The Kook Gap

A billboard in Georgia funded by the Camden County Republican Party. Image by John S. Myers via Mother Jones.

With the election upon us, the supposed “enthusiasm gap” between Republican and Democratic voters has garnered lots of attention. But politics is full of “gaps,” including the Wonk Gap (Jonathan Cohn’s term for the paucity on the right of serious analysts and intellectuals willing to put dispassionate evaluation over the party-line gospel of revenue-raising tax cuts and nonexistent global warming) and the Hack Gap (the proliferation of conservative intellectuals eager to abandon all previously held principles – say, foreign policy hawk William Kristol, who enthusiastically supports third-debate peacenik Mitt Romney). The real divide between conservatives and liberals, however, is the Kook Gap. It breaks with the traditional media policy of false equivalence — show me a crazy Republican, and a similarly nutty Democrat can’t be far behind — to suggest that the right has become inherently more detached from reality than the left, but it’s the truth.

Those on the left take it as accepted wisdom that the standard bearers of the Republican Party, whether official or unofficial, increasingly suffer not from “Romnesia” but from Obama Derangement Syndrome, a condition which predisposes the patient to see Kenya-born Muslim socialists behind every tree. From ad hoc spokespeople of the GOP brand (Rush Limbaugh, Michael Savage) to elected officials who ought to know better (Michele Bachmann, Steve King), the accusations lobbed at the president would be humorous if they weren’t made with such deadly seriousness. No less a Republican standard bearer than vice-presidential nominee Paul Ryan joined a tele-hall conference with Ralph Reed’s Faith and Freedom Coalition (more on that outfit later) to tell thousands of dialed-in evangelicals that November 6 will determine “whether or not people turn out and take their country back” from a president who has put us on a “dangerous path that grows government, restricts freedom and liberty, and compromises those values, those Judeo-Christian, western-civilization values that made us such a great and exceptional nation in the first place.” Ryan’s depiction of the president as the Evil Other whose un-American beliefs threaten the United States is depressingly common among conservatives. He truly believes that Obama threatens our freedoms, asking his audience to “imagine what he would do if he actually got reelected. It just puts a chill down my spine.” Is this sort of noxious rhetoric, especially coming from a campaign that regularly accuses the president of divisive and “small” politics, really appropriate for one of the headliners of the Republican ticket? It’s only a hair’s breadth away from the conspiratorial slime peddled by the supposedly reputable Washington Examiner:

As has been noted before, for all those misinformed people who have been incorrectly identifying Obama as a Muslim for years, the man is a Christian. Or at least he claims to be. I don’t know how a person squares being a devout Christian with the near-fanatical devotion that Obama has to infanticide — he would call it being pro-choice — but who am I to judge? The fact is, the man has identified himself as a Christian, not a Muslim.

A Florida billboard from the American Power Super PAC highlighted in a recent NYT article.

The racism here is thinly disguised, if it is disguised at all. One right-wing website, the ironically named American Thinker, opines in a post subtitled “The Affirmative Action President Exposed” that “Obama has been groomed to be the left’s perfect teleprompter-controlled front man for its Socialist/Progressive agenda.  His black-skin suit of armor protects him from all opposition.” And that’s hardly the worst the right has to offer. Enough supposedly reputable Republican politicians and media outlets have accused the president of supporting infanticide — see Newt Gingrich’s recent distortion that Obama “voted three times in favor of allowing doctors to kills babies in the eight or ninth month that they were born, having survived late night abortion” — that fact-checkers like the Post’s Glenn Kessler feel compelled to devote stand-alone articles to whether Obama longs for the fetal “victims” of botched abortions to die on the floor. Florida Rep. Alan West, in one of his more temperate statements, alleged that the Democratic caucus is filled with Communists. Mitt Romney surrogate John Sununu darkly declared that “I wish this president would learn how to be an American,” and, though forced to walk back the statements half a news cycle later, continued to function as a respected mouthpiece for Boston. Michele Bachmann abuses her position on the House Intelligence Committee to defame Hillary Clinton aide Huma Abedin as a terrorist sympathizer, garnering credulous media coverage of the McCarthyite vision of a State Department infiltrated by Islamists. A Texas judge makes headlines for predicting that Obama “going to try to hand over the sovereignty of the United States to the U.N.” – which is really only a shade worse than NRA vice president Wayne LaPierre’s contention that “all that first-term lip service to gun owners is part of a massive Obama conspiracy to deceive voters and hide his true intentions to destroy the Second Amendment during his second term.”

