Warnings About Obama's Strong-Arm Tactics: Right Tactics, Wrong Target

Investor's Business Daily, from October 2008:

The Coming Counterrevolution To Hush The Alternative Media

Conservative-friendly media better get ready. Should Barack Obama win the presidency and the Democrats control Congress, as now seems likely, they will launch a full-scale war to drive critics — especially on political talk radio — right out of legitimate public debate.

Signs of what the new environment will be like for the right are already evident:

• When the National Rifle Association recently released television and radio ads in Pennsylvania targeting Obama's history of anti-gun votes, the Obama campaign's general counsel fired off bullying letters to stations that ran the spots, implying that they may have violated public-interest obligations.

• When the 527 group, the American Issues Project, came out with a commercial linking Obama to former Weather Underground terrorist William Ayers, the campaign (unsuccessfully) complained to the Department of Justice that AIP had broken campaign finance laws, and managed to spook some stations away from the ad.

• When two different conservative writers looking into Obama's background appeared on Chicago's WGN-AM Radio, the campaign's "action wire" energized its activists to bombard the station with rage-filled phone calls and e-mails, making the program more difficult to conduct.

(The show, hosted by the eminently reasonable Milt Rosenberg, had on both occasions invited the Obama campaign to send a representative to respond; the campaign preferred to answer with digital brownshirts.)

These crude efforts are only a start.

A Democrat-controlled Washington will use sweeping new rules to shush conservative political speech. For starters, expect a real push to bring back the Fairness Doctrine.

Read the whole thing.

It remains to be seen whether Obama will continue the above strong-arm tactics now that he is President, though there are indications that there may be a push for the return of the Fairness Doctrine. In any case, instead of Obama's followers bullying the media, now it seems they have found another target:

President Obama’s allies on the left, AFSCME and the labor-backed Americans United for Change, are ramping up with a massive advertising blitz containing the most direct and hard-hitting attack yet on specific GOP leaders, demanding that they get behind the recovery package and stop saying “No.”

White House aides were told in advance what the concept of the ads would be, though they were briefed while the ad was in production, according to a Democrat familiar with the discussions. The ad, which is running nationally on cable, goes considerably farther than Obama and the White House has in directly calling out Republican leaders, flashing images of GOP Reps John Boehner and Eric Cantor, and Senator Mitch McConnell.

The ad — which is accompanied by a big targeted radio ad blitz hitting 18 GOP House members and three Senators opposing the plan — is a sign that Obama and his advisers won’t try to get in the way as allied groups play hardball with the Republicans in the final stretch of the stimulus fight, even as the Obama administration hits GOPers blocking the plan somewhat less directly or aggressively.

Like I said, Obama may be President, but he is still stuck in campaign mode.

I guess you gotta go with what works.

Technorati Tag: Obama and Stimulus Package.