Depending on where you stand — or the given day — he is either an overintellectual, professorial wuss or a ruthless Chicago machine pol rivaling the original Boss Daley. He is either a socialist redistributing wealth to the undeserving poor or a tool of Wall Street’s Goldman Sachs elite. He is a terrorist-coddling, A.C.L.U.-tilting lawyer or a closet Cheneyite upholding the worst excesses of the Bush administration’s end run on the Constitution. He is a lightweight celebrity who’s clueless without a teleprompter or a Machiavellian mastermind who has ingeniously forged his Hawaiian birth certificate, covered up his ties to Islamic radicals and bamboozled the entire mainstream press. He is the reincarnation of J.F.K., L.B.J., F.D.R., Reagan, Hitler, Stalin, Adlai Stevenson or Nelson Mandela. (Frank Rich, NYT, April 4, 2010, It’s a Bird, It’s a Plane, It’s Obama!)
It would seem quite possible, if not likely, that if you scratch beneath the surface of the numerous anti-Obama factions you would, if determined, scratch into varieties of the real itch.
Even to scratch around in the web sites of the Tea Party territories is to learn sooner or later that one of the itchy spots is sparked by a lot of resentment. No–more than merely ‘a lot.’ This is viewable once one tugs away the various remixing of atrocious interpretations of history, the Constitution, and the religiosity of the sainted founders. It’s almost as if somebody wanted to build a paragon out of racist slaveholders.
