by many of these same voices of being socialist and "he wasn't patriotic enough," Glaser notes. "And now, he's fascist."

The liberal watchdog group Media Matters has established a "Red Scare Index" to track the pundits' descriptions of Obama. It shows that "since the inauguration, there have been over 3,000 references to socialism, fascism, communism" in describing the president, says spokeswoman Erikka Knuti.

The lobbing of such high-powered, even incendiary, labels shows that the critics "obviously have no understanding of the history of the world, of national socialism or of fascism," says Michael Semler, a political science professor at Cal State Sacramento. "They're looking for symbols in language," aiming for maximum impact - and firing blanks, he said.

"I'm surprised they haven't thrown Mao (Zedong) into the mix yet ... or compared him to (North Korean dictator) Kim Jong Il. Where's (Uganda's) Idi Amin?"

In fact, in a recent broadcast, Rush Limbaugh (David is his brother) did appear to draw a connection between Obama and Robert Mugabe of Zimbabwe, the strongman who has been accused of the torture and murder of his opponents. Limbaugh made a reference to "Robert Ogabe," saying that he "slipped up."

Limbaugh added, "I was confusing him with a well-known Kenyan named Barack Ogabe."

Defenders of Limbaugh and other conservative pundits argue that the use of such loaded criticism is hardly unique in American politics. They note that during the previous presidential administration, pundits on the left didn't pull any punches on President George W. Bush and often resorted to equally aggressive language - though not so early in his administration.

Attacks on Bush

Example: MoveOn.org, in one ad in 2004, made a direct comparison of Bush and Hitler. "A nation warped by lies. Lies fuel fear. Fear fuels aggression. Invasion. Occupation. What were war crimes in 1945 is foreign policy in 2003," the ad said.

Conservatives also note that the recent hyped-up criticism of Obama isn't limited to the right. The president increasingly is getting hit with shots from the left and the political center.

Last month, some of the first anti-Obama street demonstrations in his 11-week-old administration appeared at an anti-war rally in San Francisco. One protester, saying he aimed to compare Obama to Bush, carried a cardboard effigy of Obama's face on an Uncle Sam character. It held a sign that read, "I want you to fight & die in Iraq & Afghanistan."

For the most part, volleys from the left have not been loaded with overheated political rhetoric. The strafing has challenged Obama's foreign policy in a more measured way than comparing him to the Gestapo. It also has come more from the grassroots than the media.

Anti-war activists, for instance, challenged Obama's plan to send 21,000 troops to Afghanistan by saying it threatened "to obliterate the most progressive aspects of Obama's domestic agenda, just as the war in Vietnam ruined the presidency of President Lyndon Johnson," according to a statement last week from United for Peace & Justice, the nation's largest coalition of anti-war organizations.

And the San Francisco-based Electronic Frontier Foundation ripped the Obama Justice Department this week for "continuing the Bush administration's cover-up of the National Security Agency's dragnet surveillance of millions of Americans" - a stance echoed by progressive MSNBC commentator Rachel Maddow over the past several weeks. Maddow, an increasingly influential voice of the left, told The Chronicle recently that while the Obama administration "dropped the enemy combatant designation, (it) kept all of the meaningful things about making somebody an enemy combatant."

Common thread

The common thread in the criticisms from liberals is that the critics "treat Obama like a professor," said Nichola Gutgold, an associate professor of political communication at Penn State University, who is working on a book about Obama's rhetoric and how he has handled the media.

"They're holding back in their criticisms of him because they realize that these are unprecedented times we're facing, so it's not easy to quickly dismiss what he's doing," Gutgold said. "He's trying to systematically change what we're doing. And that takes time, they figure."

Semler, the Cal State Sacramento political scientist, says that conservative pundits, by going far further, are hurting their own cause by undermining "the legitimate debate on what that (government) intervention should look like" in key industries like banking and auto production.

Any comparisons of a U.S. president to Hitler, Mugabe or Mussolini represent nothing less than "an affront to the American public," he said. "Hitler killed millions of people for their simple religion, gender, sexual preferences and ethnic practices. To equate that with what's going on in the nation's economy is an insult to history and to the memory of those people."

On her MSNBC show Monday, Maddow needled conservative critics, noting how some conservative Web sites are even finding "hidden" messages by playing Obama's speeches backward. "There is a ton of this Obama Antichrist stuff online," Maddow said. "Waaaay more than you'd think there would be."

If they listen hard enough, she said, they'll find the real truth: that playing Obama's signature "Yes, we can" line backward sounds like "Thank you, Satan."