Obama: Why he’s so hated

If you listen to the people who despise him, said E.J. Dionne Jr. in The Washington Post, President Obama is either a secret Muslim with “a Kenyan, anti-colonial worldview,” or a snobby, overeducated elitist. Now, politics is a rough game, but why does Obama continue to be “the object of the most extraordinary paranoid fantasies”? In reality, Obama is “a garden-variety American who plays basketball and golf, has a remarkably old-fashioned family life, and, in the manner we regularly recommend to our kids, got ahead by getting a good education.” He’s a political pragmatist who routinely angers liberals. The Dow, not incidentally, just hit 13,000—up from 6,547 in 2009. How did the economy bounce back, if Obama is a commie who hates America?

Obama’s America is not the one I want to live in, said Jeffrey Kuhner in The Washington Times. Despite his claim to be a “postpartisan pragmatist,” the real Obama once belonged to a church led by the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a black liberation theologist, and Obama himself once mocked Americans who “cling to guns or religion.” During his presidency, he’s pursued nothing less than a “government-imposed social revolution” to seize control of the health-care system, advance the gay and lesbian agenda, crush religious freedom, and remove all “restraints upon the federal leviathan.” It is hardly name-calling to point out that Obama believes “the role of the state is to redistribute wealth and level out differences,” said Peter Wehner in CommentaryMagazine​.com. His policies are clearly designed to “punish wealth creators, empower unelected bureaucrats, undermine private enterprise, and centralize power.” That’s why conservatives view the prospect of a second term with terror.

That fear is not hard to understand, said Jonathan Chait in New York. With every presidential election, the percentage of the minority vote grows by 2 percent, and the Republican base is shrinking. In 30 years, whites will be a minority. Obama embodies conservatives’ fear that they will soon be ruled by people unlike them—a growing Democratic constituency that is “more racially diverse, better educated, less religious, and more socially and economically liberal.” No wonder they see the 2012 election as a critical turning point in history. The title of influential conservative Sen. Jim DeMint’s new book says it all: Now or Never. Obama’s presidency has made Republicans “truly fear, for the first time since before Ronald Reagan, that the future is against them.”