Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
Mike Huckabee is inspiring some negative reactions for these comments he had regarding President Obama. I don't think they should be controversial, but judging from the online reaction, they are. Here's what he had to say:
“I don’t want to savage Barack Obama. I don’t have any personal dislike for him, I disagree with his policies, but I respect him as a human being. I think he’s a decent, patriotic American. And that will get me in trouble with some people to even say that. He loves America differently than me, but I don’t doubt he loves America.”
As I’ve written in the past, Obama is a disaster on economic policy – this is undeniable and obvious, in measurable ways. His failure to pivot after the 2010 elections to a more moderate approach is a sign that he is either too much of an ideologue to recognize the errors of his Keynesian approach or too worried at the risk of offending his base on two major arenas of policy as opposed to just one (foreign policy).
Psychological analyses of political leaders are always colored by personal biases, and in this case far too many on the right have embraced the equivalent of the left’s Bush Derangement Syndrome, which warps feckless mismanagement into the deliberate ruination of the country. Mitt Romney’s latest line – that this is “an election to save the soul of America,” that Obama has “changed the very fabric of our land” – is an explicit appeal to this view.
Obama is not some red diaper baby conspirator bent on American ruination. And saying that shouldn't be controversial. He is a failed president, yes; his domestic and economic policies range from the irrelevant to the horrendously bad.
Yet America is stronger than a bad presidency. It’s had generous opportunities to demonstrate that fact. And I'm confident it will do so again.
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Comments:
Jun '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
Why must our people go out of their way to say anything nice about Obama? That is the problem. How about you say nothing at all instead? He is almost single-handedly destroying America. If you cannot dislike someone like that pesonally, who can you dislike? He does not love America, he is not patriotic. Period.
May '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
I don't understand why you think it more rational to judge that Obama is patriotic and loves America than to judge that he is unpatriotic and hates America.
Are positive assessments rational, negative assessments irrational?
Are imputations of evil equally irrational in the cases of Bush and Obama?
Your implicit definition of rationality seems to me to prescind from the truth of the matter in question.
Reminds me of "right wing social engineering."
Edited on December 28, 2011 at 2:56pmOct '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
I agree that calling Obama a Marxist or saying that he hates America is the sort of hyperbole that (a) undermines the argument that Obama is to the left of most Americans and has a different vision of America than most and (b) devalues the terms 'Marxist' and 'America-hater', for which there are an abundance of genuine targets.
But I wonder about this bit of sunny optimism:
America survived FDR, but ended up with a giant federal bureaucracy and the beginnings of an entitlement state. America survived LBJ, but the state and the entitlements got bigger, and the middle class got co-opted. Now we have Obama and a political status quo where Paul Ryan is seen as a death-defying paladin just for daring to tinker around the edges of the giant blob that is eating the economy and the moral fabric of the republic.
So perhaps it's no longer a matter of surviving another bad presidency. It's a matter of surviving with anything but a transformative one.
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
America survived FDR, but ended up with a giant federal bureaucracy and the beginnings of an entitlement state. America survived LBJ, but the state and the entitlements got bigger, and the middle class got co-opted. Now we have Obama and a political status quo where Paul Ryan is seen as a death-defying paladin just for daring to tinker around the edges of the giant blob that is eating the economy and the moral fabric of the republic.
So perhaps it's no longer a matter of surviving another bad presidency. It's a matter of surviving with anything but a transformative one. · Dec 28 at 5:14am
That's certainly a valid point. I should perhaps temper that comment by saying that surviving bad presidencies has not been easy, and has occasionally taken a major, transformative response? But America has survived them, and will again, I'm sure. Sunny optimism is less my intention than an enduring belief in American resolve.
LBJ's legacy is really what we're tangling with today, less so than the New Deal. But that's a much longer conversation.
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
I just don't think there's any way you can argue that's true. Even assuming that he is "destroying America", he would have to have plenty of help!
