Why Obama still drives Republicans nuts
Last week, a former president gave a speech in which he described the United States as a country dedicated to high ideals and striving to "form a more perfect union," and he called on Americans to support reforms that would help to ensure more equal representation for all. In response, members of the opposing party said that this former president was promoting "communist terrorist propaganda," and labeled him "cynical," "divisive and partisan," a "national disgrace," and "one of the sleaziest and most dishonest figures in the history of American politics."
I'm talking, of course, about Barack Obama's eulogy for civil rights icon John Lewis — and the unhinged reaction of right-wing journalists and media personalities to it. The context is what made that reaction so astonishing. We're three-and-a-half years into an administration defined by constantly dividing the country between those who support the current president and everyone else, who are often denigrated as haters and losers and "enemies of the people." More proximally, last week was one when Donald Trump suggested postponing the 2020 presidential election and promised (white) suburban voters that he would protect them from being "bothered" by poor people moving into their neighborhoods and lowering their property values. That was the context for Republicans taking offense at Obama for daring to suggest that "we can do better."
The eulogy never mentioned present-day Republicans. It included no reference to President Trump by name. Yet the reaction on the right to Obama was furious — just as it was during the entirety of his two-term presidency.
The contrast with how much of the right responds to Bernie Sanders is instructive. By every measure, Sanders is more ideologically radical than Obama and therefore much further away from the Republican Party on policy. Yet he doesn't inspire rage on the right like Obama does (or as the triangulating Bill Clinton did before him). Now, during the Democratic primary this was undoubtedly in part a result of a political calculation that Sanders getting the nomination would be good for the GOP in the general election. The right would surely have hit him relentlessly if he'd ended up becoming the Democratic nominee. And they would have done so even though Sanders' singular focus on economic issues makes him more difficult to engage in the culture-war terms favored by the right. (In Trump's hands during a general-election contest, the term "socialism" would have gone far beyond economics to take on all kinds of cultural resonance.)
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Obama, by contrast, doesn't know how to speak in any other rhetorical register than above and beyond the partisan fray. He invariably sounds reasonable, his tone fair-minded, objective. He speaks of the grand sweep of American history, renders Solomonic judgments, and looks down on the disputants on the field of battle, even as his proposals invariably advance the liberal-progressive side of the clashes taking place below him.
That is what drives — and has always driven — the right nuts about Obama. It's his supposed pretense to elevation, to speaking in dispassionate terms about "us," about what's morally righteous and true, and rendering sometimes severe moral judgments of his opponents. He's a master of using a rhetoric of elevation to ennoble himself and his allies while casting implicit moral aspersions on his political foes, whom he portrays as self-evidently dishonorable, all the while sounding as if he's merely reciting the indisputable facts of the case. His tone at all times is that of a disapproving parent: You should be ashamed of yourselves.
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