Subtle Racism: GOP Relish Their Disrespect for President Obama

The GOP's total lack of respect of President Obama isis downright contemptible — if not unpatriotic. Such contempt, I'm convinced, is rooted in something other than political differences. Today, you might not see the overt actions of racist southern governors like Ross Barnett or George Wallace in the 1960s. But the presence of Jim Crow, Jr. — a more subtle form of racism — is there.

Sen. Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., the minority leader with the greatest cunning and sharpest knife, signaled his party's true purpose last year when he proclaimed: "The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president." It was not to undo the health care legislation Obama signed into law, or to block another debt limit increase. Even then, two years out from the next presidential election, the Alabama-born senator said the top goal of GOP lawmakers to oust Obama. What he didn't say is that the GOP would pursue that goal, even at the expense of the American people and the U. S. Economy.

House Majority Leader Eric Cantor, R-Va., has been especially relentless in the debt-ceiling fight. He attacked this first African-American president with a palpable disrespect not only for Obama personally, but also for his esteemed office.

Following what Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-Nev., called Cantor's "childish" display during a meeting with Obama, the House majority leader complained that the president had cut short the meeting and stormed out of the room. "He shoved back and said, 'I'll see you tomorrow' and walked out," Cantor snidely told reporters— as though the president needs his permission to end a White House gathering.

Frederick Douglass viewed such behavior as "an outrage upon the soul." In this present case it is the soul of our nation, which still struggles to get beyond the awful ripple effects of its haunting history of human bondage.

Mitch McConnell, John Boehner and Eric Cantor are the vanguard of a political force of a dying era — one that looks more like the nation's past than its future.

Obama is the second president of this millennium, but the first chief executive of the America of new possibilities — a multiracial, multicultural nation whose emergence the old order is working mightily to forestall in its desperate attack on his presidency.

Related articles

• Has Eric Cantor Overplayed His Hand? (usnews.com)
• Mitch McConnell: The Great Dismantler Bests Obama (huffingtonpost.com)