Joan Walsh argues that Obama’s decline in popularity is a product of racism and “political doubt his enemies have sown about his programs.”
Here is a key passage. See if you can follow along.
I wrote about the role race played in these ginned-up controversies at the time: Birthers and Deathers (who tended to be the same people) were focused on marginalizing Obama as scary, “the other.” Race was central to their fears, from the Birthers’ obsession with Obama’s literal origins as the product of miscegenation; to the Deathers and the Town Hellers’ insistence that healthcare reform was, in Glenn Beck’s idiotic formulation, Obama’s idea of “reparations” for slavery. The cries of “socialism” were just another way to mark him as “other,” scary and foreign. Watching scenes of shrieking, sobbing people pleading to “take our country back,” it was hard not to ask, From who? The president who got a larger share of the vote than Ronald Reagan in 1980 or George Bush in 2000? What exactly is it that makes this particular commander in chief an interloper?
Got it? The cries of “socialism” were just another way to mark him as “other,” scary and foreign.
Walsh backs off the racism argument toward the end of the article and opts for the “political doubt” explanation to account for resistance to Obama’s program. Even so, she still believes that a “subliminal racial discomfort” exists.
Update: Time corrected. Sorry about that.
