The left has given up him, calling him far too empathetic to the right. Meanwhile, the right continues to paint Obama as a Marxist Socialist Muslim with the most savage of all language for any president in my lifetime. I can understand the frustration of the left – Gitmo still open, Afghanistan war drags on, DADT still going – but the right?
Something else here is at work. Taxes are usually number one with the right and Obama has lowered taxes across the board to the lowest they’ve been in 50 years. He’s been warlike. He hasn’t pushed too hard on peace. He has been lenient with Israel’s open contempt for him but he is still called an anti-Semite. He has denigrated progressives and mocked them in public.
He should be the right’s favourite Democratic president. But he is considered to be left of Stalin. He is almost the only subject on the lips of the Republican presidential candidates. Instead of pointing out each others weaknesses, the candidates have chosen Obama as their one and only nemesis. The hate is palpable.
So why is Obama, of all the moderate presidents in modern history, so hated by the right? The only ‘radical’ thing he has done is put together a health care plan – his major campaign promise and why he was elected – and a watered down, anaemic version such that it is.
This hate from the right for this most moderate president, so disappointing to the left for his capitulations to the right, needs to be analysed by American historians but so little is actually written about this dichotomy. It cant be policy. It’s surely not his actions. His wife and children are fair game for hostile mockery – the unwritten rule that presidential families are exempt from political ire has been openly broken.
So, what is it?
