Hatin' on Obama

Now that President Obama has actually delivered his pep talk to the students of Wakefield High School in Arlington, Va., one can only suppose that conservative Republicans who raised a fuss in advance of the speech are, out of sheer embarrassment, looking for places to hide.

Generally more liberal than their elders (but less partisan), this is the Fix-It generation. And what they want to fix is nothing less than broken countries, damaged people, a depleted ozone layer – you name it. Along the way, the Millennials have developed some theories about politics. (They are vastly more supportive of gay rights, for example, but also more pro-life than their elders.) And, of course, Millennials are famously post-racial in their thinking and their politics. This singular world view created a need for some new vocabulary, which the Millennials have willingly provided. My favorite is their alteration of the words "hating" and "hater."

A "hater" in modern slang is someone who is jealous of someone else's success or someone who tends to make negative comments about others. It was used in its classic sense on Jan. 20, 2009 – Obama's inauguration day – on the Wall Street Journal Web site, in response to critics of Obama's speech. The following comment came from a Californian who wrote: "Don't be hating! What's happening right now is historical!"

In the context of politics, then, a hater is someone who engages in ad-hominem argument – and that is a malady that plagues our politics.

I hope I don't come across as a hater when I say that "as the father of four children," what Jim Greer might want to do is take a deep breath and contemplate the ill effects of excess partisanship. I don't mean to pick solely on him. He was hardly alone in the conservative firmament for whipping up the shock troops into a frenzy over Obama's supposed politicization of back-to-school day. Furthermore, dear readers, whether you are liberal, conservative, or independent, please indulge me in a simple thought experiment: Imagine the reaction if our previous president, George W. Bush, had lectured school kids about "quitting on the country" if they dropped out of school, or cautioned them to be careful what they put on Facebook, and to wash their hands and stay home if they were sick, as Obama did on Tuesday.

The president also said: ". . . the circumstances of your life – what you look like, where you come from, how much money you have, what you've got going on at home – that's no excuse for neglecting your homework or having a bad attitude. That's no excuse for talking back to your teacher, or cutting class, or dropping out of school. That's no excuse for not trying. Where you are right now doesn't have to determine where you'll end up."

Do you doubt that liberal Democrats would have skewered Bush for these sentiments? He would have been lampooned as a total square and lambasted for insensitivity, his patronizing attitudes, his family wealth, his own scholastic shortcomings, his youthful drinking . . . it's quite likely he'd have been labeled a racist.

Today, a different party controls the White House, and some Republicans – as Democrats did in Bush's day – routinely unleash rhetorical forces they cannot control. When angry Internet and radio talk show instigators whip up ratings (and rage) by claiming that the president of the United States is a Muslim socialist who was not really born in this country, well, that is not the kind of rhetoric than can be put back inside a bottle. And it comes at a cost, not just to its target, but to all of us.

By his second term in office, the phrase "Bush-hatred" had entered the lexicon. This malady, if that's what it was, took previous strains of the virus (i.e. Clinton-bashing) to new levels. Films and novels appeared with Bush's assassination as their theme. At least one "liberal" talk show host spoke approvingly of the idea – even imitating the sound of a gunshot. Edward Kennedy asserted that the war in Iraq was "cooked up in Texas" for political advantage, while another liberal senator (Jim Jeffords) asserted that Bush was planning a war in Iran as part of a plot to install Jeb Bush as the 44^th president. Media darling Cindy Sheehan, a Gold Star Mother who turned into a conspiracy theorist, compared Bush to Hitler and called him "an evil maniac."

It's true that wars have always ignited the passions of the citizenry in our democracy, but the weirdly personal anti-Bush material began showing up before he'd even been inaugurated, and it's clear that it was employed as a partisan ploy. The proximate grievance was the acrimonious Florida recount.

"The election was stolen," proclaimed Michael Dukakis. Former Army general and perennial candidate, Wesley K. Clark, told cheering Democratic audiences that he fought for democracy and free elections around the world only to witness "the taking" of the presidency here at home. "We won that election, and they stole that election," echoed Democratic Party chief Terry McAuliffe. "Bush is not our elected president," Gloria Steinem informed college students. "He took office due to fraud in Florida. He should be impeached."

All this, mind you, was before the U.S. invasion of Iraq. It was before 9/11. What was the nature of the "fraud"? Disenfranchising black voters, packing the Supreme Court, not counting the ballots . . . you name it. To his credit, I suppose, McAuliffe, for one, was candid about what he hoped to achieve by stirring up such anger: electoral success against the Republicans in 2002 and 2004. In fact, it took a little longer than that, but the invective employed against Bush proved to be hard to contain once it was launched. It was as if the Democratic leaders introduced a pathogen into the nation's political discourse that was toxic and communicable. And uncontrollable.

Today, a Democrat is in the White House, and he is getting some of the same treatment – with the same likely results. If Obama were a Muslim socialist who wanted the government to pay for euthanasia, but not chemotherapy, if he really wasn't eligible to be president because his entire life story was a fraud, if he truly were a kind of Islamic Manchurian candidate, well, then perhaps carrying guns to town hall meetings would make sense.

But he isn't, so it doesn't. Yet the ugly anti-Bush tactics – and now I'm talking to Republicans who might be reading this essay – are nonetheless now being imitated by conservatives. Partly, this impulse is motivated, as were the Democrats' attacks on Bush, by simple revenge. (Carrie Meek, a Democratic congresswoman from Florida, even once used that very word.)

Partly, it's motivated by the deep-seated feeling that conservative Republicans never get a fair shake in the press. I'm personally sympathetic to that argument, but in becoming exactly that which they profess to hate, Republicans are falling into an ancient trap. Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, writing in "Beyond Good and Evil," put it this way: "Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become one himself."

That passage ends with this thought: "And when you stare into the abyss, the abyss stares back at you." If the abyss in our case is an up-and-coming generation that is tired of politics-as-usual, perhaps we'll weather these storm clouds. Humor is a more civilized weapon than hatin', and taking good-natured potshots at Republicans was a popular pastime on Facebook this week. My son is a member of the Millennial generation, and he received this Facebook missive from one of his friends Tuesday: "Don't forget to pull your kids out of school today . . . the president might indoctrinate your kids with some crazy socialist ideas like stay in school and work hard!"

That was funny, at least to me, but the point here is a serious one. Republicans can either take it to heart or they can emulate what they consider the Democrats' worst traits; that's up to them. As for how they discuss Barack Obama, well, a wise sage from an earlier generation than mine, writer Willie Morris', put it this way in "My Dog Skip":
"Give a man a label," Willie's father said, "and you never really need to get to know him."