Tag: hate
Why Do Republicans Hate Obama?

Why Do Republicans Hate Obama?

Come to think of it, things have been awfully quiet on the End Times front. Living in the South, one grows accustomed to hearing about a never-ending series of conspiratorial threats and eschatological panics.

Prophetic fads sweep the region. It’s Satan worshippers one year, “secular humanists” the next. Subliminal messages are described in popular music; supermarket barcodes harbor the Mark of the Beast; logos on boxes of soap suds give evidence of corporate diabolism.

Under President George W. Bush, a series of preposterously bad novels by evangelical authors Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins became huge bestsellers. Dramatizing the Book of Revelation as an action-adventure melodrama like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Terminator films, the books portray born-again American suburbanites as Jesus’s allies in an apocalyptic struggle against a U.N.-sponsored “World Potentate,” who looks “not unlike a younger Robert Redford” and speaks like…

Well, like Barack Obama, actually. Which I think explains something about what appears to be happening in the 2012 presidential election. To an awful lot of white Protestant evangelicals across the Deep South especially, President Obama has become no less than a secular stand-in for the Antichrist — a smooth-talking deceiver representing liberal cosmopolitanism in its most treacherous disguise.

Dislike of Obama has grown to cult-like proportions across the region. Statewide polls show the president losing by thunderous majorities. A recent poll by the Public Religion Research Institute highlighted in The New York Times shows that “among Southern working class whites, Romney leads by 40 points, 62-22, an extraordinary gap.” In the Midwest, Obama leads among the same group. Subtract the African-American precincts and the president might not win 30 percent of votes in states like Arkansas and Oklahoma — one reason many Republicans suspect that national polls must be skewed.

So is it all about race? Not entirely, no. Many of the same voters who see President Obama as an African-born Muslim Socialist would very likely support, say, Condoleeza Rice. (Or think they would, anyway.)

Nor, however, are their fears entirely irrational. Because if the polls are right — and a disinterested observer would have to say that professional pollsters have grown increasingly accurate at predicting recent contests — the 2012 presidential election may not bring about “The Rapture,” but it could definitely mark the definitive end of a political era.

Specifically, it doesn’t matter how badly President Obama loses the five Deep South states won by Alabama governor George Wallace in 1968 — along with, say, South Carolina, Texas and Oklahoma. Should he prevail in most of the nine “swing states” where everybody agrees that the contest will be decided, and where Obama currently appears to lead by strong majorities, the white, GOP-accented South will find itself politically marooned.

Again.

Richard M. Nixon’s “Southern Strategy” will have been dismantled and a new, moderately center-left Democratic coalition built by President Obama. For the first time since 1972, the Rush Limbaugh/Mike Huckabee wing of the GOP will find itself with no clear path to power. (Not that there’s anything remotely holy about Limbaugh; I’m talking demographics here, not theology.)

The existential shock would be considerable. Not since the 1960s, when successive civil rights laws overcame the region’s “massive resistance” and ended legal segregation, have certain kinds of white Southerners experienced such anger and trepidation. Boo hoo hoo.

Moreover, should Obama be successful in rebuilding the U.S. economy during a second term, and once voters grasp that “Obamacare” has liberated them from the fear of being driven into bankruptcy by medical emergencies, the new Democratic coalition could prove to have a kind of staying power not seen since FDR and Truman.

Indeed, it’s been Republican anxiety over that very possibility in the wake of George W. Bush’s spectacular failures that led to the GOP’s Washington version of massive resistance during Obama’s first-term.

Or, to put it another way, if President Obama can win in this economy, how could any talented Democratic candidate lose?

The temptation for Southern Republicans would be to double down on the crazy, because “conservatism,” so-called, can never fail, only be failed. Also because religious melodrama is really what an awful lot of them are really about. That, and Koch Brothers money. They’re not actually conservatives at all, in the classical sense, but sentimental fanatics seeking to purge the nation of sin; adepts of “limited government” with their noses buried in women’s panty drawers; apostles of a lost Utopia located in a non-existent past, most often in 60s sitcoms like “The Andy Griffith Show.”

In that sense, fear and loathing of President Obama strikes me as a lot wider than deep; a fad, not an existential dread. They survived the Voting Rights Act; they’ll get over this. However, adapting to the new political reality may take some time.

Too bad, because the nation needs a principled conservative party to check the follies of the anti-gravity left.

Today, it hasn’t got one.

Photo: AP via David Becker, File

For These GOPers, There’s Only One Problem: Obama

Ladies and gentlemen, here he is, “your boy,” that “tar baby,” the president of the United States, Barack Obama:

Ahem.

The first title was bestowed upon Obama by political commentator Patrick Buchanan on Tuesday, the second by U.S. Rep. Doug Lamborn on the Friday before last, the third by the American electorate in November 2008. If the first two seem to cancel out the third, well, that’s the point. One hopes they will help the president understand something he has thus far refused to grasp about his political opposition.

Namely, these people don’t want to be friends. They don’t want to compromise for the greater good. They don’t want to solve problems unless by problems you mean his continued tenancy in that mansion on Pennsylvania Avenue.

They have not been coy about this. Rush Limbaugh said it (“I hope he fails”) when Mrs. Obama was still picking out a dress for the inauguration. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said in November that, in a time of war and recession, his No. 1 goal is to deny Obama a second term.

Yet somehow, the Obama brain trust, a term herein used advisedly, always seems caught off guard by the ferocity, velocity and fury of the response to him. They were surprised at the verbal and physical violence of the health-care debate, surprised at the hardiness of the birther nonsense, surprised by the stiff defense of the Bush-era tax cuts.

Now, they are surprised the GOP would rather see the U.S. economy go off a cliff than surrender the aforementioned tax cuts for rich folks. So the debt ceiling gets raised in exchange for cuts to services for the poor, who shortsightedly failed to hire lobbyists.

It is time Obama quit being surprised by the predictable, time he understood this is not politics as usual, not Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill snarling at one another by day and having drinks by night, like that old cartoon where the sheepdog and the coyote punch a time clock to signal the beginning and end of their hostilities. It is not Bill Clinton living in a state of permanent investigation, nor even George W. Bush being called incompetent all day every day.

No, this is a new thing, repulsion at a visceral, indeed, mitochondrial level. Obama’s denigrators are appalled by the newness of him, the liberality of him, the exoticness of him and, yes, the blackness of him.

“Your boy?” Really?

Sure. Why not. Didn’t Rep. Lynn Westmoreland call him “uppity”? Didn’t the ex-mayor of Los Alamitos, Calif., send out an email showing the White House with a watermelon patch?

See, here’s the thing: If, as is frequently said, Obama represents America’s future, what do they represent?

You know the answer. Worse, they do, too.

Still, what matters here are neither their feelings nor his. No, what matters is homeowners dispossessed of their homes, workers who can’t find work, sick people who can’t afford health insurance, American soldiers on patrol in hostile places.

The president is a basketball fan, so surely he knows it is sometimes necessary to throw an elbow on your way to the goal. This is one of those times. His instinct to compromise, to work with the opposition to solve problems, is admirable.

But Obama needs to understand: as far as they are concerned, they have no problem bigger than him.

(Leonard Pitts is a columnist for the Miami Herald, 1 Herald Plaza, Miami, Fla., 33132. Readers may contact him via e-mail at lpitts@miamiherald.com.)