Smearing Senator Obama

Jeffrey Ressner got to hang out at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel as he covered the groundwork for the next round of the GOP smear machine:

Plenty of lowbrow Hillary Rodham Clinton jokes were tossed around at the three-day event, but of highest concern was the notion of Obama seizing the Oval Office in a contest against presumptive GOP nominee John McCain … “We [conservatives] believe capitalism isn’t a dirty word,” he said. “If you’ve seen Daniel Day Lewis’ portrayal of a greedy, sinister oilman in ‘There Will Be Blood,’ it’s just another example of the Hollywood left’s contempt for capitalism. “People have called Hollywood conservatives ‘the new gays,’ but I don’t think that’s necessarily the case,” Berg contended. “The gays have been accepted in Hollywood for years. They’ve long been out of the closet. In fact, they’re fixing up the closet, decorating it, and it looks nice, actually.” Berg centered his talk around the “unintended consequences” of the recent Writers Guild of America strike against networks and studios, which ended last week. Berg placed blame on the WGA’s “radical” negotiators, with writers earning six-figure salaries casting themselves as “poor, exploited, downtrodden” workers, “acting like it’s 1957” and they were UAW members trying to get back on the assembly line building Corvettes. “When the writers went on strike Nov. 5, they entrusted their futures to a leadership that essentially believes Karl Marx is still relevant,” he said. “This was a revolution against The Man.” … “The WGA cut a side deal with David Letterman but not with our show,” he recalled. “We had to go back to work as the No. 4 network with no writers and no stars. Actors would not cross the line. I didn’t read this anywhere, but they were threatened with blackballing if they crossed the line to do our shows” — ironic, he says, since he believes Hollywood is “obsessed” with the 1950s blacklisting era of Joseph McCarthy. “The true threat of McCarthyism,” he says, “is coming from the left.”

Just lovely. Hollywood is a bunch of gays with contempt for capitalism and a victory for labor is labeled both Marxism and McCarthyism. But the main point of this story is how the GOP is gearing up to smear Senator Obama:

Focusing on Barack Obama’s “inexperience” and “undisciplined messaging” are two ways to ensure that the senator from Illinois doesn’t get to be president, according to honchos at the Republican National Committee. Big RNC contributors got an earful this weekend about methods the GOP will use to battle the Democrats for control of the White House this fall, as well as other initiatives central to the conservative cause … RNC Chairman Duncan as well as Co-Chairman Jo Ann Davidson opened the Sunday session with a Power Point presentation outlining five main strategic attacks against the Obama candidacy. A Politico reporter witnessed the document, but not the presentation. The first called for pointing out what the GOP views as a seeming incongruity between Obama and the mantle of commander in chief. The second point harkened back to Obama’s days in the Illinois state Senate, noting how his “pattern of voting ‘present’ offers many openings to question his candidacy.” The third offered hope to the GOP faithful that “we can be confident in a campaign about issues.” A fourth bullet point relayed how “undisciplined messaging carries great risk,” while the fifth and final attack point stressed, “His greatest weakness is inexperience. He is not ready to be commander in chief. He is not ready to be president.”

Of course, George W. Bush had even less experience in 2000, but then making I’m offering them up another bullet point given how Bush is how totally screwed US foreign policy. At least, Barack Obama understood back in 2002 that invading Iraq would be a colossal mistake.

But I think we’ve already seen a few examples of the Obama smear campaign over at the National Review in the form of Krauthammer, Charen, and Steyn. Funny how easily Karl Rove can pull this crew’s strings!