The Secret Service is investigating a Facebook survey asking whether President Barack Obama should be killed. That's as the FBI probes whether anti-government sentiment was responsible for the death of a Kentucky U.S. Census worker found tied to a tree, his bureau ID duct-taped to his shoulder, and "fed" scrawled on his bare chest.
Are these arbitrary events, or more signs of the paranoia, distrust and even hatred of government and of the president that have been poisoning our political culture?
We've seen them in the bizarre reaction to Obama's plan to speak to schoolchildren; parents, denouncing indoctrination by the president, kept their kids home. We've heard the rumors that the president wasn't born here, is Muslim, or part of some plot to hurt America. They were given voice in angry town-hall meetings on health-care reform.
Hostility toward the federal government isn't new. The country witnessed it in the 1870s South during Reconstruction, and in the 1930s in response to FDR's New Deal. But this time, there's a different quality to it.
In both those cases, the fear and loathing was in response to a sea change in government policy. Until the New Deal, the federal government had played no role in social services. That generated "scurrilous charges that so and so was a Nazi and a Communist," according to Colin Gordon, chairman of the University of Iowa's history department. He sees parallels with "portraits of Obama with a Hitler moustache and a hammer and sickle."
But this time, Gordon observes, no radical change of direction is afoot. The Obama administration has largely continued previous administrations' policies on government bailouts and taxes. The health-care proposal represents, in Gordon's view "a very timid set of reforms."
"If the Obama administration got everything it was fighting for," he observes, "we wouldn't even be half-way where we were in the Eisenhower administration." He's referring to social and economic reforms scaled back since the 1970s.
During the two earlier anti-government periods, opposition came from people in the same political party as the leadership. This time, there's a partisan dimension to it, a political power play.
Gordon says Obama's is the first centrist-liberal administration to confront such deep-seated resistance. He thinks it has a Southern racial dimension:
"I don't think you'd have this kind of vitriol against Howard Dean or John Kerry, even if their policies were exactly the same."
On the one hand, it's a sign more people are actively engaged in public-policy debates. The Internet and 24-hour news cycles have created a public culture of politics that didn't exist before. But people are vulnerable to what Gordon calls "willful and cynical misrepresentation of basic policy." Any theory or notion, however far-fetched -- like killing the president -- can get a responsive audience within seconds. Things that might never have been said aloud now are repeated with impunity.
The administration is fighting a tough battle in this climate, where any proposal, however tepid, brings such backlash. It may be tempting for the president to step back from the agenda that got him elected.
But if he backs down, as he's been showing signs of doing, it will be a disservice to the public welfare. And it will show that cynical forces can win.
Obama has the chance to implement meaningful measures to better the lives of Americans, starting with health care. Yet with all the compromising going on, we could end up in the self-defeating situation of everyone being forced to buy insurance but no public option to bring costs down.
There's a critical window of opportunity here, and the president needs to hang tough and show he's not cowed by bullying.
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