Obama is the best option we've got and we're lucky to have him.
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Preventing a second Great Depression, which was a real possibility (and not just the jobless recovery we're in, but a full-scale collapse), rescuing the banks without nationalizing them, saving the auto-companies with precision and technocratic skill (I didn't think it would work at all, and it did), re-setting relations with the rest of the world, bringing a new sanity and balance to Middle East policy, taking out 400 al Qaeda operatives, using the myth of the surge to get the hell out of Iraq (for the most part), upping the ante to get a deal with the Taliban and enacting a centrist, moderate law that for the first time in history ensures that anyone can get health insurance in this country ... really, in perspective, pretty damn remarkable.
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If I were buying stock right now, I'd say the president is under-priced.
And the second, "Change, Reaction, and Conservatism: Reading the Tea Leaves":
...I think this also helps explain the intensity of the cultural reaction to Obama. There is a rational argument against some of his policies, of course (health insurance reform primary among them). But the passion of opposition stems, I think, in part from a sense that the way the world once was is disappearing, that this is inevitable, and a repressed acknowledgment of the inevitability actually intensifies a resistance to it.
The America of the future will not be the America of the 1950s, the teenage years of many of those in the Tea Party movement.
It will be majority-minority, it will be one where gay people are not only visible but equal, it will blur racial identity and more and more people will have very complicated and mixed-up selves. The Tea Partiers want "their country back" in an almost poignant way - because their country will never come back, because change is now here for ever. That's also why there is an irrational resistance to any kind of acceptance that 12 million largely Latino illegal immigrants simply need to be integrated somehow, because mass deportation is impossible and a total control of the border very very hard (though still worth attempting). But the babies are already here! And American! So we have the panicked bizarre proposals to tear up birthright citizenship, the settled way of things for a very long time, because emotion - fear - is flooding the frontal cortex.
Obama, for many of the afraid, almost sums up in one person this entire, blurring, mocha, non-Rockwellian vision of the future, which is why so many under 40 felt drawn to him culturally and psychologically - and also why we under-estimated the inevitable cultural reaction among many of the over-40s once he actually had power and exercised it.
He is not, after all, the first black president. He is the first miscegenated president. He is a blurring of boundaries, a Hawaiian-Chicago-Black-Ivy-League-Child-Of-A-Single-Mother kind of blurring. The very complexity of his identity can threaten those whose experience simply hasn't been the same. (One thinks of Palin, for example, and her idealization of an America that requires a wild frontier of a Rockwellian Alaska to stay faintly credible as part of modernity).
Add that to the sense that Obama represents a kind of collectivism, intensified by necessarily collective responses to a major crisis like this recession, and I can certainly understand where the Tea Party is coming from psychologically.
This is not the same as calling it racist. Tea partiers rightly recoil from that personally because it isn't true for most and is far too crude to explain why they feel the way they do. And I think it's the cultural feeling that really dominates their psyche - and our politics - right now, not a political argument. They feel besieged by change. And that is, of course, a conservative feeling.
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