Steve,
a reasonably intelligent, well educated client I work with on occasion made an
unsolicited statement I recently overheard.
He forcefully said, “Obama is the worst President in the history of this
country. The man is repulsive”. I didn’t
catch the origin of his conversation and it would be nice to think it was an
isolated comment. Unfortunately, I have
heard the same remarks (either literally or in essence) from other Conservative friends and individuals on more occasions than I can recall. I work in a Conservative environment, so I’d
expect to hear observations that didn’t favor the Obama Administration, but…”the
worst”??
Admittedly,
I felt something close to the same about George W. Still, with ‘W’ you had a President who
entered office with a Nation experiencing an extended period of economic
prosperity, budget surpluses, and international sanity. His initial banal leadership exposed the
Country to cataclysmic terrorism. He
then proceeded to turn over the budget surpluses (and more) to the top 5% of
the Country’s wealthy with tax cuts, ran up the National Debt to historic
levels primarily by those tax cuts while waging two unfunded wars (one incompetently - one unnecessarily),
and officiated the largest financial
crisis in the Nation’s history as he stepped off the podium. That doesn’t even include his sitcom quality
communications skills and endless gaffes.
My
son, in the National Guard before the Iraq War began, was sucked in for two
years of deployment in Iraq and was wounded in a conflict that Bush, Chaney, and Company
virtually concocted in their attempt to control oil markets…needless to say I
have personal reasons to despise George W. Bush.
Obama,
on the other hand, came into to office in the depths of the havoc George Bush’s
leadership created and has had the helm of the Nation during a steady recovery,
one that brought us from financial collapse to pre-Bush prosperity, as well as making
the US the current economic engine for a still struggling World. For the first time since the Clinton years
the deficit (as % of GDP) has been substantially cut (70%). He has orchestrated
the end to both wars and, to his credit or not, avoided any internationally
based terrorism on US soil (which Bush couldn’t manage for 10 months). His administration introduced the first steps
to get the US out of the healthcare hole it had dug itself into (using a
Conservative Republican plan), and forced open the dysfunctional immigration
issue to public view, among many other things.
There
is plenty Obama has done or failed to do with which I disagree or take issue with
and I’m hardly Conservative, but…the “worst” President? How does Steve or anyone else come up with
that? Even setting aside George W… I
mean Herbert Hoover, Calvin Coolidge, James Buchanan, Richard Nixon, Millard
Fillmore, Warren G. Harding???? There is obviously something else going on,
something that feeds the likes of Steve, or Rush Limbaugh, or a host of Fox
News pundits.
Many
of my progressively minded friends have, without hesitation, assigned the vitriol
leveled at Obama to one simple fact; the man is black. For years this explanation seemed too
simplistic to me. Combining the knowledge I have of Conservative friends and acquaintances
who are good people I’m confident they would take immediate issue if not
downright offense at being labeled as prejudice against African Americans. However, as time has passed and the hatred
for Barack Obama has only escalated, primarily among Caucasian men, I’ve needed
to re-think the source. At this point I’ve
concluded that the reason for this loathing is not because Obama is black…it’s
because he is not white.
The
inherent need we have as social creatures to find like associations between
ourselves and others as a mean of mitigating the fear of being isolated and,
therefore, vulnerable has manifested itself with historical relevance ten thousand
fold. Nobody is exempt from harboring
prejudice thoughts. As a matter of
course, it is one of the ways ordinary people ease the fears that they create
themselves or are bombarded with from a variety of sources. I have reason enough to believe Steve, and
others like him, have personally done quite well during Obama’s term in office.
Steve’s job has been secure, inflation
low, his children remain in private schools, and I suspect his investments have
soared. In fact, the wealthy and
Corporate American have been far and away the largest beneficiaries in the
Obama years, yet they are the ones who vilify him the most. Obama does not represent what they want, but more importantly he does not represent who they are.
I
believe these folks could take nearly everything Obama (that which he has done
and that which he proposes) if you could only wrap him up in a package that
looked like Mitt Romney. When all is
said and done, the uninhibited hate these folks find growing from every orifice
in their bodies is because Obama is not one of them. It isn’t a matter of disagreement. It is because Obama’s policies have been so
bending Right (not the least of which has been his adoption of the Heritage
Foundation’s health plan without a public option) that makes this gut
opposition look so obvious. I can’t even get my Conservative friends to discuss
issues championed by the Obama administration because, I believe, their fear of
agreement might contradict their fundamental revulsion.
Prejudice and racism manifest themselves in both
overt and subtle ways. Religions have historically excelled at it. Even as any of us might recognize the fear in ourselves
we properly suppress it relying on and having confidence in evolving
ethics. However, when Barack Obama is
labeled “the worst”, it’s clear that there is no suppression going on, and that
the tirade of fear that has thwarted attempts to eliminate prejudice of race is
still strong and allowing itself to be manifest under a banner of politics.
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