Leslie Savan | The Nation

From a right-wing perspective, President Obama’s brief introduction to the fiftieth anniversary screening of To Kill a Mockingbird, airing tonight on USA Network, is a dirty trick. They think Obama’s using the 1962 film to pose as an Atticus Finch–type hero, though all he and the liberal media really want is to divide the country along racial lines. And blame whitey.

The elements for such a paranoid vision are all there: the country and the media are passionately torn over the Trayvon Martin case—Fox’s Bill O’Reilly has argued that the liberal media wouldn’t mind “inciting racial violence” against accused shooter George Zimmerman, while MSNBC host Al Sharpton has led protest rallies in Sanford, Florida, where Martin was shot dead. Further, NBC made a grievous error by editing a tape of Zimmerman’s 911 call that made it sound as if he had volunteered that Martin was black, when in fact he was asked Martin’s race by the dispatcher. NBC has fired the producer in charge of that tape. (Sure, Fox News has misleadingly edited tapes and promoted lies—for Fox, it’s a minor error and almost no one ever gets fired—but when mainstream media do that, it’s evidence of a hidden bias against conservatives. Fox’s bias is anything but hidden.)

And conspiracy theorists take note, the big-deal White House screening of Mockingbird—endorsed by Harper Lee, author of the 1960 book on which the film is based—is “also tied to the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Universal film studio. The studio and USA Network are both owned by NBC Universal,” as the New York Times writes.

That is, by the right’s lights, liberals and NBC are cynically using the venerable film to further Obama’s reelection chances. They believe Obama is posing as the reincarnation of the beloved, beyond-reproach Atticus Finch, the small-town attorney who defends Tom Robinson, an innocent black man who is accused of raping a white woman. And by extension, many conservatives say, Obama is making Trayvon Martin out to be Tom Robinson, who was later killed. Some commenters on the Breitbart.com site Big Hollywood feel sure about what’s really going down. WALTER90 writes:

Obama will stand or sit there and compare the Travon martin [SIC] situation to what transpires in To Kill a Mockingbird. He will ask America why we haven’t moved on. Why we are still a violent racist society. Of course, he won’t lay any of the racism charges on blacks, or latinos or anyone except white people.

NOPEFULL agrees:

You are right, the comparison is very striking, but it is 180 degrees from the book…. As today’s true story emerges, Obama and the MSM now represent the racist mob that wants to lynch the accused. In Harper Lee’s story, a race card was placed to cover up the truth. Then the card was white; now it is black. Whatever the final outcome, Zimmerman is a mockingbird that black hatred killed.

Of course, in right-wing eyes, Obama was up to racial no-good well before his Mockingbird remarks. When Obama commiserated with Trayvon’s parents by saying, “If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon,” Newt Gingrich shouted “disgraceful.” “Why is Obama getting involved in that mess in Miami?” a white woman in the South indignantly asked someone I know. One thing our first black president should never do is openly acknowledge his race.

Still, there’s some truth to the right’s idea that identifying with Atticus Finch is politically charged. This is the movie the Obama campaign has been wanting him to star in since forever. Like Atticus, played by Gregory Peck in an Oscar-winning performance, Obama avoids outrage; like Atticus, Obama is stymied in achieving justice by reactionary forces, but he responds with restraint. Even when he loses his battles, that restraint, with its hint of honor, can pass as sufficient, because it makes clear how wrong his opponents are—as we see in this clip, in which the father of the girl who charges rape confronts Atticus:

It’s not exactly the same as shouting “You lie!” but the tone is similar. Peck’s decency is so noble that its ultimate ineffectiveness is almost entirely forgiven. And it’s redeemed in a way by the Boo Radley subplot, which has the poor, white, social outcast save the Finch children from racist revenge, hinting that the least among the whites do indeed share in some of that Peckian nobility.

The question in the Trayvon Martin shooting is, Who, of any race, plays Boo Radley?

As we get closer to the general election race, the Republican Party is descending into ever deeper confusion over its rhetorical codes and when and how to use them.

This is more than just an awkward pivot from pitching to the base to focusing on the general electorate. It’s a direct result of decades of Republicans fashioning their language to obscure what they really mean—like asserting that “cutting taxes will raise revenues” when the real idea is to shift the tax burden from the rich to the poor. The GOP is so distracted by its multiplicity of phony attack lines that it’s begun to confuse itself.

We’ve all seen how, during the primary debates, the Republican candidates were forced to acquiesce to the notion that, say, booing a soldier on duty in Iraq or shouting down the Golden Rule are, respectively, the patriotic and Christian things to do. But when Perry and Gingrich started attacking Romney from the left as a job-destroying vulture capitalist, they started to seriously step on their own neckties.

And the reason they did is pretty simple: Reactionary movements demand a certain ability to flip meaning around in their members’ minds in order to argue with opponents who, like Obama, are (only too) willing to compromise. However, this technique has come to so dominate the GOP policy discussion that it’s become a universal reflex. Rick and Newt were simply extending the manufacture of false outrage to Mitt, their opponent du jour; tripping over their own laissez-faire principles along the way was secondary to going on the attack.

