Perhaps part of the public anger against President Barack Obama has to do with the fact that he is different in every way from his predecessors. He is an unflappable, charismatic, intellectually gifted Black man whose down-to-earth folksiness is a sharp departure from the traditional aloof American presidential mold. This break with tradition has ruptured the comfort level of the American people and angered the neo-conservative base of the Republican Party just as it has irked the southern soccer mums and the Red Neck elements in the Democratic Party. This kind of change is exceedingly difficult to swallow, let alone embrace, because it turns years of "American tradition" on its head.
The manifestations of anger and rage in the American public discourse is likely to rise to new and higher decibels as we go into the 2010 mid-term elections and as Republicans believe that saying "no" to everything that Barack Obama and the Democrats try to do is great public policy. They arrogantly believe that a gullible, angry and confused American public, dumbed down by cable TV and talk radio, will blindly, as dumb driven cattle, dump Obama and put in office an angry, white president. Perhaps they will be in for a rude awakening that times have changed and like it or not the old, reactionary and backward playbook, no matter how revised and re-packaged, just can't work in a 21st century America.
1 | 2