Apr '11
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
I think Ben's point may be that Republican ideologues are just as much of a turn-off to independent voters as liberal ideologues. Given the MSM's efforts to equate OWS with the Tea Party I think he has a fair point. We're better off with selling ideas than vitriol. My problem with Huckabee is that he seems to bend over backwards to say something nice about his political opponents and I end up wondering how solid his convictions are.
May '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
@Katie -- I don't mean to engage you two days in a row, but...
So many of the people I call my friends and family and with whom I interact everyday share the President's view of what is wrong with our country and how to fix it. I would be hard-pressed indeed to determine that all of these people whom I care about "hate America." So as annoying as he can be in attitude and occasionally infuriating in his tactics, I have to conclude that the President means well. I think the default case must be the positive one.
Certainly the Huckabee stance is better suited to winning over the disaffected middle in the general election. It is more generous and less deranged-seeming.
Mar '11
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
I'm confused.
Obama has headed on of the most corrupt, arrogant, corporatist, incompetent administrations in recent history and his policies are bankrupting the country and lining the pockets of political insiders and contributors. Under his watch our country has become less prosperous, less capable at home and abroad, less optimistic and less free.
How is that not “savaging” him again?
Why is it necessary to go the further step of making him into the Manchurian Candidate or risk being decried as a RINO/elitist sell-out/establishment type?
Feb '11
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
1)Obama has a clear visceral dislike of America and Americans. As a contrast, see the socialist George Orwell's affectionate comments about England and the English, excerpted here. It is impossible to imagine Obama feeling/saying anything like this about his own country.
2)Moves by the Obama administration and its allies to enable illegal voting, to buy votes through politically-targeted programs, and to interfere with Internet free speech all mean that it may become impossible to EVER get the "progressives" out of office if they win in 2012.
Oct '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
I'd disagree there. I think he loves his social democratic, corporatist view of what America should be (in the odd way Democratic politicians both admire social democracy and equate their own corporatist philosophies with it, even though the Democratic party has never managed to make corporatism work in America).
In other words, Obama loves special interest groups, and believes that loving corporatist interest groups and loving America are one and the same. I doubt he ever spares a thought for the politically un-organized; indeed, I doubt it's ever occured to him that he should do so.
Edited on December 28, 2011 at 2:58pmMay '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
Trace Urdan: @Katie -- I don't mean to engage you two days in a row, but...
So many of the people I call my friends and family and with whom I interact everyday share the President's view of what is wrong with our country and how to fix it.
Fine. We're not talking about those people.
Unless you want to argue that no one hates America; that no Americans are Marxists; or that the rationality of an accusation is determined by its moderateness, then it doesn't touch my point.
Was Reagan guilty of anti-communist derangement when he called the Soviet Union the "Evil Empire"?
One of my favorite philosophers was a German professor who in the 1920 and 30s began railing against the evil of Naziism. Virtually everyone around him accused him of being "too extreme" in his rhetoric and urged him to tone it down.
Please note I am not making the case that Obama is anything like Hitler or Stalin. My point is rather a general one. An epistemological one.
The rationality of a charge is determined by its accordance with objective reality, not by its moderateness.
May '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
Okay. That's a tactical point. "Avoid saying what you believe is true, because the independents will not be able to hear it. They will rather think you immoderate in your rhetoric."
That's a perfectly defensible position.
So is the position that our political culture has been greatly undermined by a reluctance to speak the truth plainly. Obama has been able to get away with what he's gotten away with because of the unwillingness of too many in the media and in public life to come to grips with the reality of who he is and what he intends.
What's not defensible, in my view, is the idea that judging Obama to be essentially Marxist in his view of reality is the moral equivalent of Bush derangement syndrome.
May '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
katievs
My point is rather a general one. An epistemological one.
The Nazi Germany point is compelling as far as it goes and I am willing to grant your epistemological point. But perhaps you will grant that as a tactic, attacking the President's love of America is a loser in the general election.
Sep '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
"I think he’s a decent, patriotic American. And that will get me in trouble with some people to even say that. He loves America differently than me, but I don’t doubt he loves America.” - Huckabee
He loves America differently than me... care to elaborate, Huck?