The mechanistic, automatic opposition to Democrats has similarly made most Republicans live in such a perpetual Opposite Day that they’ve lost the thread of their own arguments--and that means they’re losing control of the political narrative. Consider the mixed messages of just the past week:

Romney on Leno

Romney was attacking—no defending—no attacking—Robamneycare:

LENO: So you would make the law stand for children and people with pre-existing conditions?

ROMNEY: People with pre-existing conditions—as long as they’ve been insured before—they’re going to continue to have insurance.

LENO: Suppose they were never insured?

ROMNEY: Well, if they're 45 years old, and they show up, and they say, 'I want insurance because I've got a heart disease,' it's like, 'Hey guys, we can’t play the game like that.' You’ve got to get insurance when you’re well, and if you get ill, then you’re going to be covered.

LENO: I know guys at work in the auto industry, and they're just not covered ... They’ve just never been able to get insurance. And then they get to be 30, 35 and were never able to get insurance before. Now they have it. That seems like a good thing.

ROMNEY: We'll look at a circumstance where someone was ill and hasn't been insured so far. But people who have had the chance to be insured—if you’re working in an auto business, for instance, the companies carry insurance; they insure all their employees—you look at the circumstances that exist. But people who have done their best to get insured are going to be able to be covered. But you don’t want everyone saying, 'I'm going to sit back until I get sick and then go buy insurance.' That doesn’t make sense. But you have to find rules that get people in that are playing by the rules.

There’s one code for the primaries: You must be a severe conservative who says, “Hey guys, we can’t play the game like that.” Then there’s another code for the general election, when you must pose as the protective father who says, “People with pre-existing conditions [are]… going to continue to have insurance.” Romney just isn’t good enough at decodification to make the transition smoothly, winding up with one of his usual lip-smashes hinting that only the good people, the deserving people, will be taken care of.

Self-contradictions are like flypaper for Romney—he can’t keep himself from touching them, and he looks ridiculous waving his arms in the air trying to get them off. He understands this, too, and when he feels a tactical need to display his command of the process he’ll cheerfully admit it. “One of the things I found in a short campaign against Ted Kennedy was that when I said, for instance, that I wanted to eliminate the Department of Education, that was used to suggest I don’t care about education,” he told The Weekly Standard this week. “I anticipate that there will be departments and agencies that will either be eliminated or combined with other agencies…but I’m not going to give you a list right now.”

Which is painfully close to saying, “If I tell you what I’m planning to do, I won’t get elected.” (Note to Romney campaign: Shake Etch A Sketch here.)

Chamber of Commerce: Oops

Code reading is always a matter of interpretation, as the Chamber of Commerce has found out, according to a front-page piece, “Business Bets on the G.O.P. May Be Backfiring,” by Jonathan Weisman in Wednesday’s New York Times. Weisman points out that the Chamber’s campaign contributions to Republican candidates in 2010 were a bad case of “be careful what you wish for.” The Tea Party’s idea of smaller government—that you don’t spend what you don’t have, including all government expenditures without a direct funding stream attached—has run afoul of the Chamber’s idea, which might be better put as “you should spend on us but not on them.”

Efforts to shut down the Export-Import Bank and the refusal to fund the annual highway bill (traditionally a universally popular piece of pork) for more than three months at a stretch are actually hurting the big-business donors to the Chamber quite a bit. But their protests seem to have as little impact on the ideology of Tea Partiers as the evidence that you can’t fight two overseas wars and cut taxes at the same time without creating record-setting deficits. As Barney Keller, spokeman for the anti-spending, tax-killing Club for Growth, told the Times, “Free market is not always the same as pro-business.”

The Supreme Court

The conniptions of the five conservative justices on the Supreme Court this week were a wind-talker’s wonder, a cacophony of conservative coding gone terribly awry. Their overarching conflict stems from the conservative Heritage Foundation’s idea that since they don’t want Medicare For All, they’d mandate that every American must buy insurance from private companies to cover everyone as Medicare For All would, thereby enriching private companies (where single-payer simply cuts them out of the system altogether). Yet now, in order to inflict political pain on Obama, the Republican-appointed justices are saying no to the mandate—an outright attack on the bottom line of the insurance companies, who are, of course, their constituency.

If every Republican cut off his nose to spite his face like this, they’d truly become a party of mouth-breathers.

And that is a long tradition in American politics. In 1833 Andrew Jackson (channeling Ron Paul) got rid of the national bank (a forerunner of the Federal Reserve) on populist principles; he touched off a credit crisis and nationwide bank failures, as well as an epidemic of inflation as state banks printed money to take up the currency slack. The economy did not fully recover until the Civil War.

Remind anyone of the debt ceiling imbroglio last summer? This isn’t about programs that work, or even ideology, but really about holding onto power at any cost. And when they know their attack lines won’t win over the voters, they’ll go for brute force, whether it’s shutting down the government or, as could be the determining factor this November, suppressing the vote. 

