Any person who objectively views the Republican response to the election of President Obama will have to admit that the GOP has never displayed such a virulent and overwhelmingly negative response to the election of any other Democratic president. While there was Republican opposition to other Democratic presidents (Roosevelt, Truman, Kennedy, Johnson, Carter, Clinton), it was based on political issues and never reached the heights of the hatred directed at President Obama.
They have tried to couch that hatred in political terms -- calling Obama a liberal, a leftist, a socialist. They have tried to brand him as being on the extreme left, but that is far from true. As a leftist myself, I wish it was true. But it isn't. When I supported and voted for Obama in both 2008 and 2012, I knew he wasn't a real progressive. I thought this country needed to elect an African-American, and I hoped progressives could push him to the left once he was elected (or re-elected). But that didn't happen. If anything, he moved slightly to the right in an effort to compromise with the Republicans.
The truth is that President Obama has also been a moderate, and remains so to this day. He has supported (and still supports) a war that a liberal would have ended long ago. He has engaged in drone strikes in countries we are not at war with -- something that is anathema to the left. He has done very little to curb the power of Wall Street and the giant corporations, to the disappointment of progressives. Even his signature achievement, the Affordable Care Act (Obamacare), was a disappointment for those of us on the left. While the GOP has tried to brand it as socialist, that is far from true. It is a capitalist and market-driven program, developed by Republican senators as an alternative to the failed effort at health care reform in the Clinton administration.
The truth is that President Obama is neither a politician of the left or the right -- and forty years ago, when the GOP was not so extremist, he could easily have fit in the Republican Party (except for his skin color). That's because his political views are much more reminiscent of a moderate like Dwight D. Eisenhower, than a true liberal like Franklin Roosevelt. I don't say that to insult the president. It is just the truth, and we should admit it. I actually respect both Eisenhower and Obama (although I would have liked for both to be more liberal).
So -- why the virulent hatred for President Obama by the current Republican Party? It all began in the mid-1960s, when Southern racists blamed (rightly so) Democratic President Lyndon Johnson for getting the civil rights laws passed. These racists blamed the Democratic Party for that, and they abandoned that party in droves. And the Republican Party accepted those racists with open arms -- resulting in a solid Democratic South becoming a solid Republican South. It became known as the GOP's "Southern strategy", and it worked well for them -- for a while.
But then President Obama was elected, and that "Southern strategy" was exposed as the racist abomination that it truly was. The Republicans found themselves being controlled by the racists in many states -- although there was an attempt to disguise this as a teabagger "movement". But these teabagger racists couldn't stand the fact that an African-American was president -- and when such pathetic things like "birtherism" failed to unseat him, they resorted to attacking his policies.
But they had a problem. His policies were moderate, and very middle-of-the-road. So they had to move their party to the extreme right, so they could claim Obama was to their left. This was done out of pure racist hatred, because Americans in general have not moved to the extreme right. In the past, party positions were dictated by the wishes of the public majority (and sometimes it was hard to determine party differences because of that). But this move to the extreme right by the current Republican Party was in opposition to a majority of the public. It was driven by a racist minority.
That's a sad commentary on today's Republican Party -- but I believe it to be the truth. Nothing else explains the virulent GOP hatred for a president with such moderate policies.