What is Obama's definition of America, and does this correspond with our constitution and founding principles? I say no, it doesn't.
Also, I believe the approach that Obama is a "failure" too easily plays into the race-card memes. It should about his ideology and how he intends to remake America and he's been fairly sucessful.
I don't want to just defeat Obama - that's small potatoes. I want to expose and defeat the whole leftist and socialist wing of the Democratic party. Obama is not the only one, in case some of you didn't know.
Mar '11
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
katievs: I don't understand why you think it more rational to judge that Obama is patriotic and loves America than to judge that he is unpatriotic and hates America.
Are positive assessments rational, negative assessments irrational?
Are imputations of evil equally irrational in the cases of Bush and Obama?
Your implicit definition of rationality seems to me to prescind from the truth of the matter in question.
Reminds me of "right wing social engineering."
Positive assessments are rational, negative assessments are irrational and racist. Any deviation from the righteous pronouncements of our post-racial President must be racist. Because he's post-racial, and if you disagree, then you're not. Quod erat demonstrandum.
(Man, it hurts to think like that.)
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
Mike Huckabee looks at America and loves what has been and is. Barack Obama does not share that view. Hatred? Who cares? I'm confident he isn't enamored with it. "White folks greed..." is what he sees, to use the President's favorite and oft quoted sermon.
What Obama does love is the opportunity to change America away from the one Huckabee loves.
I am permitted to call him a Corporatist for his public/private partnerships that he wishes would run America's production. But when I point out that Corporatism is exactly the economic engine of Fascism developed by Mussolini to create a planned economy controlled by government, suddenly people get uncomfortable with the word “Fascism.”
Apparently government planning is not what we should fear. It's synonyms.
Oct '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
This is the key, I think. If Obama transformed the U.S. into his and his fellow travelers vision of their 'dream state' {insert pun here}, it wouldn't be recognizably America to those of us who see this country as the land of opportunity. And while he imagines the final result to be a sophisticated yet compassionate Euro-heaven led by sophisticated yet compassionate elites, we see a bloated, bureaucratic slug of a country with truncated freedoms developing along the lines of the failed SocialDemocracy models across the Atlantic.
Mar '11
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
Tommy De Seno:
I am permitted to call him a Corporatist for his public/private partnerships that he wishes would run America's production. But when I point out that Corporatism is exactly the economic engine of Fascism developed by Mussolini to create a planned economy controlled by government, suddenly people get uncomfortable with the word “Fascism.”
Apparently government planning is not what we should fear. It's synonyms. · Dec 28 at 6:19am
That is because the majority of people in this country don't understand what "fascism" means, though they think they do. As soon as they hear it, they picture swastikas and jack-boots and torch-lit parades and all the window dressing, and miss what it is that is really being said.
Mar '11
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
The rationality of a charge is determined by its accordance with objective reality, not by its moderateness.
Concur.
I think that President Obama is a democratic socialist of the kind that we see in Western Europe and the Nordic countries.
That socialist tradition, while is has been strongly influenced by Marxist analysis, is not the same as Leninism. Or Stalinism. Or National Socialism a la Mussolini, Franco, or Hitler.
I am opposed to both the soft despotism of democratic socialism and to the hard tyranny of these regimes. But I do not conflate the two and hold them in two wholly different categories on the scale of evil and tyranny.
I am happy to engage in that debate as a matter of political philosophy in a setting befitting such a discussion.
But I am not unaware that having it in the tone and timber that it has been being conducted these last 4 years amongst certain hyperventilating media mavens bears no resemblance to a political philosophy discussion. More like a smear campaign designed to suggest that President Obama, Osama Bin Laden, and Joe Stalin “pall around” together. Surely you agree that objective reality does not bear that thesis out.
Oct '10
Re: Huckabee and Obama Derangement Syndrome
What is essentially Marxist in Obama's view of reality? A labour theory of value? A materialist view of history? The inevitable immiseration of the proletariat? Or is it just a vague family resemblance between the Marxist theory(ies) of class struggle and media meme of 'class warfare'?