Presidential Debate 3

I think that who­ever the Demo­c­rat in the White House is/​was, the rightwing hatred would be just as vis­ceral. The modes of attack might be dif­fer­ent, but the depth and cyn­i­cism would be the same. If Hillary had won in 2008, it would be digs at her fem­i­nism rather than her black­ness. They would be mock­ing her appear­ance and cast­ing asper­sions at her that some how made her the cause of Bill’s infi­delity rather than ques­tion­ing her Chris­t­ian bona fides. And, we’d be hear­ing end­lessly about Vince Fos­ter, trav­el­gate, cat­tle futures, etc. Instead of paint­ing her as hav­ing a social­ist agenda, they’d paint her as con­tin­u­ing the social­ist takeover that began under her husband.

Don’t kid your­selves. I remem­ber how ugly the Repub­li­can chat­ter was in the 1990s, because I heard so much of it from my own par­ents’ lips. I heard the same nas­ti­ness about Gore and Kerry, though not quite to the fer­vent pitch that the anti-​​Obama mad­ness has reached, because nei­ther of those two men ever sat in the Oval Office. I heard enough talk about what a trav­esty it would be if that “trai­tor” Kerry won in 2004…

So, you might ask, why have the attacks against Obama been all Kenyan social­ist birther crap? Because he’s so squeakly clean that they don’t have any real scan­dals to pin on him. No ques­tion­able stock trades. No aides com­mit­ting sui­cide. No rumors of girls on the side or even an awkard drunken pass. And, he defanged their attacks on his col­lege drug use, because he already admit­ted to “inhal­ing.” So, they have to attack him with the ammu­ni­tion they’ve got. And some of it gets pretty silly. (Ques­tion­ing the col­lege tran­script of the Edi­tor of the Har­vard Law Review? Really??)

But trust me, any Demo­c­rat would be sub­ject to the same level of hatred, though it would be dif­fer­ent in char­ac­ter to match what­ever the person’s traits were. The Repub­li­cans would be look­ing for “ter­ror­ist” links to fringe lefty envi­ron­men­tal groups or what­ever they could find to try to paint the Demo­c­rat as a scary “other.” I see the attacks on Obama (and the swift­boat attacks on Kerry, for exam­ple) as mostly an esca­la­tion of what began under Bill Clin­ton, though it may have begun ear­lier than that (which I’m sure some of you old­timers can point out to me).

The attacks don’t sur­prise me as much as how many peo­ple are gullible enough to believe them. But that’s more a fea­ture of the ²⁴⁄₇ pro­pa­ganda machine, which I think would also be in effect regard­less of who the White House occu­pant might be.