FoxNews has some details. I’m sure this won’t kill the issue, but the report doesn’t strike me as surprising. To this point, President Obama has been careful to avoid expending energy fighting these sort of side battles that rile up conservatives without accomplishing anything, because he’d rather expend his political capital on actually advancing his liberal agenda. We’ve already gotten a glimpse of this when he urged Congressional Democrats to strip birth control spending from the stimulus package, thus denying Republicans an easy target. That’s one key way in which he’s different from Clinton, and why he is a potentially more formidable adversary for conservatives. I know that talk radio is all over this issue, but based on everything I’ve observed covering Obama, I don’t think he’s going to risk the big stuff to get into a battle over what is ultimately a marginal issue for him. Instead of focusing on the fairness doctrine, conservatives would be better off gearing up for fights on card check and health care, two areas in which Obama will actually attempt to do some very bad things.