The Republican media machine is, if anything, far worse. Advertising attacks on the president, paid for by the same job creators (TDAmeritrade’s Joe Ricketts, casino magnate Sheldon Adelson) whose moral fiber Mitt Romney holds up as unimpeachable, have become so “strident,” in the blandly understated language of the New York Times, as to feature Photoshopped images of Obama bowing to Saudi royalty and cartoonish depictions of mushroom clouds over Israel (message: “Friends Don’t Let Friends Get Nuked. STOP OBAMA.”) Taking the nuclear holocaust theme even further, Slate’s Dave Weigel finds a Florida radio host asking “What has caused more long term destruction – the A-bomb, or Government welfare programs created to buy the votes of those who want someone to take care of them?”

The Ralph Reed mailer. Image via Mother Jones.

Ralph Reed, the once-disgraced evangelical comeback kid who heads the Faith and Freedom Coalition to which Ryan was making his election-eve pitch, financed a ten-page mailer claiming that Obama is running for reelection so that “he can complete America’s destruction,” presumably on the orders of his pals Fidel Castro and Hugo Chavez, who are also name-checked in the packet. (No less than the Romney campaign itself recently released an ad boasting that Castro and Chavez would vote for Obama.) Reed’s effort would be laughable if he weren’t so straight-faced and earnest about it. The “Voter Registration Confirmation Survey” that landed in thousands of Republican mailboxes asks, in all seriousness, whether the threat posed to “liberty” by President Obama’s policies is a) more serious than the threats we faced in World War II from Nazi Germany and the Japanese, b) more serious than the threat we faced from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, c) more serious than the American Civil War or d) all of the above. With choices like these, it’s a relief to know respondents can “mark as many answers as you think appropriate.” Frankly, I’d say that Obama poses a bigger threat than the 2012 End of the Mayan Calendar and the Black Plague combined, but hey — that’s just me.

Featured prominently in an NYT article about sleazy anti-Obama campaign tactics is the video “Dreams From My Real Father,” which alleges an even greater conspiracy theory than Donald Trump “birthers” usually advance: the president’s real father was not a Kenyan socialist but card-carrying Communist Frank Marshall Davis, who snapped bondage shots of Obama’s mother and raised the future president as what the American Spectator (whose pages have been graced by none other than potential VP Paul Ryan) a “red diaper baby.” The Daily Beast reports that the video’s narrator pretends to quote from a fictional Obama autobiography: “My election was not a sudden political phenomenon. It was the culmination of an American socialist movement that my real father, Frank Marshall Davis, nurtured in Chicago and Hawaii, and has been quietly infiltrating the U.S. economy, universities, and media for decades.” Other ads tie the president to Hugo Chavez and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, intoning that Obama “has the dictator vote . . . does he have yours?” “Uncovered” or “newly discovered” videos that are in fact neither surface regularly at the Drudge Report, where conservative mud-throwers feign horror at statements by the president they label racist or redistributionist. A new “bombshell” seems to surface every week; the latest and perhaps most bizarre is the theory that a Republican victory would lead to race riots instigated by Obama supporters spurred by “fears about a Romney administration withdrawing or limiting government handouts.” (This doomsday scenario is peddled by none other than Thomas Sowell, “one of America’s greatest living thinkers” and a widely syndicated columnist who is inexplicably considered an intellectual light of the mainstream right.)

National Review thinks billboards like these are a positive development: “In my town of Milford, Conn., local businessman DeForest Smith flexes his First Amendment muscle on a billboard he owns. Kudos!”

