Frank Schaeffer is shrill, but I take his main point. I have often felt the same way. Yet, I have two problems with his diatribe. First, when you present the way the president has been treated as a figurative lynching, you disallow people to disagree with his decisions and policies in almost any way. It’s as if criticizing how he handled the first debt ceiling fiasco is the equivalent of criticizing a man’s diction while his neck is being fitted in a noose. What you really ought to be doing is racing to his defense before he gets killed.
The second problem I have is that it puts too much emphasis on race. Personally, I remember the 1990’s, and I remember how Bill and Hillary Clinton were accused of murder when one of their closest friends couldn’t hack life in the White House and the mean editorials in the Wall Street Journal, and he decided to take his own life. That’s some cold stuff right there. I remember how Kenneth Starr pursued the president, like Clinton was Moby Dick and he was Captain Ahab, until he nailed him on less than Al Capone’s tax evasion charge. I remember when the House of Representatives, led by Newt Gingrich, actually impeached the president over something many of them were doing themselves.
No doubt, race plays a big part in the way people feel about and treat the president, but you need to subtract everything the Republicans did to Clinton and see what’s left over before you can determine what’s racism and what’s just Republicans freaking out about a Democrat being in their White House. Unless you want to argue that the GOP lynched Bill Clinton, too, “lynching” is probably not the best descriptor of the opposition Obama has faced.
As for white liberals and liberal commentators, no doubt there has been quite a bit of inappropriate idealism and myopia and silly white privilege and expressions of first world problems and lack of realism and misplacing of blame. But being stupid or wrong doesn’t equate to being part of a lynch mob.
It’s better to keep it simple and recognize two things.
First, the country could elect Sen. Joe Manchin of West Virginia president and the Republicans would treat the Democrats’ most conservative senator as though he were advocating a communist revolution. This seems to be an essential tool in the GOP’s political tool-kit and it will be used completely irrespectively of how the Democrat actually behaves.
Second, that people blame the president when there is gridlock much more than they blame the people who won’t compromise. This is because most people do not properly understand the limitations on the office of the president’s power. And, so, you will get even somewhat savvy political commentators saying stupid things like the president could get more cooperation if he just invited more of his opponents over for dinner.
The lesson is, the GOP will go crazy anytime a Democrat is in the Oval Office, and they will not be properly punished for it by the electorate. This is a seemingly immutable law of American politics, somewhat akin to the law that says that Republican presidents will run up huge deficits and then the party will turn into deficit scolds the moment they are out of the White House.
BooMan – perfectly stated! Republicans are for Republicans and trash ANYBODY that’s not them and ANYTHING that they didn’t do.
Great examples are Solyndra (started and nearly finished by Republicans), and Benghazi (there were 11 attacks on Embassies and/or consulates under Bush with about 50 dead / 100 wounded – they didn’t give a damn). Or, the stimulus that everybody (Bush, McCain, and Obama) stated was essential and the Republicans refused to support.
Sorry, but there is a lot not to like about the programs of this President that only begin with the obeisence he has shown WS. He has been School of Chicago in his appointments and the resulting bleed of assets to the top has been a result. His Education policy could hardly be discerned from Bush’s and Duncan has accelerated the corporatization of education. The Security State. The fucking environment. He is the worst Dem president on the environment in my memory, and I go back to Kennedy. It is the “only Nixon could go to China” on steroids.
Sorry if I upset his fans, but I have not been impressed.
then you haven’t really been paying attention
He left out the drones, too….
Some progressive.
No, I was not paying attention to Bill Clinton. Up until the Welfare Reform bill.
Well considering that President Obama spent his first term cleaning up shyt that originated during Bill Clinton’s tenure as President:
So…you’re gonna write about how horrible Clinton was…right?
He did worse than that. NAFTA and the aforementioned Welfare Act were two biggies for me. He was a better conservationist than Obama, however. Not a very high bar.
No. Just no. You are a ridiculous person.
http://www.sierraclub.org/planet/200103/conservation.asp
http://articles.latimes.com/2011/jun/11/opinion/la-ed-babbitt-20110611
GOD! How many times do I have to remind people of what “Don’t Ask Don’t Tell” replaced? The fag hunts, automatic discharge with bad paper, et cetera. DADT was a step FORWARD and Clinton was pilloried for it. Now people who were probably eating pablum at the time denounce him for not championing gay marriage. Clinton was NOT anti-gay and took a lot of political heat trying to make life for military gays a little easier.
