Light On Dark Water

Wonder If We’ll Ever See This Kind of Thing Again

NotMyChoice

The sign says "Not my choice, but now my president." I posted this picture in 2008 with this explanation:

There’s a guy up the road in Spanish Fort, a veteran who’s very active in veterans’ affairs, who had a series of “Veterans for McCain” signs on this building (which I think he owns) during the campaign. This appeared the day after the election and I stopped and took a picture of it.

This kind of sentiment was not unusual at the time. It seems to be forgotten (if it was ever acknowledged) that Obama actually entered office with a fair amount of good will from those who had opposed him. "If nothing else, maybe he'll be good for race relations" was a fairly common sentiment. But his presidency proved to be so divisive that all that was gone by 2012. Well, we're certainly not seeing anything like this now, and I wonder if we ever will again. 

Maclin Horton
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12 responses to “Wonder If We’ll Ever See This Kind of Thing Again”

  1. Art Deco

    He entered office without much complaint from the opposition. People were preoccupied with the financial crisis, George W. Bush’s reputation was in ruins, and John McCain was just the next guy in line, not someone to inspire anyone anymore.
    No President who attempts to accomplish something serious is going to avoid causing contention. What’s interesting in the last 15 years is the phenomenon of autonomous contention. George W. Bush had no personal scandals to speak of and was given to splitting the difference in domestic affairs. He was still loathed by the opposition.

    Reply
  2. Mac

    The closeness of the 2000 election didn’t help. I had liberal friends circulating wild denunciations of him before the election, and even wilder ones after, and that was before the beginning of the Iraq War. I can’t help wondering if all that helped to blunt the impact of the anti-Trump rhetoric. Where could they go after comparing Bush to Hitler for years?

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  3. Stu

    I thought Cheney was Hitler. No?

    Reply
  4. Janet

    Charlie Chaplain.
    AMDG

    Reply
  5. Mac

    No, Cheney was Satan, whispering into Bushitler’s ear.
    Really the presidential loathing goes back at least to Reagan. Liberals hated him. Conservatives hated Clinton. Liberals hated Nixon as much as they’ve hated anybody. There was a bit of a lull in the Ford and Carter administrations, and at the beginning of Obama’s first.

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  6. Janet

    Surely people hated Nixon.
    AMDG

    Reply
  7. Stu

    I don’t hate any of the presidents. Who I hate are the people who make amazingly vulgar comments about others on social media and in the comments sections of political news articles online. Who are these awful people?

    Reply
  8. Mac

    I wonder about that, too. Are they really the almost psychopathic, potentially violent creeps they seem to be? Or just mean little people?

    Reply
  9. Marianne

    I know at least from my own family history that Hoover’s name was almost a swear word. And I did know Republican families for whom Roosevelt was close to the devil incarnate. There was a break with Eisenhower because, well, who didn’t like Ike.

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  10. Mac

    John Berryman. “The republic summons Ike, the mausoleum in her soul”. Or something like that. But although liberals and intellectuals may not have thought well of him, I don’t think there was anything like the hate we’ve seen for many.

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  11. Marianne

    Eisenhower may also have benefited from having Nixon as vice president. Nixon had been greatly hated by the left since his time on the Un-American Activities Committee in the House of Representatives, so they could concentrate all their hatred on him and spare Ike.

    Reply
  12. Mac

    True. The anti-anti-communists, not to mention the active sympathizers, hated him before it was cool.

    Reply

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