Liberal critics aghast at the craziness of conservative thought leaders are usually more charitably disposed toward the rank-and-file Republican voters who go about their everyday lives without much discussion of UN conspiracy theories and socialist takeovers. Viewed from the liberal coastal bubble, it is hardly surprising that an electorate plied with blockbuster movies like Dinesh D’Souza’s “2016,” which explores the alleged roots of Obama’s anti-colonial, anti-American worldview, would harbor dark thoughts about a president with a foreign-sounding name. Yet no GOP elites are forcing Republican butts into the seats at AMC or Cinemark, just as no elites are forcing red-state voters to elect such homophobic and misogynist representatives as Michele Bachmann and Todd Akin. The Republican masses have done that of their own free will. The partisan gap has never been wider, as demonstrated by any number of the serious-sounding and chart-filled studies by left-leaning political scientists quoted ad nauseam by MSNBC talking heads, but it’s mostly the result of the GOP’s march rightward, not a similarly sharp swerve to the left by the Democrats. Nowhere is this discrepancy clearer than in a recent Washington Post article about Ohio’s Jefferson County, which reporter Joel Achenbach describes as “highly contested territory in what may be the most important swing state in the presidential race.” The county, home of working-class Steubenville, is “a good place to plumb the divisions in American political life,” yet the article ends up plumbing the cesspool-like depths of right-wing smears. The piece epitomizes everything wrong with today’s Republican Party. The left may have its share of crazies, but it has nothing on the GOP. There is simply no comparison, even among the party faithful. The worst conspiracy theories about Mitt Romney deal not with salacious inventions — there are no “sister wives” hiding in Ann’s closet, no secret Mormon plot to take over the White House — but with the candidate’s bank account. Imagine if the worst the right lobbed at Obama were accusations about improper royalty payments from The Audacity of Hope.

Achenbach takes us on a tour of the Ohio electorate, and it’s a stunning picture. His interactions with Republican voters are worth quoting in full:

“If they had Idi Amin, Saddam Hussein and Barack Obama running, Barack Obama would be my last pick,” says Ray Morrison, 70, a retired steelworker who lives on a country road west of the city. “If you want to know the true story about Obama, you have to watch Fox a little bit. I hate him.”

Al Fenner, 68, a bishop in the Shepherds Walk mission downtown, doesn’t think the president is “all-American” and believes that Obama once said that “he would stand more with the Islamic rather than with the American way.” Asked to cite a specific instance of Obama saying that, Fenner answered: “Go on YouTube and find it. I would not quote it if it were not true.”

Herb Barcus, 81, is a Democrat who votes Republican. He doesn’t like the way the government has been raiding the Social Security trust fund. Thinks Romney is a just and honest man. Thinks Obama is “unqualified.”

But he’d rather not talk politics, preferring to talk religion and the end of days.

“I think the time’s running out,” he says. “You have to read prophecy. You ever hear of the Rapture? Soon to be coming, I believe.”

Lest you think I’m selectively highlighting the worst of one party, let’s see what Steubenville’s Democrats have to say to Achenbach. There’s the benign, from a retired millworker who says of Romney, “He wants to take everything from the poor and the middle class to pay for his tax cuts for the rich.” The most radical comment from a liberal is in fact a bit of sarcasm; unlike Barcus, this voter doesn’t seem inclined to take Biblical prophecy or the potential Rapture literally:

Here’s Cheryl Doran, 50, a waitress at the family restaurant Naples, speaking of Romney: “I think he’s the devil. I have no use for him.”

Calling the Republican nominee “the devil” isn’t civil, but if an allusion to Satan were the worst that Rush Limbaugh had said about President Obama, the kook gap wouldn’t be nearly so wide. Instead of nasty metaphors, the right delivers its zingers with absolute seriousness. Jerome Corsi, who could be dismissed as a Swift Boat nutjob were his anti-Obama screed “The Birth Certificate” not a certified bestseller (and were he not awarded a plum place in the Romney private-jet press pool), genuinely thinks he’s dropping a bombshell when he alleges that the president is a closeted gay man. “Not only is he gay,” writes Neal Gabler in the left-wing magazine The Nation, “he frequented gay bath houses in Chicago along with his former chief of staff and current Chicago mayor, Rahm Emanuel . . . . Plus, he was ‘married’ to his Pakistani roommate while attending Occidental College (one theorist says that the ring he wore at the time was a “homosexual symbol for ‘women stay away’).”