Sam Nunn stabbed Clinton in the back over that one.
I believe it.
I disagree with you about the importance of race in the response to the President. Schaeffer is on point completely with regards to the point of race with regards to the GOP and President Obama.
There are people who are acting like an lynch mob. Rush Limbaugh comes to mind. Some members of Congress like Louis Goehmert also seem to fit this category.
There are people who are playing a partisan strategy of badmouthing everything. Put Mitch McConnell in this category.
There are people who do not want to be associated with the black President. Put most Blue Dogs in this category. It is Obama’s policies, not particularly liberal policies that they run away from back home.
There are people who have fundamental policy disagreements with President Obama on specific issues. These disagreements are fair up to the point at which they question the President’s commitment to what the President says he’s committed to.
But the fact remains that for five years we have a background narrative to the Obama administration that amounts fundamentally to a lynch mob. And what they consider humor always provides the Freudian slip that shows this agenda.
Agree wholeheartedly with:
but most especially with this:
.
In the early months after his election, I cannot recount all the times I was on the receiving end of truly awful cartoons and photoshopped images of the Obamas from otherwise sane and responsible friends and relatives. Some said it was no different than all the jokes about Bush’s mangled syntax. But many of us Southerners recognized a profound difference. In truth, they were then about as tone deaf as Phil Roberson was in his recent GQ interview. They’ve gotten a bit more circumspect and less obvious over the last few years.
O/T I was making a purchase from the men’s department of a regional (NC based) dept store (TH Dem will know its name) yesterday afternoon and the line was moving slowly. An older couple noted the very close by display of Duck Dynasty merchandise with a big photo of the main male players. The older couple said they’d never seen it and I concurred, as I had never willingly watched any reality show. There was a nice and polite young 20 something male also waiting who commented what a nice Christian family they were and how good the show was. An astute observer would have noted that the male clerk ringing up and exchanging customers’ merchandise was most probably gay and on at least one occasion his eyebrows even arched. Otherwise he never let on that he was even listening to the conversation. I mentally tipped my hat to him.
First off, a concession: NO ONE should use the terms lynch or lynching unless you’re documenting an incident where a person was taken against their will and murdered with their body left on display. It’s too specific and repellent to be used metaphorically.
And yes, BooMan, the GOP has been using extremely harsh rhetoric and executing extraordinarily adversarial legislative actions for quite a while now. Josh Marshall has titled this GOP strategy the art of bitch-slap politics.
But explain these extremely racist “jokes” about our President, which are almost never disowned by anyone in the conservative movement. Instead, these embarrassments are responded to by chides from right-wingers to “get a sense of humor.”
When we don’t call racist statements and actions by their proper names, then we’re acquiescing to bitch-slap politics. It’s not just jokes about Obama which fit into that concept. We simply must talk about the explicitly racial motivations for these voter suppression laws, for example.
Feature, not a bug. And you know it.
Not really possible. It’s 100% about race. But it’s about the totality of the challenge. Democrats, liberals, etc. are defiant in the face of sociopolitical hierarchies. Bill Clinton may have been white, but his judicial ideal was Barbara Jordan. The left is aggressive in its pursuit of integration, gender rights, social and sexual liberty, academics, unions, and the rights and wages of workers as the right is aggressive in defense of white supremacy, corporate power and religious tradition. The left wants to ban the personal right to handgun ownership, curb weapon manufacture and proliferation, and increase licensing and profiling and regulation of gun ownership in general. And then probably appoint a black lesbian (from Oberlin) or something to run the department.
The purpose of the left is to subvert power in favor of the underdogs. The right’s goal is for power to remain power. Everything about Obama is a problem for them. Everything about the people he appoints and hires and favors is a problem too.
So in that respect, it’s interesting that the best proxy for this situation is a white woman. Frances Perkins.
http://www.francesperkinscenter.org/refugees.html
Uncanny, right? But of course, she had the last laugh. The Depression broke and Social Security is forever. The right has to fight so hard because it inevitably loses. That’s why we don’t all live in mudshacks eating rotting garbage while the feudal lords and defenders of the holy faith live it up in their castles and cathedrals. And why eventually, no one will live that way at all.
Once again, feature, not a bug. Don’t mistake the layman’s ambivalence for incompetence. People like (or sometimes even love) the Democrats’ agenda in the abstract. They have a harder time abiding Democratic ascendance and implementation.
