Obama Hates Us, This We Know

Back in November, the Obama election machine was brimming with love, peace, brotherhood and fair reason, promising us a government that was both transparent and nonpartisan. Kumbaya! We're all going to join hands and skip into the Promised Land. Those who did not vote for him would be welcome at the table, and a new era of fraternity would begin. To paraphrase Dinah Washington, "what a difference a year makes."

The Obamassiah has turned out to be the most thin-skinned, doctrinaire, suppressor of dissent and disagrement since the paranoid Richard Nixon prepared his enemies list. Now I've been around a very long time in the political arena, and I know that politics ain't beanbag. Any man (or woman) with the ego to run for president is not going to be your average choirboy. It's tough, it's mean, and you're going to step on toes and have your own toes stepped on. So if a president develops an animosity towards those who have treated him unfairly, or at least who he thinks have treated him unfairly, it's understandable. Any president who pretends to love everyone is a liar, and is planning on finding a way to stick the knife in if the opportunity presents itself.

Truman publicly denounced anyone who didn't think his daughter was the greatest opera diva of all time. Eisenhower was a vocal foe of the military-industrial complex. JFK had an ongoing grudge against the Washington Post. LBJ was a notorious slapper-downer of those who got in his way. Carter could be very nasty toward those who didn't take his piety seriously enough. Reagan was extremely affable, but he was not above the use of "there he goes again" when confronted with an opponent who spouted left wing nonsense. Clinton had an ongoing donnybrook with The American Spectator and anyone else who accused him of serial womanizing. Bush II was not above insulting or temporarily banishing news reporters whom he considered to be falsely undermining his war efforts.

But Obama and Nixon are the only ones in my memory where the dislike translated into the concept of "enemies." The enemies are out to get them, professionally, politically and personally. And Obama seems to go even one step farther. His lock on the mainstream media is almost perfection, but there are still a few enemies who just won't go away, and they need to be gotten rid of by any means necessary. So Fox News Channel has been marginalized as an enemy, and not even a legitimate news organization. Rush Limbaugh is an enemy who speaks in no uncertain terms of hoping Obama fails (meaning he hopes his policies fail). News radio is an enemy which must be destroyed by curing it with a "fairness" doctrine and back door maneuvering to kill the free speech of those who oppose the president.

Obama has "community organizations" working hard to silence the nay-sayers, threatens lawsuits and even criminal prosecutions against those who disagree with his politics, and has even gone so far as to set up a national e-mail snitch list to get citizens to rat on each other in order to ferret out the enemies who would bear false witness.

All those other presidents knew that it was all politics, and that if someone got personal about it, they'd hit back personally whenever possible. But they never saw an opponent as an enemy of both the president and the state. And they never spent so much valuable time and presidential currency on trying to deligitimize the enemies they imagined in their paranoid heads. Only Nixon and Obama have made this so personal, so vicious, and so dishonest. They both exhibit an absolute lack of comprehension of the concept of a "loyal opposition."

The problem has become so acute that Senator Lamar Alexander, a very gentle sort of moderate/conservative Republican actually addressed the issue on the Senate floor. He urged Obama to lay off on the assaults on those who disagree with the White House. Alexander pleaded with the president to quit squandering every opportunity to "work together on the truly presidential issues--creating jobs, reducing health care costs, reducing the debt, creating clean energy." And then he dropped the comparison bomb: "I have an uneasy feeling only ten months into this new administration that we are beginning to see the symptoms of this same kind of animus displayed by Nixon developing in the Obama administration."

As Gary Andres at The Weekly Standard has said: "After ten months in office, a clear pattern has emerged. Instead of hope and change, it's blame and attack. Obama rarely gives a speech about a pressing national problem without blaming George W. Bush. For many Americans, it's getting old. It makes the president look small and petty. Does he want America's respect or its pity?"

Nixon developed his paranoid style during the McCarthy era, taking a real issue of communists in government and using it to tar his political rivals as enemies. He won his Senate Seat in California from Helen Gehagan Douglas by accusing her of communist sympathies even though all proof was that she was nothing more than a lifelong liberal. He had deep feelings of inadequacy because he wasn't part of the Ivy League intelligentsia which he so often had to face with his Duke University credentials. Obama has the Ivy League record, but his real credentials remain obscure, his academic career a complete secret and therefore a complete mystery, and seems to be covering up his own feelings of inadequacy by high-falluting speeches and pretensions to elegance. Underneath, he's just another sneaky politician who got his political training in the dirty politics of Chicago. Not exactly the Harvard Yard. Add a belief in the concept that if you don't agree you're dangerous and out to get me, and you have a formula for enemies lists.

Presidents with this kind of philosophy regarding the opposition hire aides who see things the same way and are willing to do what the president wants to rid the nation of the enemies. Nixon had John Ehrlichman and H. R. Haldeman, Obama has Rahm Emmanuel and Valerie Jarrett. This president even considers people in his own party to be enemies if they disagree with his pet projects. "We routinely hear about phone calls from the president's staff to congressional Democrats expressing White House dissatisfaction if someone says anything out of line with Obama's policies," said an unidentified Congressional aide to Gary Andres in his Weekly Standard article.

I can't tell you about hope, but I am pretty sure that this style of ad hominem politics isn't going to change while Obama remains in office. His inability to compromise or see the other guy's point of view is deeply ingrained and probably unalterable. It will be interesting to see at what point in the Obama presidency the situation will have deteriorated so badly for him that he announces to the American public "I'm no socialist (despite all the mounting evidence to the contrary)." And considering his nearly open hostility to Israel, I am even left wondering if he will blame the failure of his administration on "a group which stabbed us in the back."