Skip to main content

Fear and Loathing of Obama

By

It seems the dream of a Post-Racial America has yet to emerge.  I get a kick out of articles like this one that try to dance around the race issue in this campaign.  Jesse Washington seems to go out of his way to present both sides of the issue, when it is so damn apparent that race is at the center of the Republican fear and loathing of Obama.  It's as Alec Baldwin tweeted, "If Obama was white, he'd be up by 17 points."

The Republicans, and in particular the Tea Party, have tried a number of strategies to gainsay Obama from the notorious birther argument, to the current attempt to link him to a black poet and socialist activist, Frank Marshall Davis, but at the core is race.  Here is what I get when I type in obama racist political cartoons.  Quite a sampling.  One is uglier than the next.  This one drew the most ire.

Young Republicans like to claim they are too young to be haunted by the specter of racism, but that strikes me as a rather lame argument as well.  It is quite clear that the entire modus operandi of the Tea Party, by association the Republican Party, has been to paint Obama as the "Other."

This comes out in many of Mitt Romney's stump speeches.  His attitude has been one of insolence toward  President Obama, as if he doesn't deserve to be in the White House to begin with.  This was palpably present during the so-called Republican debates, when the only candidate to show any deference toward the President was Jon Huntsman.  Herman Cain even went so far as to project himself as a "real black man."

The irony is the Republican Party stood for racial equality and women's suffrage at one point.  The Radical Republicans of the 1860s and 70s pushed for Civil Rights legislation across the board, and managed to get three Constitutional amendments through Congress that explicitly gave the black man the right to vote.  Sadly, universal suffrage wouldn't come until much later.  But, it seems this sense of history is lost on present-day Republicans, who absorbed the Dixiecrats in the wake of the Reagan Revolution.

Comments

  1. Rick DiguetteSeptember 10, 2012 at 1:39 PM

    During election years the Republican party has typically been at its most divisive no matter who the Democratic candidate was. But that changed with Obama's election. Now Republican divisiveness is a 24/7 game.

    The Republican base has been extremely disillusioned since 2008. It had never believed that a Black man (or woman) would ever be elected president. Then it happened, and once it happened the disillusionment made itself felt (and seen) for what it is: racist contempt.

    ReplyDelete
  2. James FergusonSeptember 10, 2012 at 3:17 PM

    What amazes me is how bald faced their racism and bigotry became these last four years, but how vehemently they continue to deny it.

    ReplyDelete
  3. avrdsSeptember 10, 2012 at 3:42 PM

    One term more:

    http://www.onetermmore.com/video_subtitles.html

    ReplyDelete
  4. James FergusonSeptember 10, 2012 at 5:04 PM

    Good one, av!

    ReplyDelete
  5. James FergusonSeptember 11, 2012 at 9:22 AM

    Despite all this "bad blood," Obama still has a much higher likability rating than Romney,

    "... and continue to rate him [Obama] as more personally likeable, by a broad and steady 61-27 percent," Langer reports.

    http://news.yahoo.com/poll-americans-pick-president-obama-over-mitt-romney-040236860--abc-news-politics.html

    I don't know how you turn persons votes with a margin like that. Romney appears to be sinking fast with Obama now with a 6-point edge in the ABC poll, a seven-point swing since the Republican convention.

    ReplyDelete
  6. TripplerSeptember 18, 2012 at 5:48 PM

    Romney says 47% of all people are dependent on government and those are ones who will vote for Obama. Yet the facts show that the highest non taxpaying segment of society live in Republican red states:

    http://www.theamericanconservative.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/09/non-payers-by-state.jpeg


    And this doesn't even account for the right wing corporations that are dependent on government subsidies.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Rick DiguetteSeptember 18, 2012 at 9:38 PM

    Romney's comments were assinine and, as you point out, uninformed.

    ReplyDelete
  8. James FergusonSeptember 19, 2012 at 10:42 AM

    Also, look at all the subsidies and tax breaks major corporations get. Even Bain Capital got a handout during the crisis,

    http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-federal-bailout-that-saved-mitt-romney-20120829

    I never realized just how incredibly stupid Mitt Romney was until now. Even Dubya had enough sense to pretend he actually cared.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, noting the gro
228 comments
Read more

Dylan in America

By
Whoever it was in 1969 who named the very first Bob Dylan bootleg album “Great White Wonder” may have had a mischievous streak. There are any number of ways you can interpret the title — most boringly, the cover was blank, like the Beatles’ “White Album” — but I like to see a sly allusion to “Moby-Dick.” In the seven years since the release of his first commercial record, Dylan had become the white whale of 20th-century popular song, a wild, unconquerable and often baffling force of musical nature who drove fans and critics Ahab-mad in their efforts to spear him, lash him to the hull and render him merely comprehensible. --- Bruce Handy, NYTimes ____________________________________________ I figured we can start fresh with Bob Dylan.  Couldn't resist this photo of him striking a Woody Guthrie pose.  Looks like only yesterday.  Here is a link to the comments building up to this reading group.
182 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more