The Popular Obama

Each bumbling tirade, each racist attack on the most vulnerable, each new instance of blatant financial corruption, each sexual scandal, each child rape cover up, brings to mind a President that acted …well… presidential.

I’m gratified to be able to join a great majority of Americans in admiration of Barack Obama. In fact, Obama is the most admired living US President, a reality that profoundly disturbs Donald Trump and a great many of his followers.

We do experience faint echoes from the fringes: a shout from a guest wrestler on the White House lawn, as Trump listens and grins, slurring Michelle Obama as a secret man who somehow bore children. We witness Trump sponsored video images of the Obamas, Barack and Michelle, as jungle primates.

And, of course, we see an erosion of human rights on the Supreme Court, a horrible legacy: the fixed idea that Obama had the right to make judicial nominations for only 3/5 of his 2nd term.

Still, a virulent hatred of our country’s first Black President has shrunk mostly to the remaining MAGA base.

That unreasoning anger does bring back memories that, for me, largely crystallized with a single letter. The news that a hate-letter to President Obama was being tested for cyanide was itself unremarkable. It did seem at the time emblematic of a remarkable subset of hatred.

All Presidents become targets in the modern world, which is to say the world of national politics within my own memory, the America beginning in my very early youth, the America at every stage of my life since. I have never known an America completely at peace with the democratic process. Violence has always lurked in the American Valley of Shadows. To this day, many of my generation remain alarmed and relieved that the signature failure of November 1963 did not repeat itself in attempts on the lives of Presidents Ford, Reagan, or even Trump.

But the Obama Presidency was different. The Secret Service acknowledged that the level and seriousness of threats had multiplied as soon as Barack Obama assumed office.

The ferocity of rhetoric also soared to heights previously unimagined. It was not only the quantity and volume of often obscene shouts that accelerated. The nature itself of the attacks had gone where nobody had walked before, at least during my lifetime.

John Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and others were verbally attacked, sometimes in borderline absurdity. The attacks were almost always about some act or event, sometimes actual, mostly imagined. In the case of Bill Clinton, misdeeds surrounding a real estate deal faded into self-contradiction, resting finally on the tenuous accusation that a future President had conspired with his wife and a few friends to lose millions of their own financial holdings. The suicide of a close friend and the death of another in a plane accident were viewed by those living in the fringes as having been engineered by the Presidential family.

Finally, they got him in an extramarital tryst that he failed to acknowledge under oath. American voters reacted toward Republicans as most of us would to a voyeur who announces to the world what he has witnessed, while peeping into local bedroom windows at night. These days, Trump’s adventures multiply, then multiply again, the transgressions of those more innocent days.

But all of the accusations, the one true, the others drifting away like some bad odor in the wind, were each based on some real or imagined act.

President Obama was also attacked for imagined acts. Benghazi, IRS, death panels, and so on, were accusations of, at least, something. But he and his family were, and occasionally still are, targets of something more, something more ugly, something that involves a state of being. He was accused of being someone apart, unnatural, not normal, un-American, something not at all like us.

“Barack Obama, the first African-American president of the Harvard Law Review, was born in Kenya and raised in Indonesia and Hawaii.”

– Alex Jones, May 17, 2012

“Communist nurtured, subhuman mongrel…”

– Ted Nugent, January 17, 2014

“A terrorist fist jab?”

– E.D. Hill, Fox News, June 6, 2008

“…propaganda, starting with the President, that everybody should hate the police.”

– Rudy Giuliani, December 21, 2014

During those days of conservative rage, a good friend insisted, as we lunched together, that any observation of racism toward President Obama was likely an illusion, itself a bit of race-baiting in reverse. It was then, and remains now, a common observation in conservative circles. “I’m sure,” my friend conceded, “in a national population this large, we could find someone, somewhere, who hates Obama for being black.”

I suspect he was underestimating the virulence of his conservative comrades-in-arms.

The idea that the President was an illegitimate holder of office, despite winning two majority votes, lapped like tall waves over a low bridge into official actions.

You lie!

– screamed by US Representative Joe Wilson (R-SC)
  during a Presidential Speech to Congress
  September 9, 2009

Largely forgotten years after those heady times, a hostile head of state from a friendly ally was invited to a major address without the customary courtesy of prior notification, a courtesy that would have been extended as a matter of course to any previous President. That was followed by a public letter advising a hostile country in negotiation to avoid war that they should not trust any agreement signed by that President.

The convergence of action with rhetoric had a single thread. The message was unmistakable. Barack Obama was an impostor, not a real President. Formal propriety and official respect were to be held in abeyance until a legitimate President again could be restored to office.

I was happy at the news that the cyanide soaked letter did not, after all, contain cyanide. Laboratory tests revealed only the presence of an abundance of human saliva. A sick gesture, but not lethal.

Like the Republican base, and Republican majorities in Congress, the letter writer chose only to spit at our Commander-in-Chief.