The purpose of the Tea Party and Paul Ryan’s austerity is to ensure that the recession never breaks.
Excellent comment, especially the parallel with Frances Perkins, the designated scapegoat because Roosevelt himself as upper-crust was a little bit untouchable.
I don’t think the “lynching” trope is all that out of line applied to Clinton, in fact: remember how he was affectionately called America’s first black president? To the right he was at the very least a N—lover, and continually portrayed in terms of racist stereotype as a shiftless, lazy jive talker and helpless slave of his gross appetites. His blackness is imaginary, but it’s how they hated him. By the same token Obama is a victim of anti-Semitism, treated by the right and the pseudo-left libertarians as a coldly intellectual, tribal, conniving Communist or anti-liberty conspirator. Of course he is in fact black, and I think this really makes the hatred an order of magnitude more extravagant and poisonous. It makes me want not to criticize him at all–to try to give him something of a pass or make excuses on all aspects of national security policy–or (especially on economic issues) to do it really carefully, emphasizing always that he is no worse in any important sense than Truman or Kennedy and no matter what far better at being president than any Republican since Eisenhower.
Good comment:
“Bill Clinton may have been white, but his judicial ideal was Barbara Jordan.”
It was the perception that Clinton could respect African Americans, their accomplishments, their skills, their history, their continued suffering of injustice that drove a lot of the hatred toward him. They feared the accounting for the evils of racism just the same way they do now.
I can also remember Jimmy Carter getting basted over his appointment of Andrew Young to the United Nations Rep seat. The negative reaction from the rabid side of the right was swift and putrid.
I like what you say and how you said it. I tend to think that much of the hostility towards Pres. Obama is racial in nature but you make a good point that the right were just as crazy about Clinton.
Regarding point the second, gridlock.
People look at what Bush was able to accomplish, given a compliant legislature and a fawning press and a determination to allow powerful institutions the freedom to do what they have always wanted.
Then people look at what Obama has failed to accomplish, in the face of a massively obstructionist legislature and the contempt of The Villagers and fanatical opposition from the powerful institutions he is trying to rein in.
And they conclude that Obama didn’t even try because he is a crypto-Republican corporate whore and the path forward is to vote for third party vanity candidates that will teach the Democrats a lesson.
Because People are Stupid.
I must admit that this is one great insight. It surely gives a company the opportunity to get in on the ground floor and really take part in creating something special and tailored to their needs.
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Good discussion. Even though the figurative use of the word “lynch” makes me wince, I have to agree with Schaeffer here. When I read Schaeffer’s complaints about “carping” from the left for example, I don’t think he is necessarily discussing ANY AND ALL left based criticism of Obama. I’m thinking he is talking about the rather thoughtless criticism that leaves out important context about the unprecedented extremes of the right and leaves out any constructive ideas. There’s a lot of pure trash out there from the left that just doesn’t elevate itself to the level of mature criticism. And they seem to forget what side of the political spectrum they are on at times.
I also think your point about GOP opposition to Clinton seems to miss a key element in that even as the GOP opposed him, much of that was still based on racism. Whether we look at the right’s treatment of Obama, Clinton or Carter, much of the virulent hostility comes from fears that these presidents might actually succeed promoting policies that create more social and racial justice.
I can no longer separate racism from the other “issues” the GOP claims to be concerned about, especially considering how the 2012 Prez election was conducted. And Zack Beauchamp at Think Progress nailed the state of things pretty well for me this year:
http://thinkprogress.org/justice/2013/10/09/2730651/how-racism-caused-the-shutdown/
For me the GOP has become a hate group.
Yes, the GOP will go crazy with Dems in the Oval Office. But if the left ever gets its act together and universally realizes that taking down the right is far more important than a vein-ripping tear down of a Dem president, there’s a better chance the GOP will get punished by the electorate. And to me that ought to be part of the ticket cost to enter the big tent. Criticize our de facto party leader by all means, but first put it in context of the hatred, obstruction and injustice promoted by the GOP and second, use constructive criticism on our own.
Maybe if the f-ing Dems balanced their social emphasis with a little economic emphasis.
A 15,000+ Dow and a $7+ buck minimum wage after 5 yrs. You see a little problem there?
And we have intimations of a neo-lib-on-steroids Pacific treaty that is gonna blow up in their faces, big time.
L. O. L.
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