It’s homecoming weekend at the University of Iowa, so let’s talk football!

Some on the left say those who support President Obama  are  “cheerleading.”  Not that there’s anything wrong with that!   There is a vague sense I get that this is meant to be somewhat of a put-down and a bit sexist, but let’s leave that for another conversation…

If Obama supporters can fairly be characterized as cheerleaders, then I think it is fair to characterize Obama critics on the left as unhappy football fans who would boo their own quarterback.

I actually have witnessed this in Kinnick stadium once, when Iowa fans booed the quarterback.   Even the national sports media reported on this strange behavior and were confounded and amazed that a team’s fans would boo one of their own players.  To be fair to the fans, it was probably just the combination of  drunkenness and frustration.  But it felt really bad to be a part of,  and more importantly,  it didn’t seem to help the QB play better (and if I remember right, we lost the game).

President Obama is trying to win the game for us, metaphorically speaking. We don’t have a better player to put in. (So those of you who are considering going to caucus uncommitted, good luck with that).

Tomorrow, Occupyiowa is planning an occupation at OFA offices. I received a notification of this event from CCI yesterday.  I replied to it that while I do support the Occupy movement, I feel there are many evil characters and entities to consider occupying other than President Obama.  Predictably, I suggested the corporate media.  [See Blog for Iowa’s reporting on how the GOP strategy for the last 40 years since 1971 has been to take over the media in order to destroy liberalism and how they have largely succeeded. We’re not making this up. Click here for links to most of BFIA’s work on this topic.]

My thinking is this: If Obama is so bad, so friendly to corporate interests, why are the Republicans  trying so hard to destroy him?  The Koch Brothers  have pledged to spend more than  $200 million on the 2012 election  because they know he’s not one of them.  Karl Rove is raising that much money too.  Mitch McConnell has famously said defeating President Obama is the GOP’s first priority. The tea party controlled congress won’t support the jobs bill because it might help Obama. They don’t care that it would help the country. They have their priorities.

The point is frequently made that DC Democrats haven’t done a good job of protecting us from Republicans, and that they bear some of the blame, and that much is true.   But they are also not fascists who would take down this democracy in a minute if they could like the current GOP is trying to do.   It is too simple  to lump  Democrats into the just-as-bad-as-Republicans pile and I believe this to be a fake media  narrative that only serves to give Republicans a big assist.

So, I just can’t get into the spirit of being mad at President Obama for his perceived progressive failings when there are Republicans in our midst who would be ecstatic if the left abandoned Obama in 2012.  An action against Obama will only cause confusion and help the GOP and the corporate media keep lying about who is mostly responsible for the problems, in my view.

And one final point:  The Obama administration is already supportive and respectful of the OWS movement. The pressure should be directed towards congress, specifically, Republicans, because they don’t get it at all.

And by the way, Pew Research has this:

Obama has received the most unremittingly negative press of any of the presidential candidates by a wide margin, with negative assessments outweighing positive ones by four to one.

Pew found that just 9 percent of the president’s coverage was positive, while 34 percent was negative” a stark contrast to the 32 percent positive coverage and 20 percent negative that it found Texas Gov. Rick Perry, the most covered Republican, received.

His coverage has been substantially more negative in every one of the last 23 weeks of the last five months” even the week that Bin Laden was killed, Tom Rosenstiel, director of the Project for Excellence in Journalism, said of the president’s treatment in the media compared with that of the GOP field.

The top four most favorably covered candidates, the study found, were all tea party favorites:

Read more: politico.com/

If you are a cheerleader type of Democrat like I am and you would like to help your team this homecoming weekend, you can volunteer to help Iowa Dems keep the majority in the legislature by joining the canvass for the Liz Mathis campaign in SD 18, participate in an OFA phone bank or come walk with Democrats in the UI Homecoming parade tonight, 5:15, corner of Van Buren & Jefferson. 

Go Hawkeyes!