Table Of ContentTo Milo, Prairie, Django, Willow, and Silas.
What joy!
CONTENTS
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Presidents Under Fire
2. The “Othering” of Candidate Obama
3. The “Othering” of President Obama
4. The I Hate Obama Book Club
5. The Brothers
6. The Role of Media
Conclusion: Toward a Politics of Civility
Bibliography
Index
Also by Bill Press
About the Author
Copyright
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
It may seem like a lonely undertaking, but it’s not. Every nonfiction book is a
collaborative effort that builds and grows on the work of those who have plowed
the same ground before.
To that end, I thank especially my good friends at ThinkProgress, the
communications arm of the Center for American Progress. Editor-in-Chief Faiz
Shakir has built the Web site into one of the country’s most dependable sources
of information on public policy. And, simply by reporting the facts of their vast
political contributions, indefatigable researcher Lee Fang has made life hell for
the Koch Brothers—to which exercise I am only too happy to add my
contribution.
As they did with my last book, David Brock and his amazing crew at Media
Matters helped enormously, too. In addition to being a fierce media watchdog,
they pump out a steady, dependable flow of research for those of us in talk radio.
I’m proud again to publish with the imprint of Thomas Dunne Books. A
special word of thanks to Tom Dunne for his personal inspiration, insights, and
additions. Nobody loves or knows politics better. It’s a joy to work with Tom’s
associates Rob Kirkpatrick, Margaret Smith, Joe Rinaldi, Nadea Mina, and other
professionals at St. Martin’s Press.
My work is made easier every day by the outstanding assistance of producers
Peter Ogburn and Dan Henning and the support of colleagues Eric Burns, Karl
Frisch, and David Shuster.
For this, our sixth book together, thanks most of all to researcher Kevin
Murphy and agent and friend Ron Goldfarb. You could not ask for more
committed partners and collaborators.
And, as always, a special word of thanks to Carol.
INTRODUCTION
The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term
president.
—SENATE MINORITY LEADER MITCH MCCONNELL, OCTOBER 24, 2010
A NEW BEGINNING
Inauguration Day, January 20, 2009. For those who traveled to the nation’s
capital, as well as for those who watched at home, it’s a day we’ll never forget.
Washington had never seen a crowd so big or so happy.
An estimated 1.8 million people crowded in front of the United States Capitol
to witness the swearing-in of Barack Obama as the forty-fourth president of the
United States. The mass of humanity stretched from the western steps of the
Capitol all the way to the Washington Monument, a mile and a half away.
It was a bitterly cold morning, but nobody seemed to mind. There were smiles
everywhere. People greeted total strangers with hugs and high fives. Police
officers and National Guard troops, out in record numbers, got in the spirit of the
occasion. They smiled and posed for photographs with Obama supporters. To
help pass the time before the ceremony began, crowds broke out chanting “Yes,
we can” and “Fired up, ready to go!”—the signature slogans of the Obama
presidential campaign.
Indeed, there was magic in the air. For the first time, people sensed the reality
of the “hope” and “change” they had believed in and enthusiastically voted for.
And they understood they were participating in a very special event: not only the
inauguration of a new president but a young president, with a young family—
and, most significantly, 143 years after the end of slavery, America’s first
African-American president. Everybody knew they were watching history being
made.
But what few, if any, in that huge crowd on the Mall realized was that, at that
very hour, a different kind of history was also being made—and not so far away:
in the headquarters of the Republican National Committee, just south of the
Mall; in the offices of K Street lobbyists, just a few blocks north; and in the
corridors of the Capitol building itself.
Even while Barack Obama was taking the oath of office, conservative political
operatives were busy plotting how to bring down this new young president. They
embarked on a twofold agenda: not only to cause his entire political agenda to
fail but also to destroy him personally. To that end, they unleashed a barrage of
personal attacks and a litany of hate uglier than those directed against any other
president in modern times.
CHANGING THE TONE
There is nothing wrong or unusual about pursuing a different political agenda.
That is, after all, the job of the opposition party: to oppose.
