Exploring The Heart Of Darkness

David Corn's piece in Mother Jones today on the GOP 2012 field attacking President Obama for being the "other", the ultimate dangerous alien outsider, demonized at every turn as an America-destroying catalyst of evil, is one of the most important things you'll read this month, possibly this year.  Corn calls this "Otherism" and he's spot on in his analysis.

Anti-Obama otherists have wrapped themselves in the flag of American exceptionalism, contending that Obama is different because he doesn't believe that the United States is special and superior to other nations. Last summer, former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee, who at the time was mulling a bid for the GOP's 2012 presidential nomination, told Politico that Obama's "worldview is dramatically different than any president, Republican or Democrat, we've had… He grew up more as a globalist than an American. To deny American exceptionalism is in essence to deny the heart and soul of this nation." (In March, Huckabee, à la Gingrich, claimed, wrongly, that Obama had grown up in Kenya and had thus absorbed an anti-colonialist sentiment that prompted him to have a "very different view" of the British than "the average American.") In November, former GOP Sen. Rick Santorum, another 2012 wannabe, told College Republicans at American University, "America is exceptional, and Americans are concerned that there are a group of people in Washington who don't believe that any more."

This is exactly why I've been saying Birtherism is pure and simple dog-whistle racism.  Corn's "Otherism" is just the next stage in evolution of this concept, what the polite circles of the GOP use to describe Obama as "fundamentally not like the rest of us." And yet, it's far more than that. Otherism has been used against Democrats for decades now, against Clinton (he's not like us, he's poor trash from the Ozarks), Gore (he's not like us, he's an elitist hippie tree hugger), Kerry (he's not like us, he's a rich snob who played at being a war hero) and of course these days, against Obama.  Republicans have always pulled crap like this because it works.

But with Obama, the element of race gives it a whole new dimension.

The key audience for otherists, though, is not the general public. Obama, according to the polls, remains popular, even when voters disapprove of his policies or his handling of key matters. But many tea partiers and other conservatives do view Obama as an interloper and harbor deep fears about him and his agenda. GOP presidential contenders and party leaders need to appeal to these sentiments, and some, no doubt, seek to exploit them. Otherism offers a way to do so.

Unlike birtherism, otherism remains quite useful to the Republicans. Not even the adults of the party can resist its ugly temptations.

When you combine otherism with racism, the result is the frenetic, dangerous cottage industry we see today springing up and playing on the fear that our nation's first African-American president may be our nation's last president period.  Racism as fear has had a long and ugly political history in this country, but rarely has the disease been this acute.

This is the new Obama Derangement Syndrome...same as it ever was, if you think about it.