Fox News contributor Margaret Hoover and Fox & Friends co-host Gretchen Carlson dared to tell Bill O’Reilly on his show last night that they think the new MoveOn ad, “GOP War on Women,” will be effective. In the spot, various women read recent Republican comments on birth control and abortion, and conclude that “the GOP must have a serious problem with women, and until the Republicans get over their issues, we women have got a serious problem with the Republican Party.” 

After O’Reilly ran the latter part of the ad, Hoover said, “As a Republican, while I don’t like it, I actually think it is a hard-hitting and will be highly effective ad.” 

O’Reilly: But what sort of person would associate an entire political party with a few people’s opinions?

Hoover: …It’s not just a few people....

O’Reilly: I can’t believe you guys think it will be effective. What kind of moron would think that?

Hoover: Because we’re women, Bill.

O’Reilly: It has nothing to do with women.

Hoover: What?!

And so it went, until Bill came back to say, “I have to scold Hoover now.”

Even Carlson (who doesn’t seem to dumb herself down on the Factor as she does on her own Fox & Friends) looked like she wanted to scold Bill right back as she reminded him that Republicans are losing the war for women.

Here’s the O'Reilly segment (and the even better, extended version of the MoveOn ad below):  

Rush Limbaugh talks with guests in the East Room of the White House in Washington, January 13, 2009. (AP Photo/Ron Edmonds)

Rush Limbaugh’s show has never sounded so bleeding-heart liberal as it did this week, when commercial sponsors bailed and were replaced by the United Negro College Fund, Feeding America, the US Department of Health and Human Services and other nonprofits and governmental agencies. In fact, of the eighty ads running Friday on the online stream of Limbaugh’s flagship station, WABC in New York, seventy-one were public service announcements and three were station promos. According to Media Matters, one of the six remaining paid ads was from an advertiser who had asked for it to be pulled.

Now some fifty national advertisers—more if you count locals—have pulled their ads from Limbaugh’s show to avoid being associated with his attacks on Sandra Fluke as a “slut” and “prostitute.” Rushbo is so radioactive right now that even some PSA freebies are running away from him. The American Heart Association wrote in an e-mail to Bloomberg.com, “It is our practice to be a content-sensitive advertiser, and in light of the current controversy, we will be asking WABC to no longer utilize these unpaid PSAs.”

So it’s been a bad week for Rush. Though maybe not quite as bad as CNN, MSNBC and some blogs have made it sound. They all reported that on Thursday WABC suffered more than five minutes of dead air time where ads were supposed to have run on Limbaugh’s show, leaving the impression that radios across Gotham fell into real radio silence.

But it wasn’t quite as simple, or as satisfying, as that. The five minutes and thirty-three seconds of dead air (distributed over four commercial pods in the three-hour show) occurred, as Media Matters reported, only on WABC’s online show, not on the station’s broadcast.

The dead air, however, was indeed caused by the flight of Rush’s sponsors. Explaining what happened, one radio insider told me, “If advertisers are asked to pull [that many] ads, the system is experiencing something it hasn’t experienced before.” That is, the software’s algorithms couldn’t handle the replacement of so many regular spots with PSAs in the time before transmission.

I asked Michael Harrison, publisher of the trade magazine Talkers if this was the largest exodus ever of radio advertisers. “It’s hard to rank because it’s hard to say how long it will go on,” he says. But in terms of that many advertisers bolting in so brief a period, he says, “This is the biggest.”

“Here’s what matters: how many listeners start to pull out,” Harrison continues. “Then there’s a problem for the future. We suspect that his audience is increasing now. The irony is that Limbaugh’s advertising is probably worth more than ever. But unless you believe that the American advertising industry has a high bar for standards and taste, then there will [eventually] be more advertisers coming on. We’re talking about nobody advertising on the number-one show in the business. How likely is that?”

Harrison, who describes himself as politically neutral and interested only in the health of the broadcast industry, adds, “The worst thing that could happen is that advertisers will gang up on Limbaugh and he’ll end up on satellite or streaming only. If this accelerates to where it severely hurts Limbaugh and thereby all of terrestrial radio, including many stations that play liberal hosts, it will be another nail in the coffin of terrestrial radio.”

But for now, at least, Limbaugh’s stain appears to be spreading mainly to other right-wing talkers (as well as some of the cruder shock jocks). Some ninety-eight advertisers have asked that their ads appear nowhere near Limbaugh, Hannity, Beck, et al., according to Radio-info.com. The website published a memo from Clear Channel subsidiary Premier Networks that listed advertisers (including Ford, GM, Toyota, Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm, McDonald’s and Subway) who, as the memo states,

specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity). Those are defined as environments likely to stir negative sentiment from a very small percentage of the listening public.

Of course, if it really was so very small a percentage, this would not be a big problem for talk radio. And Rush would not be spending so much of the time on his program raising support for the United Negro College Fund.