Would Obama Incite Civil Unrest to Win?

By Daren Jonescu 

Is President Obama willing to incite civil unrest to win re-election?  As we have all been encouraged to wear our dog-whistle decoders these days, one can hardly be blamed for wondering.  Worse yet, we know the answer.  He is already doing it.

Please bear with me, as this topic requires considerable delicacy.

According to Rolling Stone, Barack Obama has now called Mitt Romney “a bull*******,” on the record.  His anger at the challenger was palpable — that is, carefully staged — during each of the last two presidential debates.  And he has made a central theme of his campaign the warning that a Romney presidency would erase all of the “equality” victories of the 1960s and ’70s.

Consider these typical words from his October 25 rally in Las Vegas:

You can choose to turn the clock back 50 years for women and immigrants and gays.  Or in this election you can stand up for the principle that America includes everybody. We’re all created equal — black, white, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, abled, disabled — no matter who you are, no matter what you look like, no matter where you come from or who you love, in America you can make it if you try.

This, to restate, is his message down the stretch: before the revolutionary uprisings of the 1960s, America only "included" white men.  Romney is a white man who wants to return to that time.  So if you are a woman, an immigrant, gay, black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American, or disabled, then you should not merely oppose Romney as a candidate who does not represent your interests; rather, you should fear him, as a man who wishes to eliminate you from the American portrait.

If Romney wins, and you are not an "abled" white male, America will no longer "include" you, according to Obama.  In less than two weeks, you are going to be reduced to second-class citizenship, your fortunes cast back to the bad old days of 1962, before radical feminism, the Nation of Islam, gay rights, the Black Panthers, free love, flag-burning, the "drug culture" -- and of course, before the days of America's first "gay," black, America-hating, drug-damaged, contraceptive-dispensing, progressive feminist Islamic-Christian president.

And now, after scowling at him through two debates, after his vice-president spent ninety minutes calling Paul Ryan a liar, and in the context of all this fear-mongering about the threat of a return to White Male America, Obama has branded his opponent a "bull*****er."

From Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman, this kind of remark might have been regarded as innocuous, albeit unpresidential.  From Obama, the Harvard genius with the well-creased pant leg, the bestselling author and master of political oration, it is an expression of bitter rage and supreme disdain.  And in an era when representatives of Obama's base are flooding Twitter with threats to assassinate his opponent, such heated rhetoric could be dangerous.

Anyone who wonders whether perhaps Obama just does not want to be president anymore should think again.  He wants to be president.  What he does not want is to have to exert so much effort to retain the presidency.  What he does not want is what Hugo Chávez does not want, what Vladimir Putin does not want, what Mahmoud Ahmadinejad does not want: a fair fight, an unobstructed challenger, an unintimidated electorate. 

It was so easy in the past.  Swept along on a wave of adulation and enthusiasm, protected by leftist media and academia, and helped out when necessary by an Axelrod-arranged scandal or two, Obama has barely had to lift a finger to gain political office and to climb the ladder.  Authoritarians do not understand why one should have to do so.

So he is angry.  And this anger has become central to his campaign strategy.  The fear he is seeking to inculcate among his base has an even uglier flip-side.  The Obama campaign is attempting to cast Romney and his supporters not as people with the wrong ideas, but as The Enemy.  In this circumstance, fear can easily give way to extreme outrage -- and perhaps to violence and intimidation.  This is particularly true when the target audience of this fear-inducing invective is ignorant, emotion-driven, and dominated in its thinking by entitlement greed, rather than by considerations of right and wrong.  Consider Sandra Fluke, Snoop Dogg, Occupy Wall Street, and student leftists (see examples).

When Harry Truman's daughter, a singer, was panned by critic Paul Hume, the sitting president wrote a letter threatening to bust Hume's nose if they ever met.  In 1950, however, none of Truman's supporters would have been inclined to do the dirty work for him, or even to take the whole thing seriously.  Needless to say, Obama's supporters are quite different from Truman's. 

Could Obama really be reduced to attempting to win re-election through mob protests and intimidation -- i.e., through a climate of fear?

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