Seething Anger?

The McClatchy News Service called it “seething anger at President Barack Obama and his far-reaching agenda.”

Out they came, with signs and whistles, fife and drums, onto Pennsylvania Avenue. One sign read: Stop Obama’s Spending Spree. Another: The Greatest Communist President We Have Ever Had. And this: Save Freedom. Stop Obama.

No hyperbole there, eh?

Now, along with every other evil he stands for, Obama stands for the demise of freedom and liberty.

It’s easy to dismiss the tea baggers and anti-tax, small-government zealots as a sideshow, a gaggle of nitwits who have no idea why they took to the streets on September 12, but to do so would be to miss the larger picture. Something remarkable and scary happened last Saturday in Washington.

Verifiable facts and logic should render the anti-Obama protestors a short-lived circus act, too ridiculous to give a second thought. Right down the line these angry, boisterous people have it wrong: the deficits they decry belong to a conservative duo – George W. Bush and Dick Cheney, not Barrack Obama; Obama is not a Communist by any objective measure and to think otherwise is fantasy; nor is Obama leading the country into an era of socialism for if he was his Administration would have sought real regulation of the financial system rather than bending over backwards to preserve the Wall Street status quo.

What’s in play here is the power of the right-wing media establishment to whip up the American political fringe and goad it into action. Obama wants to take your guns away. Obama is a tax and spend maniac. Obama will place your health care in the hands of the Government and indoctrinate your children in the ways of Socialism. Obama isn’t really an American citizen.

This is the Right’s counter-attack from the stinging defeat it received last November, and the attack is succeeding because Barrack Obama and the Democratic Party cannot come up with a coherent counter-message that resonates with people. Only recently has Obama spoken about health care in terms of morality, which at its core is the crux of the issue. Our for-profit health insurance system is not only immoral – it also happens to be inefficient and ineffective for millions of people and a drain on the national economy. That’s the nuts and bolts of a compelling argument but Democrats would rather play defense against the ridiculous and false claims made by the GOP -- or speak in dry technical terms about slowing the rate of health care cost increases.

White people dominated the photographs I saw of the 912 protestors, making me wonder if what we’re seeing here is just a mass case of racism, a reaction against the fact that a black man occupies the White House. Is Obama merely a lightning rod for white people’s anger and fear? What exactly are they afraid of? The policies Obama has advocated thus far are so moderate in scope that racism can be the only reason that white people are “seething.”

While a particular segment of white Americans may be seething with anger and quaking with fear, I believe the large majority of us are simply waiting for the Barrack Obama we elected to show some leadership – and some backbone. I for one didn’t vote for a continuation of the status quo – I voted with the hope – tempered by the knowledge that politicians always fail us -- that Obama and a Democratic majority in Congress might overturn the worst excesses committed by the Bush-Cheney junta, including torture, domestic spying, extraordinary rendition, the failed conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan, and economic policies that favor the wealthy over working Americans.