The Center Holds: Obama and His Enemies

by Jonathan Alter

  Soon Obama Derangement Syndrome became so widespread that a large chunk of the Republican Party seemed to suffer from the affliction. More than 50 percent of Republicans surveyed in August 2010 thought it was “definitely true” or “probably true” that Obama “sympathizes with the goals of fundamentalists who want to impose Islamic law around the world.” Nearly 25 percent of Republicans said that they thought the president was a Muslim, up from 13 percent in 2008, and more than 33 percent believed he wasn’t born in the United States.

  It’s not true that “welfare queens dracism lay at the root of all opposition to Obama. Millions opposed him or even despised him for reasons entirely unrelated to race. But for plenty of others, racial feelings infected their views of the president in ways they often could not express. Many aggrieved whites fell back on the same line: “I can’t explain it. I’m just not comfortable with him.” This view was a product of the country’s tortured racial history. For some whites of a certain age and background, it was impossible to square the man with the office he held, no matter how he filled it. In hundreds of all-white rural counties, Obama’s 2008 and 2012 totals were far below those of losing Democratic candidates Michael Dukakis and John Kerry, not to mention Bill Clinton and Al Gore.

  The question of electing an African American president had, on the surface, been resolved in 2008. Pollsters were no longer interested in sampling racial attitudes. But beyond Obama’s weakened support among whites, there was anecdotal evidence that the level of racism was up over 2008, when a black man in power was merely an abstraction. Sabrina Tavernise of the New York Times interviewed voters in Lorain County, Ohio, and found that 16 percent of the people she talked to said explicitly that they wouldn’t vote for Obama in part because he was black. She found similar sentiment the following month in Jefferson County, Ohio, a Democratic county where Kerry, who lost Ohio in 2004, far outpolled Obama. About 10 percent of voters there raised race directly (and on their own accord) as a reason they wouldn’t vote for Obama. It was hard to calculate how many more people felt that way but would not share it with a reporter.

  Ron Fournier, a reporter for the National Journal, returned to his hometown of Detroit and was appalled by the level of racism he found among white voters. To Fournier, the code used by a Detroit firefighter and his friend, a contractor, wasn’t hard to decipher:

  “Subsidization” = Welfare

  “Generational Apathy” = Lazy

  “They Slept All Day” = Blacks Sleep All Day

  “I Feel Like a Fool” = I’m Mad as Hell

  The same people defending Ann Romney’s dressage horse found it outrageous that Michelle Obama took her daughters skiing. When Glenn Beck asked, “Why can’t we call her uppity?,” Megyn Kelly, Michelle Malkin, and Sean Hannity were among those on Fox News agreeing it was a legitimate semantic question.

  The smearing of Obama was greater than anything experienced by presidents in the recent past but hardly a departure from an ugly tradition in American history. Obama haters were the splenetic descendants of the partisans who depicted John Adams as a “hideous hermaphroditical character” in the election of 1800, Abraham Lincoln as an African dictator and hairy baboon in the early 1860s, Franklin Roosevelt as a Jewish bloodsucker (the name conjoined from “Rosen” and “Felt”) in the 1930s, Dwight Eisenhower and John F. Kennedy as communists (courtesy of the Birchers) in the 1950s and 1960s, and Bill Clinton as a murderer dealing drugs out of an airport in Mena, Arkansas, in the 1990s. Most of these calumnies were part of what the historian Richard Hofstadter called “the paranoid style in American politics,” though plenty of others, like commentator Ann Coulter branding the president a “retard, { font-family: "TradeGothicLTStd-BdCn20";v” were simply the product of an entertainment industrial complex that profited off insults.

  Whatever the source, Obama’s name, race, and exotic background lent urgency to the usual vitriol directed at presidents—a sense that this alien must be removed from the seat of power. You didn’t have to be a fanatic racist drawing the president as an Afro-Leninist savage with a bone in his nose to believe the lies. Many less extreme Americans were unusually open to fringe arguments, even if unaware that their fears were increasing their belief in nonsense. Time and again, Obama’s enemies used the same words to describe him: “Socialist,” “Muslim,” “not really American.” Had he been a full African American with an Anglo-Saxon name, he might not have been as subjected to the same untruths, though undoubtedly other lies would have arisen from the muck. Instead the president’s “otherness” took the old racial fears to a new and more confusing place.

