Bill Clinton was widely despised and reviled and, obviously, the Republicans went so far as to impeach him. He was accused of murder, corruption, sexual shenanigans of the consensual AND non-consensual varieties, and his wife was depicted as a bitch, a shrew, and a termagant.
Barack Obama is widely despised and reviled, too. He hasn’t been impeached, though he has only had a Democratic Congress to deal with. He’s been accused of murder (of his grandma, no less), corruption, sexual shenanigans with drug-addled dudes in limos, of being a foreign agent and a Muslim, and his wife is depicted as an ape.
I perceive a racial element to the hatred of Obama, and I don’t think many people would claim it isn’t there. But is Obama more hated? Are there more haters, or the same number but more virulent? Or are the real excesses of the Clinton haters being lost in the mists of time?
(I’m not remotely interested in discussing Bush, so if you wanna, make your own thread, please.)
I see your point, JS, but don’t qute agree. For some segment of our population, Obama’s blackitude is a crucial factor in their hostility. But not so many, and even less than in Horndog Bill’s term.
I think its more that they simply hate to lose. They nurture a central dogma, that they are, in truth, the majority. If they lose an election, some other factor must be at play, some skullduggery afoot. It wasn’t that long ago that Rove was promising them a permanent Republican regime, they could rest secure in that shining citadel on the hill.
Poof! Gone! What happened? They can’t have simply lost, America loves them. Must be ACORN, or George Soros.
But the public affection for Obama is palpable, and pees in their Cheerios every morning. So I don’t think, for the most part, that racism has much to do with their loathing for him. Besides, outside of the melanin content of his skin, he’s pretty much white. Maybe Colin Powell is whiter, but barely. In our post-racist America, a white attitude is more important than simply white skin. Bill Cosby is a lot whiter than Bill Hicks, Michelle Obama much, much whiter than Lady Ga-Ga.
Obama’s grandmother died on Nov. 4th, days before the general election. Some ridiculously small minority thought it was a ruse to generate sympathy votes, either claiming her death was faked or he had her murdered. Think on the level of “Sarah Palin isn’t the true mother of that baby” conspiracy.
Obama being accused of corruption is pretty easy. I can’t think of any real specific examples, but complains of “chicago style politics” are a common criticism against the man, which implies corruption and cronyism.
My favorite is Obama’s secret gay lover. More a tabloid thing than a right-wing thing, though. Check the supermarket checkout aisle next time, I think it’s still on the cover of this month’s magazines.
Many (relatively speaking to the other theories. Still a small minority of the population) are afraid Obama is a manchurian candidate placed by a secret Muslim cabal intent on making the USA less Christian. You really need a cite for this?
No idea on the wife, but black people = monkey humor is pretty easy to believe.
I think there is more hatred of Obama in part because the right wing media is more established due to the breakdown of the fairness doctrine resulting in a stronger right wing presence on AM radio and the establishment of fox news, both of which were fairly novel in the 90s.
Plus you have email smears always going around, and email didn’t really exist under Clinton.
So I think the change in communication technology is resulting in Obama being the recipient of far more conspiracy theories reaching a wider audience. People are easier to cement in their opinions due to media changing.
Race plays a role, but the fact that Barack Hussein Obama is easier to portray as an ‘other’ (a black person, Kenyan, Marxist, muslim, etc) makes him more hated. William Jefferson Clinton was a white guy from the south and harder to portray as an interloper and foreigner.
I also think there are some death throes coming from the right. The right is made up of white christians who are 50+. And the nation is rapidly becoming more secular, more non-white, and young people are far more socially & economically liberal than their parents. So I think the right sees 2006 and 2008 as the first shots of the war that is going to kill the right as they know it. The average talk radio listener and fox news viewer is about 66. I think O’Reillys viewers are 71. Hannity’s average about 65 (I think). Within 20 years almost all the teabaggers and audience of talk radio and fox news will be dead of old age, millennials (who supported obama 2-1 over McCain) will be in their 40s and about 1/3 of the electorate and non-whites will make up 40% of the electorate.
A lot of that stuff is standard on right wing message boards too. The Michelle Obama “ape” thing is ubiquitous in comment sections and on Free Republic.
You can google Larry Sinclair for the gay lover thing. Sinclair is a multiple ex-con and a con artist who poste a video on youtube claiming he gave Barack Obama a blow job in the back of a limo when Obama was still in the Illinois Legislature. His story was riddled holes, it changed over time, he’s never offered any evidence that he’s ever so much as met Obama or been with a 100 miles of him. He also failed a polygraph test after accepting a large sum of money to take one.
Despite all this, his story is till accepted as Gospel truth among the Freeper set.
