The Polarizer-In-Chief

More on Them vs. Us
October 1, 2010

By Victor Davis Hanson

On the national level, Obama continues to attack his opponents as obstructionists without explaining how and why his agenda has made America better in the last two years. We are having no debate on whether the greater good is best served by a larger state or more individual freedom. Democratic congressional candidates are either running against the president or despite him. Very few of their campaign ads say, “I voted for nationalized health care, more stimulus, cash-for-clunkers, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor. Help return me to Congress to finish the job with card check, amnesty, cap-and-trade, and higher taxes on the rich.”

I guess they’re using a different playbook: on the national level, compare Republicans to the racist reactionaries of old that opposed abolition and civil rights, and on the local level unearth skeletons and nastiness — anything, in other words, except debate over the record of 2009–10.

The result is that President Obama, by design and deliberate intent, is proving to be the most polarizing figure in recent memory — widening the gulf between the parties, trying to rev up a small base by demonizing an oppositional counterpart, creating a them-vs.-us atmosphere among races and ethnic groups, and in the process embarrassing a captive media by proving that the hard Right’s once-shrill prediction that Obama would continue to be the polarizer he had always been, in the Alinsky, Ayers, and Reverend Wright mode, were, well, more or less prescient.


Barack Obama’s World of Them vs. Us
October 1, 2010

By Victor Davis Hanson

On his latest speaking tour, the president has continued to talk about a traditional midterm election — in which the country assesses the sitting administration’s agenda — as if it were some epic Manichean struggle, something akin to race relations: Jim Crow, civil rights, and now, most recently, the abolition of slavery. At best, Obama is implying that a referendum on his policies is of similar magnitude to an existential battle like the Civil War; at worst, he implies by analogy that he is the crusading abolitionist and his opponents the forces of slaveholding evil. And all of this from someone who campaigned on the notion of unity and national healing.

I’m sorry, but opposing higher deficits or cap-and-trade is not the same as denying someone civil rights, and Obama, the Ivy League graduate, is not a Susan B. Anthony or Martin Luther King Jr.

In Obama’s world, there is no such thing as legitimate skepticism of his policies, even though they seem to millions to be radical and contrary to the notions of limited government, lower taxes, and personal freedom, notions that have long set us apart from our Western constitutional cousins in Europe. Instead (as can be seen in his latest Rolling Stone interview), those who oppose his policies — from the tea-party groups that resent his background to that destructive force on the national scene, Fox News — represent darker forces.

Looking back at 20 months, we see this Nixonian them-vs.-us world in which good progressives battle against those who make more than $250,000 per year; greedy doctors taking out tonsils; police who stereotype and act stupidly; Arizonan xenophobes who snatch kids out for ice cream; Islamophobes who would deny constitutional rights to Muslim moderates at Ground Zero; and racists who have traditionally stood in the way (mutatis mutandis, as they do now) of freeing the slaves.

All this psychodrama is beneath a president. It is a prescription for tearing the country in two — and about the dumbest thing you could do just weeks before an election.