  THE SMEARING BEGAN in earnest in early 2007, when Steve Doocy, a former weatherman turned morning talk show host on Fox & Friends, reported as fact a collection of bogus blog rumors charging that Senator Obama, a newly announced candidate for president, had been educated in a radical Muslim madrassa in Indonesia. A CNN reporter dispatched to Jakarta debunked the story, but not before it spread widely.

  By then Hillary Clinton’s campaign was giving it a boost. Just as Al Gore’s campaign for the Democratic nomination in 1988 used the Willie Horton story against Michael Dukakis before it was picked up by George H. W. Bush’s backers, so the conservative criticism of Obama as “the other” had its origins in the 2008 Democratic primary.I Mark Penn, Hillary Clinton’s chief strategist, wrote to Clinton in a March 2007 memo, “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared toward showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting it in a new light. Save it for 2050. It also exposes a very strong weakness for him—his roots to basic American values and culture are at best limited. I cannot imagine America electing a president during a time of war who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and his values.”

  Of course, there were limits to how much one Democrat would trash another. The “voices of vituperation” on the right had no such boundaries. They began to spread lies—many of which contradicted each other—that Obama was a communist, a fascist, an atheist, a homosexual, the bastard son of Malcolm X, or the bastard son of Frank Marshall Davis, an African American leftist poet living in Honolulu. The most infamous of these crackpot stories was that Obama had not been born in the United States and thus was ineligible under the U.S. Constitution to be president. By most accounts, the bizarre birther story was born in August 2008 in a lawsuit filed by a former deputy attorney general of Pennsylvania, Philip Berg, later described by a judge as an “agent provocateur.” After Obama was elected, more than a dozen people filed lawsuits. To argue that litigants had standing in court, they enlisted the support of a retired air force colonel, Gregory Hollister (who argued that Obama wasn’t his legal commander in chief), and Alan Keyes, the Harvard PhD, Reagan-era ambassador, and perennial candidate to the outside world.

  whom Obama had beaten for the Senate in 2004. Keyes called Obama a “radical communist” and “usurper.” His suit, like all the others, went nowhere.

  By early 2009 the tale of the forged birth certificate was circulating widely on right-wing websites. The story was implausible if not insane. To be true, it required that clairvoyant conspirators in 1961 had planted fake birth announcements in two Honolulu newspapers to cover up for the fact that the infant son of an obscure mixed-race couple at the University of Hawaii had in truth been born in Kenya; that Barack Obama Sr., whose visa didn’t allow him to return to the United States after he left, would somehow risk a quick trip home to Kenya and be readmitted to the United States without incident; that talented criminals would go to work forging a birth certificate to pave the way for a “Manchurian candidate” to seize power half a century later; that doctors and nurses at the hospital who remembered laughing over a patient named Stanley (Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham) having a baby were lying; and on and on. When confronted with any of this, birthers would retreat into the familiar dodge that they were merely “raising questions.”

  And the haters had a convenient loophole: Obama’s e
xotic background and strange name allowed them to avoid the stigma associated with outright racism. Enlisting blacks like Keyes and immigrants like Orly Taitz, a loud right-winger who elbowed her way into regular cable TV bookings, made the whole birther thing seem more ridiculous than rancid. The sideshows in the media circus attracted viewers in part because they worked on an ironic level; they appealed to a new generation that saw politics as a source of entertainment from revered comedians like Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, and Bill Maher.

  The birther story also penetrated because it was given credence by respectable politicians. When the racist Gerald L. K. Smith charged in 1937 that Franklin Roosevelt was a secret Jew (he later called Eisenhower a “Swedish Jew”), no one could have imagined that the Senate minority leader at the time would be asked about it, much less tacitly endorse the claim. But there was Mitch McConnell in 2011 saying “I take the president at his word” when he said he wasn’t a Muslim—a passive-aggressive way of keeping the story alive. Mitt Romney paid no political price for spreading innuendos about Obama’s birthplace. “I love being home, in this place where Ann and I were raised, where the both of us were born,” he said on a trip to Michigan. “No one’s ever asked to see my birth certificate.”

  With such high-level backing, it was no surprise that so many in the GOP thought Obama represented a dangerous threat. These suspicious yet credulous conservatives came to believe that a mild-mannered and moderate (by any historical standard) president who refused to nationalize the banks, embraced a GOP health care plan from the 1990s, and made $300 billion in tax cuts a centerpiece of his economic recovery program was in fact a dangerous radical bent on hijacking the nation and trampling on the Constitution.

