Ugly stuff. Matt Bai sees a trend among Republican leaders who are (Bai notes carefully and politely) "trying to make the fall campaign about the president himself and the kind of societal change he actually represents."
Uh oh. Racism, nationalism, and xenophobia in pin stripes and pearls?
... The increased focus on Mr. Obama’s personal history is probably less about persuading the electorate as a whole than it is about unifying the disparate strands of the conservative base.
The latest controversy over Mr. Obama’s identity involves — once again — Newt Gingrich, the former House speaker, who this week accused Mr. Obama, whose father was a Kenyan economist and spoke out against the occupying force in his country, of exhibiting “Kenyan, anticolonial behavior.” Mr. Gingrich was shorthanding an essay in Forbes by the conservative theorist Dinesh D’Souza, who, in exploring Mr. Obama’s attitudes toward business, settled on the theory that Mr. Obama was taking directions from the anticorporate apparition of his long-departed father. (That Mr. Obama never really knew his father is apparently beside the point.)
This latest uproar came about a month after prominent Republicans excoriated Mr. Obama for supporting the building of a mosque near ground zero and just a few weeks after Glenn Beck, the television personality, held his faith-based rally on the National Mall. Last week, meanwhile, Gov. Haley Barbour of Mississippi, chairman of the Republican Governors Association, in tepidly acknowledging Mr. Obama’s Christian faith, said to reporters: “This is a president we know less about than any other president in American history.”
Call me weird, but (having read his autobio) I think I know more about this president's personal history than about any earlier president. From ol' "chop down the cherry tree" through "cheerleader at Yale," no one has had a personal history as interesting -- nor as relevant to the contemporary world we actually live in -- than Barack Obama.
But that's where the problem is, you see. The Americans who balk at his "otherness" don't want to live in the contemporary world. They want a president who is male or Sarah Palin, who's white and drives a '69 Chevy pickup. They want to roll everything back to about 1969 and maybe, just for fun, nuke the north Vietnamese and improve our history.
They want to live in an America that rules (and, with any luck) terrifies the world. They're doing just fine in that respect. Thanks to them, America's ugly conservatives are terrifying the world.
The White House has chosen to play it cool. Maybe much too cool. Maybe we need to step in and do something about this.
You can probably expect the tenor of these attacks to grow shriller as 2012 approaches and Republican presidential hopefuls begin courting activists in Iowa. For now, at least, the president has no plans to respond. White House advisors contend that as the conservative insinuations about Mr. Obama grow more pronounced, the extremism that underlies them will become self-evident to the public.
In the meantime, though, the November elections are less than seven weeks away. And by energizing the grass roots, the constant innuendo about Mr. Obama’s allegiances may be doing exactly what Republicans need it to do.
