Bringing outrage to a new level

One thing hasn't changed in the Age of Obama: Presidents who try big things face a big backlash.

Scenes of gun-toting protesters and swastika-wielding demonstrators speak - loudly - to the passions stirred by President Barack Obama's attempt to refashion the country's health-care system, after having already engineered a vast intervention in the sagging economy.

Some of the antagonism is undoubtedly race-related.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, which tracks hate groups, reports a dramatic surge in the anti-government ranks of the militia movement over the past year or so, when Obama emerged as a favorite to become the first black president. Threats against Obama have increased 400 percent since he took office, according to Ronald Kessler, an investigative journalist who has written a book on the president's protective corps, the Secret Service.

Clearly, this president has set off a real rage, said Mark Potok, who directs the Southern Poverty Center's Intelligence Project. Certain people look around and see this is not the country their white Christian forefathers built and they are angry. They look at the president, see a black face and it reminds them of everything that has changed, in many of their minds for the worse.

But racism, itself an incendiary charge, accounts for only a part of the push back.

As presidential scholars point out, the law that governs the natural world -every action has an equal and opposite reaction - also applies to the world of politics.

All the presidents whom we view as important faced ferocious and vituperative criticism, even (George) Washington, said George C. Edwards, a presidential expert at Texas A&M University. When you challenge interests, or at least seem to upset the status quo, interests respond. The bigger the threat to their interests, as they see it, the more fierce the criticism.

It is certainly unsettling to see protesters wave Nazi insignia and signs depicting the president with Adolf Hitler's mustache. The anger -one man was arrested last week outside a Hagerstown, Md., health-care forum holding a sign reading Death to Obama - seems all the more menacing given the president's skin color and the country's violent history of racial tension.

Yet the demonstrations break no ground in either poor taste or hyperbole. President George W. Bush was routinely portrayed by critics as a warmonger, a dunce and even Hitler. (An Internet search pairing the Nazi dictator and the 43rd president turns up a gallery of images)

President Bill Clinton, the last Democrat to occupy the White House, was accused, among other things, of orchestrating the murder of his friend and Commerce secretary, Ron Brown; covering up a drug-running ring in rural Arkansas, and complicity in the Oklahoma City courthouse bombing.

What is different this time, Potok said, is the involvement of mainstream aiders and abetters like former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and ex-House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who promoted the false charge that Obama's health plan would euthanize senior citizens, as well as widely watched TV personalities who question Obama's citizenship and, thus, his legitimacy as president. Back in the Clinton days, those kinds of fabrications played mostly on the fringes of political debate and dark corners of the Internet.

Jan van Lohuizen, a Republican pollster who worked for Bush, suggests that the more outlandish assertions, amplified by some of the often hyperbolic news coverage of town hall protests, reflect the country's increased polarization.

You used to have bounds around foreign policy, he said, referring to the old notion that politics stops at the water's edge, which, today, seems almost quaint. You used to maybe disagree on domestic policy, but at least you read the same books, saw the same movies, read the same newspapers. We don't do that anymore.