Similarly, no president should be spared criticism. No president has. But even
if Barack Obama is not the first, nor the last, president to face such criticism, the
personal attacks directed against him, for whatever reason, have been more
relentless and uglier than those against any other president in our lifetime,
certainly any president since Abraham Lincoln.
It began during the presidential campaign of 2007 and 2008. It intensified
once he was in the Oval Office. And it only continues to accelerate the closer we
get to November 2012. In the past, the “loyal opposition,” whether led by
Democrats or Republicans, was usually conducted as a constructive, not a
destructive, response. With regard to any serious problem facing the nation, both
sides might have come up with different ideas on how to fix it, but they still
agreed there was a problem that needed fixing. They both had the same goal, just
different ways of getting there.
In order to balance the budget, for example, Democrats usually favored a
combination of taxes and spending cuts; Republicans insisted on spending cuts
alone. On immigration, most Democrats wanted to secure the border, while at
the same time providing some path to citizenship for millions of immigrant
families settled in this country for a long time; many Republicans simply wanted
to seal the border and send anyone here illegally back home. Everybody
understands that, in such a system, neither side gets everything it wants. Both
parties have to give a little, or compromise. Slowly, albeit imperfectly, progress
is made.
That’s how government works. Or rather, that’s how government used to
work. This was true no matter who was in the White House, and no matter
whether a Democrat or Republican was majority leader of the Senate at the time:
Bob Dole, George Mitchell, Howard Baker, Tom Daschle, or Trent Lott. After
each election, winners and losers sat down together, decided on the agenda for
the next session of Congress, and got down to work, solving problems.
Yes, that’s how it used to be. Not always, of course. Newt Gingrich, certainly
no Howard Baker kind of Republican, adopted a take-no-prisoners approach to
politics. And under his direction, Republicans started road testing a new, more
virulent form of opposition: trying to break the president—at that time, William
Jefferson Clinton—personally. They accused him of dubious crimes
(Whitewater) and even outright murder (Vince Foster), shutting down the
government if they could not have their way, plunging the United States into an
impeachment crisis, and forcing us all to sort through Clinton’s dirty laundry
once they had latched onto a sex scandal—evidence of which, alas, was only too
easy to find in Monica Lewinsky’s closet.
But however badly behaved the opposition was under Clinton—and let’s
remember, they were bad—things got even worse for President Obama. Never
before in U.S. history had so many on the Right insinuated that the president was
not even an American, or that he was a socialist, a fascist, a tyrant, or some
combination of all three. Never before had so many tried to claim the president
was illegitimate. Perhaps this was because they disagreed with him. Perhaps it
was because he was so popular and successful. Or, perhaps, it was just because
he was black.
From the very beginning of the Obama administration, Senate majority leader
Mitch McConnell and the then House minority leader, John Boehner, made it
clear they had a different agenda. Instead of working together on any issue, they
would automatically oppose anything President Obama or congressional
Democrats put forward—even if it happened to be legislation identical to
proposals previously submitted to Congress by President George W. Bush, which
they had enthusiastically supported.
Boehner made that point very dramatically in the first weeks of the new
administration. On January 9, 2009, he and other House leaders sent Obama a
letter, inviting him to meet with the House Republican Conference to discuss his
proposal to stimulate the economy and rescue the country from the brink of
depression. It’s important that we meet soon, they told Obama, “in keeping with
your campaign pledge to work in a bipartisan manner and change the partisan
tone in Washington, D.C.”
Much to their surprise, perhaps, their invitation was welcomed with an
“enthusiastic yes” by former House Democratic leader Rahm Emanuel, then
serving as Obama’s new White House chief of staff. The meeting date was set
for Tuesday, January 27. Hopes were high for changing “business as usual” in
Washington. Even Boehner rhapsodized that “the president is sincere in wanting
to work with us, wanting to hear our ideas, and trying to find some common
ground.”
Well, that’s what he was saying publicly. But as the then press secretary,
Robert Gibbs, recounted, Boehner was singing a different tune behind closed
doors. The morning of their meeting, before Obama had been offered a chance to
explain his economic package, even before he’d climbed into his limo for the
