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Chapter 12
‘Not One of Us’: Barack Obama, the ‘Paranoid Style’, and the Polarization of American Politics

Kevern Verney

Some events are so momentous as to be unforgettable. The election of Barack Obama as the first African American president of the United States on 4 November 2008 was a moment in history that will remain an enduring, lifelong memory for many of the millions of onlookers who witnessed it, whether in the United States or via international news coverage. Fifty years after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, on 22 November 1963, people around the world old enough to have personal memories of the president’s death are still able to recall where they were, and what they were doing, when they first heard news of the tragedy. It does not seem unreasonable to suppose that, 50 years after Obama’s first election to the White House, surviving witnesses of the occasion will similarly be able to recall how, and when, they first witnessed the images of his victory speech in Grant Park, Chicago, on that memorable autumnal evening.

Obama’s re-election in 2012 was, by comparison, a more muted event. The return of any incumbent to the White House, perhaps inevitably, invokes a less dramatic and exciting atmosphere than that created by their first victory. For any individual the intervening four years in office leads to the feeling of a break with the past giving way to a sense of familiarity, and expectations being tempered by the recognition that politics is the art of the possible. In the words of former New York governor, Mario Cuomo, politicians ‘campaign in poetry’ but ‘govern in prose’.[1]

Such was the case with Obama. In 2008 his bid for the presidency generated excitement and euphoria not just in the United States but around the world. In particular he seemed to articulate the hopes and thoughts of a generation of first-time voters, creating a feeling that anything and everything was possible. Inheriting a set of problems greater than those confronting any incoming president in living memory – including the worst economic crisis since the 1930s and not one but two unresolved foreign wars, in Iraq and Afghanistan – it was always going to be impossible for Obama to meet such expectations. His 2012 re-election campaign was, unsurprisingly, more pragmatic and realistic, both in respect to what had actually been accomplished and also as to what would be achievable during a second term of office.

Despite this more sober mood, and the inevitable sense of disillusionment created during the intervening four years, Obama’s global popularity remained remarkably high. A poll of 21,797 people around the world conducted by the BBC World Service between 3 July and 3 September 2012 found that 20 of the 21 nations included in the survey favoured the re-election of Obama over his Republican challenger Mitt Romney. Pakistan was the only country in which the former Massachusetts governor enjoyed a poll lead, and that with the support of just 14 per cent of respondents compared to 11 per cent for Obama, with the remaining 75 per cent of people questioned either undecided or expressing no preference for either candidate. In the survey as a whole an average of 50 per cent of respondents favoured an Obama victory, compared to just 9 per cent in favour of Romney, and the remainder expressing no preference between the two men.[2]

In a parallel survey undertaken in the heady days of 2008, Obama had admittedly performed slightly better, enjoying leads over John McCain in all 23 countries included in that poll. By 2012 Obama had suffered a significant falling off in levels of support in some of the 15 nations included in both surveys. In Kenya the 87 per cent of respondents who had favoured him in 2008 dropped to 66 per cent four years later, and in China and Mexico there was a decline in support from 35 per cent to 28 per cent of respondents and 54 per cent to 43 per cent of respondents respectively. Nonetheless, the lead over his Republican opponent remained commanding, with support for Romney peaking at just 18 per cent in Kenya. In seven nations – France, Brazil, the United Kingdom, Panama, Indonesia, India, and Turkey – the level of support for Obama actually increased in the 2012 survey in relation to its 2008 predecessor. Moreover, Obama performed particularly well in Western democracies that might be seen as, socially and politically, having the most in common with the United States. The level of public support for Obama in Canada, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom thus ranged from 64 per cent to 72 per cent of respondents in 2012 compared to just 2 per cent to 9 per cent of respondents who favoured Romney, and an increase on the 59 per cent to 69 per cent of respondents in those countries who had favoured Obama in the 2008 survey.[3]

Such statistics are at odds with the findings of most opinion polls undertaken within the United States in the closing months of the 2012 election campaign which consistently pointed to a close-fought race. In the event, Obama’s tally of 51 per cent of the total vote in the November election, compared to 47.3 per cent for Romney, thwarted Republican hopes of a shock victory and demonstrated that the president did, after all, command the support of a small, but clear, majority of voters at the polls. Nonetheless, the differences between the levels of domestic and international support for the president remain striking.[4]

This essay explores these contrasting responses to Obama. It argues that the negative perceptions of the president in the United States can be attributed to two factors. Firstly, they reflect continuing racial divisions within American society. Although the overt expression of racial prejudice is no longer acceptable in mainstream political discourse it is manifested in coded language and rhetoric. Specifically, this takes the form of the repeated claims made by Obama’s detractors that for a variety of reasons, ranging from supposed doubts as to his place of birth and religious beliefs through to his alleged lack of patriotism, he is in some way not truly American.

Secondly, it will be suggested that the vehemence of the domestic hostility to Obama needs to be seen in the context of what historian Richard Hofstadter claimed to be a paranoid tendency in US political life. This, he argued, is a recurring phenomenon in the American historical tradition, particularly at times of economic crisis or heightened ethnic and religious tensions, all of which exist in the present-day United States.

