f Barack Obama defeats Mitt Romney on Tuesday, you can blame it – at least a little – on the noose.

You probably read this week about that backyard display in Plaza Midwood. It was a stuffed body with the president’s photo attached to the head, a noose wrapped around the neck. It was visible to the public, including neighborhood children.

A man who lives at the home told a reporter that someone must have done it after a party last weekend, but it doesn’t matter, really. Somebody put it there – a noxious act that should be, by now, completely unsurprising.

After all, there also was an Obama effigy in California this week, another in Indiana and Utah. And it wasn’t long ago that we saw bumper stickers in Charlotte and other cities that read: “Don’t Re-Nig in 2012.” Isolated cases, you say? Last week, 39 percent of respondents to an Associated Press survey said the president was born in another country.

It’s proud ignorance and joyful ugliness, and all of it has been embraced and feared – but rarely criticized – by Republican leaders.

That’s infuriating to moderate conservatives who believe that legitimate criticisms of the president get diluted because they share the same house with the crazies and the uglies. How, some wonder, can voters choose a president who presides over a stagnant economy, an astounding debt, with no new ideas about how to change either? For some, it’s because the alternative means voting with the birthers and the racists. It means being on the same team as the debate crowd that booed a gay soldier, or the crowd that cheered the idea of letting a sick man with no health insurance die.

Yes, Democrats also have their extremists. And certainly, Romney has come under withering criticism from the left, some of it unfair and inaccurate. Every election suffers from a bit of over-the-topness.

But we have yet to see Romney hanging from a noose.

Read more here: http://www.charlotteobserver.com/2012/11/02/3640637/the-self-inflicted-republican.html#storylink=cpy