The End of the Siege of Obama

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White House photo by Pete Souza

This is an auspicious week, because it saw the first real controversy of Hillary Clinton's campaign (there were a couple of "She said what?!?" mini-stories, but those don't count). And why is that so important? I explain in my Plum Line post today:

Mark the first week of March 2015 down: This was the moment when Republicans officially shifted their focus from Barack Obama to Hillary Clinton.

Not that they'll stop being angry about what the Obama administration does. But shaking their fist at the White House is now a secondary concern. The energy, the focus, and the attention will now be primarily on Clinton. When Republicans sit up at night trying to devise clever strategies to hamstring the other side, it'll be Clinton on their minds. And the Benghazi select committee gives them a vehicle to attack her. After not being heard from for months, the committee and its chairman Trey Gowdy popped up to issue subpoenas for Clinton's emails from her time at the State Department. It shouldn't be long before they're demanding that she come to Washington to testify in front of the cameras.

You may look on this transition with breathless anticipation, or horror, or something in between. But I'll bet that if you charted the mentions of "Obama" and "Clinton" on Fox News, this week is when the lines would cross.

A second Trump administration will cement a right-wing majority on the Supreme Court for a generation, and put our collective future in the hands of someone who will be virtually unchecked by our institutions. The country has shifted rightward, and the reverberations will ensue for potentially the next few decades. In this climate, a robust independent media ecosystem will be more important than ever. We're committed to bringing you the latest news on how Trump's agenda will actually affect the American people, shining a light on the stories corporate media overlooks and keeping the public informed about how power really works in this country.

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