  THE GODFATHER OF Obama haters was arguably Joseph Farah, an author and former editor of the Sacramento Union. Farah first emerged as an influential conspiracy theorist in 1993, when he was among those claiming that the suicide of Vincent Foster, the deputy White House counsel under Clinton, was actually a murder covered up by the U.S. Park Police in Washington. He co Professor Cornel Wests small llaborated with Rush Limbaugh on a book before moving on in 1997 to found WorldNetDaily, which became a highly successful purveyor of right-wing dirt and the first repository of anti-Obama stories.

  WorldNetDaily’s best-known writer was Jerome Corsi, who went from earning his PhD from Harvard in 1972 under the tutelage of liberal professors Laurence Tribe and Michael Walzer to peddling conspiracy theories about 9/11 and Democratic politicians being on the take from Iranian mullahs. Corsi was immensely popular. Both Unfit for Command, his 2004 book using a few conservative Swift Boat veterans to savage John Kerry as a coward under fire, and The Obama Nation, his 2008 catalog of concocted Obama outrages, went to number one on the New York Times bestsellers list, though independent assessments of Corsi’s books found them riddled with fabrications.

  Edward Klein’s bestseller, The Amateur, was received more respectfully because Klein had been a New York Times editor, but the book was so scurrilous and unsubstantiated that, except for a scathing review, his former colleagues at the paper ignored it. While it was plausible, even likely, that Bill Clinton called Obama an “amateur,” Klein’s sourcing was sketchy. And Caroline Kennedy said in private that both his assertion that Obama had alienated her and his claim to have been a friend of her late mother were false.

  The columnist John Avlon toted up eighty-nine titles in what he called the Obama Haters Book Club, nearly twice as many as were written about George W. Bush during his first term. The titles ranged from The Communist and The Manchurian President to Gangster Government and The Great Destroyer. Avlon’s personal favorite was Whiny Little Bitch: The Excuse Filled Presidency of Barack Obama.

  For those who preferred a more academic tone, the conservative author Dinesh D’Souza wrote a bestseller called The Roots of Obama’s Rage that claimed that Obama’s obvious (to D’Souza) hostility toward the United States and desire to destroy the U.S. economy were somehow shaped by the anticolonial impulses of a father he never knew. The peculiar book, a favorite of Newt Gingrich, was catnip for those with Obama Derangement Syndrome, who quickly took D’Souza’s argument to its logical conclusion. Robert Weissberg, a retired professor of political science at the University of Illinois, wrote a widely circulated article entitled “A Stranger in Our Midst” that reflected the mind-set of the afflicted. Weissberg wrote that “countless conservatives despised Bill Clinton but nobody ever, ever doubted his good-ole-boy American bona fides.” By contrast, he argued, Obama and his “collaborators” resembled “a foreign occupying force” bent on “alien rule.”

  It wasn’t hard to find “evidence” to bolster the point. For instance, Obama was photographed carrying a book by Fareed Zakaria, a columnist for Time and an anchor on CNN. The viral email that followed was typical of the genre:

  THIS WILL CURDLE YOUR BLOOD AND CURL YOUR HAIR!!!!!!

  The name of the book Obama is reading is called: The Post-American World, and it was written by a fellow Muslim.

  “Post” America means the world After America! Please forward this picture to everyone you know, conservative or liberal. We must expose Obama’s radical ideas and his intent to bring down our beloved America!

  If each person sends this to a minimum of 20 people on their address list, in three or four days, all people in The United States of America would have the message.

  The new “OMG” is Obama Must Go!!!!!!!!!!!!

  Scores of myths about the president went viral. Gun owners claimed that Obama was intent on banning all weapons in the United States by signing international treaties that bypassed Congress. Anti-Muslims circulated a photo of the president bowing “too deeply” to the king of Saudi Arabia (whose hand George W. Bush had held at his ranch in Crawford, Texas, without much comment) as proof that he was a jihadist selling out the country to the Arabs. A retired local judge in Marble Falls, Texas, interpreted health care reform proposals to include not just the nonexistent “death panels” made famous by Sarah Palin but provisions giving free insurance to all illegal immigrants and allowing the government to loot an individual’s bank account. A lie circulated that Craig Robinson, the president’s brother-in-law, kept his job as Oregon State’s basketball coach only because of stimulus money received by the university. One movie theater owner in Florida even put “Limited Engagement: The Obama Lying Sack of Shit Tour” on his marquee.