Despite the fact that “the devil” is most bilious liberal sentiment Achenbach encounters, false equivalence — “a lot of voters are lukewarm about the guy they support, but they are white hot about the guy they loathe” — permeates the piece. And Achenbach is hardly the first journalist to only permit discussion of conservative craziness when couched in even-handed “but the left does it too!” rhetoric. When he writes that Obama and Romney “represent parties that have become internally more homogeneous, with distinctly different philosophies,” he is certainly correct that Democrats and Republicans have philosophical differences. The problem is, it’s Plato vs. Howard Camping (of May 21 Judgment Day fame).

It is the ultimate exercise in such attempted equivalence to to equate the mainstreamed, constant lunacy of the right with some garden-variety, mildly offensive crankiness on the left, but Politico inexplicably (as conservatives will brand the site “left-wing” until the cows come home) gives it the old college try. In an article titled “Election Doomsday Scenarios Abound” reporter Ginger Gibson labors mightily to draw parallels between wild conspiracy theories unmoored to reality (Obama is coming for your guns!) and worst-case scenarios based on actual policies (Republicans really do want to overturn Roe v. Wade). Comparing the “doomsday scenarios” described by each side’s nuttier elements, we have this from the right:

One of the most frequently invoked signs of the end times has come from conservative bloggers arguing that unruly Obama supporters will riot if Romney wins — prompting a declaration of martial law that keeps the exchange of power from taking place.

Politico feels compelled to note that Democrats predicted a similar scenario for George W. Bush supporters in 2008, but you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone in 2012 warning that Romney’s backers are planning to marshal the Klu Klux Klan to take down a newly victorious Obama. What evidence does Politico find to bolster its assertion that both parties engage in equally ludicrous doomsday prognostication? Scraping the bottom of the malice barrel, Gibson has this to offer:

Democrats have been worked into the most fervor over claims that Republicans will employ widespread voter suppression at the polls on Nov. 6.

Gee, do you suppose that “fervor” may have something to do with the very real “voter fraud” laws — 24 restrictions in 17 states in the past year alone — implemented by Republican state legislatures across the country, despite a paucity of actual cases of fraud? Reasonable people can disagree whether these laws are explicitly designed to suppress the Democratic vote, but it’s a fact that strict ID requirements disproportionately affect minorities and youth, two traditionally liberal constituencies. And when Republican officials are on record as stating that voting “should not be easy” — in the words of Florida state Sen. Mike Bennett, “I don’t have a problem making it harder. I want people in Florida to want to vote as bad as that person in Africa who walks 200 miles across the desert” — is it really conspiracy-mongering to suggest that “suppression” is exactly what the GOP has in mind? Though supporters of voter ID laws in Pennsylvania were unable to cite even one occurrence of in-person voter fraud that the legislation would address, the House Republican leader did make YouTube history by crowing that voter ID laws would “allow Gov. Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.” Yet Politico suggests that Attorney General Eric Holder’s description of such voting laws as “poll taxes” is somehow equivalent to the conservative description of Obama as a martial-law-implementing, violence-stoking tyrant. Huh.

In the wake of 2000-recount hyper-awareness and paranoia on both sides, I don’t see how allegations of “voter suppression” fundamentally any worse than those on the right of massive voter fraud (a 2009 survey found that 52 percent of Republicans attributed Obama’s victory to ACORN’s “stealing” the election) or continually accusing Democrats of registering Big Bird and Mickey Mouse. Perhaps the sides are equally as conspiratorial on this count . . . and yet. The evidence for voter fraud is exceedingly slim – Mother Jones observes that there are more annual UFO sightings than fraud convictions, and a News21 analysis found 10 voter impersonation cases out of more than 2,000 mostly baseless accusations of fraud over 10 years, which would affect roughly one out of every 15 million voters – while voter ID laws are predicted to affect 700,000 ID-less minority youths in Pennsylvania alone. Again, like the fears of a Romney reversal of Roe v. Wade, at least to my partisan mind the left’s concerns seem more based on actual policies articulated by the opposition itself.