Sinclair also has another story about Obama having something to do with the murder of a gay choir leader at Jeremiah Wright’s church. This story is also accepted as Gospel truth.
The Birther/secret Muslim stuff is well known enough that Sam cannot be sincere in asking for a cite for it.
The Clinton hatred wwas pretty bad, and the accusations got pretty outalndish (Jerry Falwell’s video accusing him of a string of murders, accusations that he was a drug smuggler, Vince Foster, the invented “troopergate” allegations, etc), but the ugliness has been turned up to eleven for Obama. A significant number of Republicans (I think it’s something like 25%) believe he’s literally the Antichrist. Huge numbers of conservatives also believe in the Secret Muslim shit, the birther shit, the death panels, that he hates white people, that he’s simultaneously a fascist, a nazi and a communist. And it’s not just fringe nutjobs either, it’s ekected Republicans propounding this shit. “Death Panels” cane from Sarah Palin. Michele Bachmann has accused him (among multiple other loony accusations) of wanting to set up concentration camps. The rehetoric is absurd. John Bohner said that Health Care Reform would “ruin the country.” Really? It’s going to literally ruin the country? What the fuck?
We also have the governors talking about segregation, Arizona wanting to check his birth certificate. The paranoia and irrational hysteria is unprecedented.
Ok, so we wouldn’t see any of this if Hillary was elected? She’s white after all.
Ok, so I presented a straw man. But I maintain that Hillary-hatred would be ramped up more than anti-Obama nuttery if she was elected Prez. But since modern conservatives have a limited attention span, she’s perfectly acceptable as Sec of State.
The real trick, btw, would be to reach back and report the wingnut stuff against Kennedy/Johnson in the 1960s. There was a lot of it, but it was marginalized because conservative nutjobs didn’t have the megaphone of talk radio and Fox News at the time. So the ability to jabber on about empty claims and accusations (eg. factually false talk of czars with felony records) was limited.
Carter might have been immune from this because he was from the South. But that sort of resistance was short-lived. Clinton was a Rhodes scholar good-government type from a small southern state, with finely tuned political intuition. Nonetheless, conservative hysterics still became jazzed up by all manner of empty accusation. There’s always been a paranoid fringe in American politics: the difference is that the left-wing stuff doesn’t get any traction in today’s America, while conservative derangement has a large and gullible captive market.
The difference is that the accusations against Clinton were more widespread and made it into mainstream conservative circles. The ones against Obama mostly look like, “Some guy on a comment board said this once.” I will grant that the birther nonsense rises to the level of some of the accusations against Clinton, but most of the others seem to be just what a few hotheads said on a board somewhere. By that standard, we can find hundreds of crazy accusations leveled at pretty much any politician.
Probably. There was a thriving Hillary-bashing cottage industry even before she was a candidate. Even as First Lady she came in for more visceral hatred than her husband. I never understood it.
BG, the same thing about feeling threatened by uppity people-of-a certain-type who don’t know their place, perhaps. What I don’t understand was the Hillary-bashing from within the Democratic party itself. We certainly saw enough of it in this very forum during primary season, and there’s no question about how damaging it was.
Well, I don’t believe that had any misogynistic element – not much of one, anyway. It was more of an intrapartisan class war between the center-right DLC establishment and the left-populist elements who were convinced (mistakenly) that Obama was one of them and this was their moment at long last. It certainly is true that, from the start, Clinton had a lot more big-money backing sewn up.
No, you’ve got that backwards. The stuff about Clinton was mostly from the lunatic fringe and talk radio. The Obama stuff is coming from elected Republicans and a major cable news network.
The hatred for Hillary would have been close. Near the beginning of the election, I though Hillary would end up getting more hostility bcause I thought (at the time) that sexism was still more alive than racism in America. Boy was I wrong.
I do think Hillary would have got close to the same levls of hatred, but she was never accused of not being American or of literally being Satan incarnate.
To that last point, she was accused on this very board of being “the fucking beast from Revelations”, you may recall.
A fair point about her being the DLC candidate vs. the so-called populist, but that was hardly the core of it. Distaste for the DLC, or for the economic and foreign relations success of the Clinton administration, has never run high among the Democratic party’s mainstream.
I have seen only two cartoons even hinting that Obama (either one)=any kind of ape.
And of course, for the sock monkey.
Compared to HOW MANY I saw of W=Chimp.
Jerry Falwell was hawking the Clinton expose’ tape that accused him of involvement in a string of deaths.
I don’t know what the Obama expose’ DVD claims, but the biggest name TV preacher I know who is hawking it is Jack Van Impe.
The specific anti-Obama accusations are pretty fringe. The anti-Clinton accusations were made by much more central figures on the Right- and the cases for Clinton as sexual predator & the central figure in a “circle of death” could be made to sound halfway credible.