The sense of disparity in domestic and international responses to Obama is reinforced by the intensity of much of the opposition directed against him within the United States. Within a week of his re-election so-called secession petitions were launched by residents of Texas, Louisiana, Alabama, and five other states calling for their home states to be allowed to withdraw from the Union rather than face the prospect of a second Obama administration. Admittedly, this constituted only a small proportion of the electorates in the states concerned and even the most popular petition, in Texas, only attracted the support of some 100,000 signatories. Nonetheless, the very existence of the secession movement was itself notable as a phenomenon not seen in the United States since the election of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.[5]

Given this historical precedent there is a degree of irony in the fact that both in the mainstream media, and his own carefully presented self-image, the president whom Obama is most often compared with is Lincoln. In common with Lincoln, Obama also shares the unfortunate distinction of being one of the most publicly vilified presidents during his term of office with both men being caricatured as apes by journalists and political opponents. By the end of his first term of office at least 67 bestselling anti-Obama books had been published within the United States.[6]

Beginning with Jerome Corsi’s The Obama Nation: Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality (2008), the conclusions presented in such works, or to be more accurate, assertions, for they typically put forward little in the way of serious argument to support them, ranged from claims that the president was a covert communist to suggestions that he was an empty media creation, or simply lacking the political insights and character attributes needed to be president. Frequently intellectually weak and contradictory, these publications were invariably strident and alarmist in tone. They were also often highly personalized and offensive in their depictions of Obama, as reflected in such titles as Aaron Klein and Brenda Elliott’s The Manchurian President (2010), Mike Cullen’s Whiny Little Bitch (2012), and Edward Klein’s The Amateur (2012).[7]

In the case of some commentators, the use of such emotive and partisan language reflected the idiosyncratic nature of their political views, or more calculating objectives of media self-promotion and easy book sales to diehard right-wing audiences. At the same time, that their works attaininged bestseller status was testimony to the fact that they struck a sympathetic chord with large sections of US public opinion. In terms of serious political organization, this phenomenon was highlighted by the emergence of the so-called Tea Party movement as a nationwide grassroots opposition to the Obama administration within months of the president taking office.

By April 2009 more than 1.2 million Americans had attended Tea Party meetings, and by 2012 there were more than 3,500 Tea Party chapters across the United States. Albeit stopping short of seeking recognition as an independent political party, the movement enjoyed considerable influence within the Republican Party by endorsing candidates for office who most closely identified with its views. In this vein, during the 2012 Republican primary campaign the hitherto largely unknown Rick Santorum emerged, at least for a while, as a serious alternative to the better financed and more mainstream candidacy of Mitt Romney. Santorum’s strident anti-Obama rhetoric was one factor that contributed to this success, as reflected in his startling claim made on 25 March 2012 that the president’s re-election ‘would be the end of freedom’.[8]

The intensity and widespread nature of domestic opposition to the president, as reflected in the anti-Obama literature, the Tea Party movement, and the close-run 2012 election campaign, raises the question as to why perceptions of Obama within the United States are so different from those in the wider international community. One possible explanation is the persistent and enduring nature of historic racial prejudice in American society. The validity of such a claim would appear to be reinforced by the allegations of racism against the Tea Party movement by leading Civil Rights organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Moreover, the 2012 election also demonstrated a continuing ethnic divide with Obama receiving the backing of less than 40 per cent of white voters. Both in 2008 and again in 2012 he performed worst among white voters in states with a history of racial conservatism, most notably in the Deep South.[9]

In the euphoria that surrounded Obama’s election in 2008, it is ironic to recall that a number of political and media commentators hailed his victory as proof that the United States had become a post-racial society. Four years on there were few, if any, serious scholarly researchers prepared to support such a claim. This shift in perception can be explained by a number of factors. In the first instance, a number of highly publicized and well-documented race-related incidents during Obama’s first term of office highlighted the continuing importance of race in American society. These included the 2009 arrest of African American Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates on suspicion of trying to break into his own home; a series of racially charged references to, and representations of, President Obama himself and First Lady Michelle Obama in the media; the 2010 dismissal and re-hiring of an African American federal government employee, Shirley Sherrod, over incorrect allegations of racism against her; and the 2012 shooting of a black teenager, Trayvon Martin, in Florida and the subsequent acquittal of the white neighbourhood watch volunteer who killed him.[10]

The aftermath of Obama’s 2008 election victory saw a significant rise in the levels of traffic on race hate websites and his first term of office was marked by a disturbing increase in the incidence of racially motivated crimes across the nation. Social and economic indicators of prosperity and wellbeing highlighted major inequalities between the life prospects of white Americans and those of African Americans and Latinos. In comparison to their white counterparts, members of the latter groups were less likely to benefit from a college or university education, more likely to be arrested or serve time in prison, be paid lower incomes throughout their working life, receive lower standards of health care, and die at an earlier age. The president himself drew attention to such disparities in his writings and speeches. Indeed, the cumulative evidence of a continuing racial divide in American society was such as to lead one scholarly commentator to conclude that ‘one of the main challenges facing future historians will be to take seriously the vogue for postracial rhetoric during the 2008 election cycle’.[11]