Guardian UK: Hate Obama? You may not be a racist. But you will be white

Hate Obama? You may not be a racist. But you will be white
The president's critics are not all prejudiced but the crowd is mutating to the extremes. And we have a bad history on this topic

Michael Tomasky
The Guardian, Monday 16 November 2009


I was just recalling how, about a year ago, my country was swept up in a spasm of self-congratulation. Not only had Barack Obama broken a seemingly insuperable historical barrier in winning the presidency, the media told us, but "we" had as well. We had overcome centuries of gruesome history and proved to the world that America could live up to its promise.

The US press in those days duly reported but tended to downplay events that told the opposite story. The footnote, for instance, that the white supremacist website stormfront.org temporarily went dead on 5 November, the day after the election, because it was so inundated with requests for membership. And the tale about the Maine convenience store that started an "Osama Obama Shotgun Pool" inviting customers to bet on the date Obama would be shot, and saying: "Let's hope we have a winner".

These were treated as isolated events, and maybe they were. The important thing was the people had spoken, and they'd given proof that America wasn't that kind of country any more.

A year later, we've seen an epidemic of hatred against the president that I think is safe to call unprecedented. Bill Clinton and George W Bush were hated – but not quite like this. When we have a pastor, a real-live Baptist minister in Arizona, devoting a sermon to explaining why the president should "melt like a snail" (and he was explicit – he meant Obama should be killed), we've reached a new point. Obama, it was reported over the summer, receives 30 death threats a day, three or four times the number issued against Bush. And I think it can't be just a coincidence that you will almost never see him give a speech out of doors, the middle of a heavily guarded military base (Fort Hood) providing a recent and rare exception. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2009/nov/16/obama-racism-conservatives-opposition

after reagan's failure and both bushes, some people still want to pretend it's all about ideological differences...sure.

Most hate him because he's a Democrat. There is a segment of that group that also hates him because of his race but that is a smaller group.

I mean - we saw how much they loved Bill Clinton, Al Gore, John Kerry, Howard Dean, etc.

but an even bigger one that we elected a Democrat with a majority of the popular vote, for the first time since Carter.

Notwithstanding that, they are racist.

The contemporary Republican Party is happy to include racism as part of its ideology. George Bush the elder told racists that, if they were voting for him because they were racist, he didn't want their vote. Not so of his son or any Republican today.

Racism is an ideology, one that fits in perfectly well with the Republican model of the "ownership society."

the author of the article doesn't quite grasp the reality.

Yes,of course they would hate other Dems but, this situation is at the extremes and so many of the incidents that have occurred since he became President have been blatant,and overtop and can only be seen for what they are RACIST..

And that he is young, popular, a global "rock-star" and exceptionally gifted at writing and oratory means that they hate him more than they've ever hated before.

but that's probably not true. It is ugly, and it does tell us something about the country I'd rather not know most of the time.

The racists are another segment of Fox Nation that has been energized by last year's election.