  Some of the attacks took on a more sinister cast. A group called the American Family Association alleged that the president was using the Department of Homeland Security to create his own fascist brownshirt army to wage war on Americans. The organization’s best-known face, Bryan Fischer, a right-wing talk radio host, warned that DHS had riot gear and nearly a half-billion rounds of ammunition that “they’re going to use . . . on Americans.” He added that if Obama was reelected, Americans would “hear some serious talk about secession in any number of places around America.” (An accurate prediction, as it turned out.) Alex Jones, who hosted Ron Paul several times on his radio show, insisted that both the 2011 shooting of Representative Gabby Giffords outside a Tucson shopping center and the 2012 Aurora, Colorado, cineplex shootings were Obama administration plots aimed at letting the United Nations confiscate guns.

  The haters were imaginative. In the summer of 2010, talk show host Glenn Beck held what he called a “Restoring Honor” rally in Washington. Beck, always a sucker for crackpot history that reinforced his preference for theocracy, explained to the crowd that he wanted to form a “black-robed regiment” in homage to the clergymen he wrongly placed at the center of the American Revolution. (Contrary to Beck’s claim, most historians view it as a secular not theocratic event.) His later “Restoring Love” rallies ladled out heaping portions of piety. Sensing public unhappiness with the bitterness of the debate, Beck claimed to want to lower the temperature of the Tea Party rallies. But many of those who spoke at the event couldn’t help themselves. Aryeh Spero of Caucus for America compared Obama to Ahab, who, alo
ng with his wife Jezebel, worshipped false gods. Members of the political left, Spero said, were descended ideologically from Ahab, a leader committed to “transforming the nation” and “subjugating the people.” Those in the audience, by contrast, were like the revered prophet Elij forty-eight hoursvah, committed to fighting paganism. Spero urged the crowd to “make sure a President does not crown himself Caesar.”

  Calling Obama a Roman was a compliment, relatively speaking. More often, of course, he was called a Muslim, an untruth that took as evidence the fact that his middle name was Hussein and kept spreading even as Americans got to know him better. One viral email described a man at a Blockbuster Video who learned from a pair of Arab customers that, unlike Laura Bush, Michelle Obama didn’t accompany her husband to Saudi Arabia and Turkey because “Obama is a Muslim, and by Muslim law he would not be allowed to bring his wife into countries that accept Sharia Law.”

  This post let the first lady off easy. More often, she was depicted by right-wing crackpots in the most vile racist terms—so disgusting that the emails were almost impossible to read without flinching. Many were accompanied by threats of bodily harm to the first family that were referred to the Secret Service. All told, the Obamas were subjected to more death threats than all of their recent predecessors combined.

  IT DIDN’T TAKE long for Obama Derangement Syndrome to move beyond anonymous bloggers to public officials. U.S. District Court Judge Richard Cebull, a George W. Bush appointee in Montana, admitted that he forwarded an email suggesting that the president’s late mother had sex with a dog. Dean Grose, the mayor of Los Alamitos, California, resigned because of his email showing the White House lawn as a watermelon patch. On Capitol Hill, Representative Joe Wilson’s 2009 “You lie!” outburst when the president was addressing a joint session of Congress on health care was only the most public example of members of Congress denigrating the president and his program in terms far outside the mainstream. Representative Allen West of Florida, a self-described “radical and extremist” best known for saying that the number of communists in Congress was somewhere between “seventy-eight and eighty-one,” called Obama not just “a low level socialist agitator” but “probably the dumbest person walking around in America right now.” Like Alan Keyes, West’s African American heritage may have lent a special venom to his attacks. “[Obama] does not want you to have the self-esteem of getting up and earning and having that title of American,” West told constituents. “He’d rather you be his slave.” Such apocalyptic rhetoric was common. Representative Mike Kelly of Pennsylvania compared August 1, 2012, the effective date on which most insurers were required under Obamacare to offer coverage for contraception, to Pearl Harbor Day and 9/11: “I want you to remember August 1, 2012—the attack on our religious freedom. That is a date that will live in infamy, along with those other dates.”