When the entertainers of the Right aren't declaring their disgust with President Obama for groveling before foreign potentates, they're pretending to fear him as a left-wing thug, an exemplar of what they call 'the Chicago way.'
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
There's something about Barack Obama that induces Americans to imagine what they cannot see. The Right envisions a vile socialist, while many on the Left picture an inspired liberal, politically restrained in his first term but now free to pursue his true beliefs.
Obama's ascendancy unhinged the radical right, offering a unified target to competing camps of racial, nativist and religious animus.
It's not about Obama, it's about the Democrats and their policies that cause consternation on the right.
The scary thing is a dramatic erosion of American position in the world - its economic, military position, as well as America's influence. Obama is not the man at the wheel desperately trying to conserve American power, influence and wealth. For ideological reasons, he wants the slipping to continue. He's actually the architect of it.
The rap on Obama has been that he is a little too cool and aloof. The rap on Romney may be that he is just plain callous.
There was a lot of feeling that with an African-American president, life on the South Side of Chicago would be radically different.
Obama's personality traits, coupled with his extreme-leftist agenda, make him particularly dangerous to the American ideal and to the preservation of our founding principles, as well as to the liberty and prosperity they guarantee.
What people forget is that the most radical thing about Obama is that he was the first black man in history to imagine that he could become president, who was able to make other Americans believe it as well. Other than that, he is a centrist, just like I try to be. He's been bridging divisions his whole life.
It's as if inside the White House the belief in Obama's inspirational charisma is still such that every time the ugliness of brute politics intrudes, it's a startling revelation.
We saw Jesse Jackson the victim of a smear campaign. People remember the Dean scream that was used against Howard Dean as a peace candidate who was doing well. So, in many ways, the Democratic Party creates campaigns that fake Left while it moves Right and becomes more corporatist, more militarist, more imperialist.