Race, ideology and Obama as worst president

MIAMI – Who is the worst U.S. president since WWII?

If you believe the results of a new poll by Quinnipiac University, the worst president in more than fifty years is…Barack Obama.

The poll found that 33 percent of respondents said Obama is the worst, followed by George W. Bush with 28 percent. Nixon came in third. What about the much-maligned conservative whipping boy Jimmy Carter? Only 8 percent thought he was the worst. And who were judged to be the best? Would you believe two odd bedfellows, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton?

Republicans and other right-wingers are ecstatic. After all, that is what they have been spouting all along. On a slow news Fourth of July weekend, the mainstream media have been disseminating the poll far and wide. Most of the commentary has centered about the reasons for Obama’s dead last ranking. Is it the slow recovery in the economy and the scarcity of jobs? How about the disintegration of Iraq, the chaos in Syria, or the massive flow of undocumented and unaccompanied minors across the border?

Although these factors have undoubtedly adversely affected public opinion regarding Obama, most of this commentary is beside the point. Those are not the main reasons for these bizarre findings. Even some of the more critical pundits have merely pointed to factual but superficial reasons. For instance, when confronted with this type of question, the public generally has ranked whoever is in power at the time as the worst president.

Bad memories tend to fade and a halo generally tends to settle upon the heads of many presidents who suffered low public esteem while they were in office. Nixon, the only president forced to resign, is a partial exception.

But the central reasons a third of the public sees Obama as worst president has more to do with race and ideology than with current events or human psychology. Heck, arguably at least a third of the country hated and mistrusted Obama before he was elected. In person-on-the street media interviews during the campaign, many people had no qualms in declaring that they would never vote for a black president.

Race still counts a lot in American politics. The GOP leadership is lily-white. The Deep South is the strongest Republican base. If only white people had voted in 2004 and 2008, Obama would have been easily defeated. The massive minority vote put Obama in the White House to the chagrin of a majority of whites who voted against him. Few have become reconciled with that reality.

Then there is the fact that, rhetorically and to some degree substantively, Obama is the first progressive to win the White House since 1964. LBJ’s election in that year took place during the lowest point for popularity of the so-called conservative movement. Since then, with considerable aid from think tanks lavishly funded by rich conservatives and outright reactionaries, right-wing ideology has captured the hearts and minds of far-too-many Americans as well strongholds of power, including the Supreme Court, the House of Representatives and, to lesser extent, the Senate.

By blocking Obama’s agenda across the board, these forces have been working from the first day to make Obama’s president a failure and an object lesson for liberals and progressives. The right was aided by the fact that Obama inherited from his predecessor disasters on a number of fronts. Faced with the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, Obama was only able to extract from Congress a relative puny economic stimulus package, far short of what was needed for a fast and vigorous recovery. Republicans then turned around and blamed Obama for the country’s economic malaise.

The GOP and conservative business interests were unable to stop the president altogether on health reform, but they forced him to settle for a program that kept the insurance companies in the driver’s seat and is so complex it is easy to lampoon. Still, as far as it goes, the evidence is that Obamacare has caught on better than the right predicted and hoped for. Obama deserves credit for enacting the first social reform in decades, albeit a modest one, in the teeth of implacable Republican intransigence. For the right, however, Obamacare is the sum of all the president’s evils.

On the foreign front, the Bush administration handed Obama no-win situations in Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama erred in trying to salvage the unsalvageable. But had he pulled out all the troops on day one, the right would have savaged him, just as he is being savaged today. But the cost in U.S. lives and treasure would have been less and the outcome would not have been very different from what is happening on the ground now.

For the racist and the right-wing ideologues who easily make up a third of the U.S. population, Obama can do no right no matter what he does. Moreover, as a black president elected on the strength of his popularity among minorities, he can’t help but confront conservative whites with the reality of the new America that is just dawning and whose birth they abhor.

In addition, by at least attempting, however tentatively, and sometimes succeeding in governing as a progressive, Obama challenged if not quite shattered the right’s dream of a permanent, ever-more conservative majority.

Before Obama, the right believed that the long arc of history would inexorably and forever bend in their direction. In Obama’s election, the right foresaw the possibility that the arc was starting to bend in the opposite direction. They were shocked, furious, in the mood for vengeance. It is for giving them such a rough and rude reality check that the right can never forgive Barack Obama.