Republican Dress 'Em Up

It’s probably horribly cynical of me to say so, but it seems to me that there’s a certain cohort within the GOP that has a special incentive to damage and destroy the first black president, in order to make sure there will never be a second one.

Granted, I stand firm to my conviction that even in the eyes of the GOP’s hard-core racists, whomever and wherever they may be, he’s a Democrat first and a black man second. The GOP clearly hoped and believed that demonizing Jimmy Carter would be enough to ensure that no Democrat was ever elected president again, which is why they went apeshit when Bill Clinton won and thus did everything they could to destroy him, again hoping that doing so would ensure that no one would ever vote for another Democratic president. But Clinton beat them at their own economic game. You don’t hear RW/TP/GOPers calling Obama “another Bill Clinton.” They’re desperate to believe and to make others believe that Obama is “another Jimmy Carter,” because as the memory of Carter’s presidency, for better or worse, fades, they want to be able to pin every Democratic presidential candidate for the next 30 years with the pejorative “another Barack Obama.”

And they have the propaganda and reality-control engine to do it. They can make Barack Obama “the worst President ever” without any regard, without even paying one iota of attention, to anything that has actually happened or is actually happening. There are enough Americans whose understanding of reality, indeed whose interest in reality, is limited to what I call bite-sized nuggets of emotionally-satisfying fiction. The entire 2010 midterms were based on that. There is no reason to believe that future elections will be any different, especially now that the Supreme Court has told us we cannot make it illegal to purchase reality.

I think it was Randi Rhodes whom I recall saying, at the time Obama was elected, that “he will be the greatest president ever, because he has to be.” Hyperbole aside, what she meant was that as the first black president, he has to do a good job, because if he doesn’t it’ll be a long time before we have another one. In my opinion, Obama has done a good job; not a greatest-president-ever job, but a very good job under very difficult economic, and unprecedentedly difficult political, circumstances. But my opinion only counts for one vote in a state Obama will win handily next year no matter who the GOP nominates. What we’re seeing is the inverse of what Randi suggested: The GOP is trying to make Obama into the “worst president ever,” by preventing him from accomplishing much, preventing the economy from improving, and having their propaganda/reality-control machine keep repeating over and over how horrible he is regardless of any facts (i.e., regardless of what the facts are, or regardless of what the facts actually or reasonably mean). That way, it’ll be several generations before we even consider electing another non-white president. Perhaps we never will.

I firmly believe that Barack Obama is the most hated president in my lifetime, in terms of the volume and intensity of the hatred directed his way, not to mention the irrational and counter-factual bases thereof. The Right hates him for being what he isn’t (a radical Muslim left-wing commie-socialist ideologue bent on destroying America), and because such blind, reflexive hatred is all they have left given the grotesque failures of their own ideology; while the Left hates him for being what he is (a pragmatic centrist more interested in governing than campaigning), and because they are never satisfied with what Democratic officeholders accomplish.

The Right enjoys feeling oppressed and victimized by Democrats; the Left enjoys feeling disappointed and betrayed by them. Conversely, while the Left enjoys feeling oppressed and victimized by Republicans, the Right has no similar inclination to feel disappointed and betrayed by Republicans while Republicans are in office. They save such feelings, to the extent they exist at all, for after Democrats are elected to clean up the GOP’s economic mess, at which point they begin to pay lip service to the notion that so-and-so was “not a real conservative” and that they “never really supported” what he was doing, and perhaps that he lost the election because he was “not conservative enough” for this “center-right nation.”

So, in 2012, we can go back to what has become the default, the status quo, in American politics: A Republican government racking up endless debt, fighting endless wars, handing essential government functions over to industry lobbyists and unqualified cronies, and waging endless cultural battles they have no intention of ever finally winning; a Republican electorate that enthusiastically enables all of this and aggressively demonizes anyone who objects; and a Democratic electorate that will complain endlessly about it and dream of the day when they can elect the next Democratic president to clean up the next Republican disaster, at which point they might actually wait a few months before feeling disappointed and betrayed and starting the whole miserable cycle over again, as the Right once again brings its phony outrage over “big government” and “spending” and “tyranny” out of hibernation.

The song remains the same….