I’m not saying that liberals don’t exaggerate the effects of so-called voter suppression. That it rises to the level of conspiracy mongering is an accusation with at least some legs, as I recently read a long Harper’s “expose” of the GOP’s attempts to rig the vote via ballot counting technology. It’s the Diebolt suspicions resurrected, albeit in a dry way, heavy on the faux statistics, that will gin no one into rioting or attract the salacious pull quotes about Barack Obama’s mother being a fat white porn model. Reports that Romney’s son Tagg has financial connections to a company that builds voting machines have less substance, but what is really notable about such tenuous theories is the degree of pushback they receive from more sensible people on the left. While conservatives of all stripes, from talk-show hosts and National Review writers right up to RNC officials, embrace unproven stories of voter fraud, no less a lefty outlet than AlterNet felt compelled to publish a story titled“5 Reasons Karl Rove Is NOT Going to Electronically Steal This Election,” in which Steve Rosenfeld writes:

Most of these scenarios are not just far-fetched or worse, but they distract from more visible and widespread issues that could impact the 2012 results . . . . There are things to worry about, but they’re not what’s breathlessly flying around in the lefty media.

The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates offers this analysis:

On the right, voter fraud is an actual issue, and voter-ID laws are endorsed by basically every organ of the conservative movement. On the left, the notion that Bush stole Ohio was debunked by Mother Jones. The difference between left and right isn’t the lack of appetite for intrigue and conspiracy. It’s that the left has a partisan press, whereas the right has a partisan press office.

While you can legitimately apply the term “doomsday scenario” to a fantasy about Obama ordering legions of blue-hatted UN soldiers into the streets, it’s a stretch to characterize the potential rollback of women’s rights as apocalyptic. Here’s the worst Politico can find on the left:

Democrats — some of them candidates and Obama surrogates — have concentrated on stoking fears among a key constituency: women. Some officials have pushed a post-Romney election world in which women are forced to be barefoot and pregnant in the kitchen.

“They would drag us back to the failed policies of the past and take women to a time when we were not even considered on equal footing with men,”Debbie Wasserman Schultz told volunteers in North Carolina. “Mitt Romney would take us back to a time before I was born and shut the clock that much for women.”

It’s one thing to map out the extreme implications of stances articulated by a party itself; though it may border on reductio ad absurdum to conclude that outlawing abortion translates to chaining barefoot housewives to the oven range, it at least begins with something that exists in the real world: the GOP platform, which states that “the unborn child has a fundamental individual right to life which cannot be infringed,” and thus “we support a human life amendment to the Constitution and endorse legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to unborn children.” It’s quite another to pluck out of thin air the idea that Obama wants to establish shariah law in America or that he would bulldoze all suburbs in favor of inner-city development. The liberal predictions of a rollback of women’s rights is premised on the 92 laws restricting abortion passed by state legislatures in 2011 — the most of any year since the Guttmacher Institute began tracking such laws in 1985. It is rooted in the declaration by the Republican nominee that he would be “delighted” to sign a bill banning all abortions (though he did lament that “that’s not where we are right now”) and the willingness of GOP officials to subject women seeking abortions to vaginal probes and a gantlet of third-degree questioning about the “forcible” and “legitimate” nature of their rape. Direct from Romney’s own website is this statement:

But while the nation remains so divided, he believes that the right next step is for the Supreme Court to overturn Roe v. Wade – a case of blatant judicial activism that took a decision that should be left to the people and placed it in the hands of unelected judges.

Sure sounds to me like the candidate would be completely OK with women in entire regions of the country — the South, much of the Midwest — being denied reproductive rights. He refers to Roe v. Wade as “one of the darkest moments in Supreme Court history” — apparently even worse than, say, Dredd Scott. This is not the position of  a moderate; neither is his support for a “personhood” amendment with the potential to criminalize not only abortion but some forms of birth control, including the morning-after pill (an “abortifacient,” in conservatives’ scientifically dubious argot).

Politico notes in a separate article that, “at the national level, Democrats insist, Republicans no longer call for simple restrictions on abortions anymore, like parental notification laws. Instead, they’re fighting over women’s access to contraception — by opposing the Obama administration’s requirement for most employers to cover birth control without co-pays — and targeting Planned Parenthood.” Contrast Romney’s plainly stated preference for overturning Roe v. Wade to Obama’s stance on gun control as articulated to a left-leaning, anti-gun MTV audience: “Obama said he favors an ‘all of the above approach,’ including better enforcement of existing gun laws, strengthening background checks, and working with law enforcement and local groups to better combat the sources of violence.” If this inconsequential, wishy-washy position is enough to draw the ire of the NRA conspiracy theorists, imagine the explosions that would ensue if the president followed in Romney’s footsteps and proclaimed himself “delighted” to sign a ban on every firearm from pistols to hunting rifles. Overall, Politico’s attempt to draw parallels between the supposedly apocalyptic visions of each party ends up doing just what the reporter tried to avoid: it cements the impression that the right is populated by nutcases.

