Having failed to defeat Bill Clinton in 1992, the Republicans sought to discredit him as a leader. As the first Democrat elected to the White House since 1976, he had broke an 12-year winning streak by Republicans.
This, in turn, made him a usurper in the eyes of Republicans generally. If they could not prevent him from reaching the White House, perhaps they could reduce him to impotence by destroying his legitimacy as President.
Republicans pressed for a special prosecutor to investigate a failed Arkansas land deal called Whitewater. But, over time, they kept adding new subjects for investigation, hoping at each turn to find a way to secure his indictment.
In January, 1998, news broke of Clinton’s affair with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Republicans saw a chance to drive him from the White House via impeachment. But their effort failed, and Clinton served out the rest of his term.
Republicans won the White House in 2000, and again in 2004. But in 2008 the prospect of a black man becoming President frightened and infuriated not only many Republican leaders but their rightist supporters.
Republicans encouraged right-wing groups to spread the word that Obama was not born in Hawaii, but in Kenya. The purpose of this was to strip Obama of legitimacy as a leader.
Republican supporters–brandishing photos of President Obama painted with a Hitler forelock and toothbrush mustache–have claimed he intends to set up concentration camps for those who disagree with him.
Newt Gingrich, the former Republican Speaker of the House, charged that Obama was pursuing a socialist agenda via his legislation to reform healthcare and provide an economic stimulus to the stalled economy.
In his book, To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular-Socialist Machine, Gingrich claimed that Obama’s policy agenda was as “great a threat to America as Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.”
On April 20, 2010, BP’s Deepwater Horizon oil rig exploded and sank about 40 miles southeast off the Louisiana coast. The resulting oil spill pumped millions of gallons of crude oil into the Gulf of Mexico.
When Obama began taking a tough line with BP, Rand Paul, the Republican candidate for Senator from Kentucky, declared the President was “really un-American in his criticism of business.”
Almost immediately after Obama took the oath of office, he came in for demonization by an industry of anti-Obama books by right-wing authors. The views they sought to popularize about the President can be quickly gleamed by a review of their titles:
• Conservative Victory: Defeating Obama’s Radical Agenda by Sean Hannity
• The Manchurian President: Barack Obama’s Ties to Communists,Socialists and Other Anti-American Extremists by Aaron Klein
• The Blueprint: Obama’s Plan to Subvert the Constitution and Build an Imperial Presidency by Ken Blackwell
• Catastrophe: How Obama, Congress and the Special Interests Are Transforming…a Slump into a Crash, Freedom Into Socialism and a Disaster into a Catastrophe….And How to Fight Back by Dick Morris
• The War On Success: How the Obama Agenda Is Shattering the American Dream by Tommy Newberry
• Power Grab: How Obama’s Green Policicies Will Steal Your Freedom and Bankrupt America by Christopher C. Horner
• How the Obama Administration Threatens to Undermine Our Elections by John Fund
• Obama’s Radical Transformation of America: Year One by Joshua Muravchik
• Fleeced: How Barack Obama, Media Mockery of Terrorist Threats, Liberals Who Want to Kill Talk Radio, the Self-Serving Congress, Companies That Help Iran, and Washington Lobbyists for Foreign Governments Are Scamming Us…and What to Do About It by Dick Morris
(Morris’ book, Fleeced, contains possibly the longest subtitle of any political book since Adolf Hitler wanted to call his autobiography: Four and a Half Years of Struggle Against Lies, Stupidity and Cowardice. Knowing that so long a title would be a disaster, Hitler’s publisher settled for Mein Kampf, which, in German, means “My Struggle.”)
Increasingly, Republicans have repeatedly aimed violent–and violence-arousing–rhetoric at their Democratic opponents. This is not a case of careless language that is simply misinterpreted, with tragic results.
Republicans like Sarah Palin fully understand the constituency they are trying to reach: Those masses of alienated, uneducated Americans who live only for their guns and hardline religious beliefs–and who can be easily manipulated by perceived threats to either.
As Adolf Hitler, the master of 20th century propaganda advised in Mein Kampf: “Such being the case, all effective propaganda must be confined to a few bare essentials and those must be expressed as far as possible in stereotyped formulas. These slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea that has been put forward.”
Thus, Palin and her fellow Republicans repeatedly use code-words like, “Don’t retreat, reload,” and draw up maps showing Democrats targeted with cross-hairs. (The map, posted on her website at “SaraPAC,” was taken down only on the day of the shootings.)
They know full well that there’s a good chance those words and images will take root in the hearts of such an unacknowledged constituency. And this, in turn, gives Republicans a chance to win with the bullet what they could not win at the ballot box.
