1 in 5 Americans STILL think Obama is a Muslim

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He's different in that there's never been a President like him -- he came into the race branding himself as different from the status quo -- he got a lot of play from being different. There's a downside to being different. He rolled the dice and got elected. We'll see if he can do it again in 2012. I think he has a fair chance -- he won't win it in a landslide, but a lot of moderates are still bitter as hell over the Bush years and might not be over it yet.

 

Then what, specifically, were you talking about? If you weren't talking about people thinking he is a Muslim/Kenyan/Communist, what exactly were you referencing?

 

The general feel. I think there are a lot of people who can't adequately define their 'the One' or 'not the One' feeling, but they feel it nonetheless. Obama is either you're dream come true (even if you never dreamed of, let's say, a black president) or he's the exact antithesis of it.

A few people may be honest and say it's because he's black (on both sides), and a few people may be honestly able to say it's the politics (on both sides), but I think a lot of Americans can't quite put a finger on it.

 

Spoken, from an outsider's perspective I don't really buy the bi-polar perception about Obama. "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views,” Mr. Obama wrote in “The Audacity of Hope. That is probably very true.

On that blank screen people can as much project their hopes as their conscious and subconscious fears (of 'The Other', people of colour, of Islam, of the imminent Islamic Progressive Socialist Liberal Communist takeover of the US etc.) and/or their diffuse, undirected anger about a poor economic situation. The GOPers masterfully (and unscrupulously) exploit that. I really think it is primarily projection above anything else.

I for my part have never expected that Obama would greatly change course as far as foreign policy is concerned. He is an American president after all, and interested what (probably wrongly and extensively) is defined as 'the American Interest'. Although, I admit I was starting to doubt that and became optimistic after his Cairo speech. That optimism is now gone. Obama is as much a prisoner of the AIPAC Lobby as Bush was.

 

You know, I think presidents that have branded themselves as outsiders, campaigning against the status quo, might be the majority . Surely Obama isn't the only "first" to get the White House either. Does anyone remember if JFK (first catholic, right?) had the same issues?

 

I believe that's very true as well. Nevertheless, he started out with an over 70 percent approval rating. The good will of a majority of the people was with him in the beginning, regardless of the fact that he was black. Yeah, there was that small percentage that hated him because he was black, and America had a "black president," (the "we want our country back crowd"), but for most Americans race wasn't an issue. Now people are angry.

The thing to notice about all this, is that the Republican party establishment is in shambles as well; it's not just the Dems. A lot of the anger is directed at the "business as usual" crowd in Washington. It's not just the economy. It was this bad in the 1980s and there was not this kind of anger. It will be interesting to see how this plays out, because all that anger is going to meet reality after November. Rhetoric can only take you so far, and eventually there has to be ideas on policy. That's what I'm waiting to see.