The invaluable David Weigel of Slate has spent the election season bouncing between swing states, and he returns from Florida with an anecdote that, like Achenbach’s Washington Post piece, exemplifies the differences between the parties. The Miami-area radio dial is filled with competing political ads, but only one side specializes in crazy political ads. Flipping between a hip-hop station and a talk radio channel, Weigel notes the contrast:

On 99.1, I hear an Obama campaign ad consisting of 30 seconds of Michelle Obama speaking, 15 seconds of another black woman speaking, and the Obama disclaimer.

“We have to ask ourselves: Are we going to go back to the same policies that got us into the first place?” asks the first lady.

“Show President Obama we’ve got his back,” says the second woman.

“This election will be even closer than four years ago,” says the first lady. “Don’t ever understimate the impact you can have.”

Punctuating the hot air from the talking heads is another sort of ad altogether, one which emphasizes the dangers to the Romney campaign of aligning itself with religious fundamentalists and other popular conservative figures. Though the right’s network of outside groups, from super PACs to faith-based non-profits that supposedly focus on “issues,” gave Romney financial cover before the candidate was able to tap his general-election warchest, the independence of such organizations also enables them to go dangerously off-message. Romney may want voters to believe this election is all about the economy, but his more extreme boosters have a different idea. Weigel again:

On 610 am, every other commercial break, I hear this ad from Ralph Reed’s Faith & Freedom Coalition, spoken by a baritone narrator:

Barack Obama forced Christian charities and colleges to pay for health services that violated their faith. He waffled on support for Israel. Obama claimed, in a Muslim country, that America is not a Christian nation. Obama lobbied for same-sex marriage, removed the name of God from his platform — reinserting it as delegates booed. Said Congress had better things to do when it reaffirmed that “In God We Trust.” Better things than trusting God?

The Reed spot may rile up the base, but I’ll take the dull Obama ad any day.

A sampling of the anti-Obama bestseller list. Image via the Daily Beast.

Such ads may seem ridiculous, but it’s impossible for listeners not to absorb some of the sentiments. If this is what everyone in Radio Land tunes in to hear every morning from 6:00 to 9:00, it’s no surprise that they share Reed’s worldview. John Avlon of The Daily Beast explicitly links the conspiracy theories of the professional right-wing to the prevailing Obama-as-Satan sentiment among average voters. Under the headline “The Obama Haters Book Club,” Avlon rounds up an astounding panoply of anti-Obama tomes, from comparatively respectable NYT bestsellers (Newt Gingrich’s To Save America: Stopping Obama’s Secular Socialist Machine) to independently published, pamphlet-esque paperbacks (Andrew McCarthy’s How Obama Embraces Islam’s Sharia Agenda) to shock-doctrine bile from conservative talking heads (Michael Savage’s Trickle Down Tyranny: Crushing Obama’s Dream of the Socialist States of America). One has to ask: if Obama’s socialist dream is crushed, what on earth will these folks write about? Defeating the president may be their stated goal, but a Romney victory would undoubtedly kill the golden goose. Avlon eviscerates any Politico-style tendency to declare the two parties equivalent on “the sheer tonnage of hate and lies” directed at an unfavored occupant of the Oval Office:

Two years ago, when I put together the first Obama Haters Book Club list, the number of titles was at 46, roughly half the current total.

Compare that to the literature of Bush Derangement Syndrome, which totaled just 5 at the midterm elections of 2002 and rocketed up to 46 by November of 2004. Obama Derangement Syndrome shares some of the same qualities—truthers and birthers are in some respects mirror images of each other; obsessed with their targets alleged tyrannical ambitions and core illegitimacy—but they are not remotely equivalent.

There have been twice as many Obama Derangement Syndrome books as specimens of Bush Derangement Syndrome. The cycle of incitement has gotten worse and more widespread because it’s been semi-legitimized. Some of the same folks who called BDS treasonous see ODS as part of a patriotic resistance. This is more insidious than simple hypocrisy.

Most insidious of all is the way such poisonous hyperbole manifests itself in the body politic as “the harvest of that hate.” Avlon describes an encounter with Republican voters that could have been plucked from Achenbach’s Post article:

Talk to otherwise decent, well-intentioned citizens on the campaign trail and these themes keep creeping up in conversation: “Obama is a socialist” and “He wants to make us more like Europe” are among the most benign; “Muslim” and “Marxist” are not uncommon. This past Wednesday, I spoke with three tipsy middle-aged women who helped put on an Ann Romney rally in wealthy Winter Park, Florida, who did not hesitate to repeatedly describe the president of the United States as “evil.” Members of Congress even repeat lines straight out the Obama Haters Book Club, talking about Obama’s “Gangster Government,” “Thugocracy,” Muslim Brotherhood infiltration of his administration, his Communist influences and tyrannical ambitions. One Romney campaign ad even spoke of the president’s “War on Religion.

Which raises the question: Can anyone so eager to slur the first black president with the label of “foreigner” really be considered decent or well-intentioned? These sort of people may be perfectly pleasant outside of politics, but they are hardly “well-intentioned.” The subjects of Achenbach’s article are neither stupid nor naive; they know exactly what they are saying, and they “intend” every word of it. Hatred is not hard to spot, and to give the peddlers of such hatred a pass by suggesting they’re simply worried yet misguided patriots is to infantilize them. We’re talking about adults who are fully capable of taking responsibility for their parroting of Rush Limbaugh’s race-baiting rhetoric and their internalization of the very “rage” they accuse the president of harboring (see: Dinesh D’Souza’s The Roots of Obama’s Rage.)

Particularly astounding is the assertion from conservatives — from the man on the street right up to Mitt Romney himself — that President Obama is the one who has turned the 2012 race into “a campaign of uncommon nastiness and stupidity.” How can the editors of the National Review, who produced that little slam, say this with a straight face? Are they unaware that the pundits they employ routinely accuse the president of sympathy toward terrorists, of wanting to destroy America, of being too stupid for his office? “Uncommon nastiness” is NR contributor Michele Malkin’s middle name; she refers to female Obama supporters as “the Peggy the Moochers and Henrietta Hugheses of the world . . . the nanny-state grievance mongers” and Democratic officials as “the lying liars and the crap weasels, like Debbie Wasserman Schultz out there. And she really is in a classlessness all by herself.” (Pot, meet kettle.)

When National Review’s Yuval Levin opines that the president is a “man of nasty pettiness,” one wonders how he would characterize the behavior of his own writers, whose election-night directives to Republicans are “crush them!” and who call Obama “the most anti-American of American presidents” who “has run the most un-American of campaigns.” Is it not “nasty” to suggest that the Commander in Chief is a fan of gay bathhouses? Is it not petty to refer to Michelle Obama as “Moochelle” and make rude comments about the size of her rear end? For all the supposed religiosity of Ralph Reed and his minions, they seem blissfully ignorant of the Biblical prescription to the hypocrite to “first cast out the beam out of thine own eye; and then shalt thou see clearly to cast out the mote out of thy brother’s eye.” Republican elected officials are even worse, as Eric Cantor feels compelled to preach that “the president is full of negativity, character assassination, and attacks.” In the skewed conservative reality, labels like “communist” and “affirmative action baby” evidently do not count as character assassination.

Where does this leave us? We’re mere hours from an election pitting a center-left president against a challenger that channels all the worst impulses of the “severely conservative” right. We’re faced with a national media that hears in Paul Ryan’s denunciation of President Obama as a dangerous man from whom we must “reassert our Constitution” little more than, as the Washington Post describes it, “unusually harsh” language. It is telling that, as the Times notes, the remarks were delivered in a conference call “sandwiched between public rallies in which he often spoke of the Romney-Ryan ticket’s promise to bridge partisan divides if elected.” The faux umbrage and utter hypocrisy of Eric Cantor is contagious. If America elects Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan on Tuesday, 50.1% (or whatever plurality ultimately tips the race), of its people will get exactly the kind of president they deserve.