Not Another Political Rant (OK, It Totally Is)

In early 2009, I was the editor of a scrappy little alt weekly on the island of Maui. It was a sweet gig, even if it involved more gnawing on pen caps and battling print deadlines and less lounging on warm beige sand drinking colored corn syrup and rum through a twisty straw, contrary to the belief of 93 percent of my friends and family on the Mainland.

Anyway. That was when Barack H. Obama was elected president of the United States. It’s also when a friend and co-worker informed me her boyfriend was joining the Tea Party.

“What’s the Tea Party?” I asked.

She showed me his homemade sign. It had a Thomas Jefferson quote on it; I can’t remember which one. It was red, white and blue.

“You mean like the Boston Tea Party?”

“Yeah, I guess,” she replied.

“On Maui?”

“Um…yeah.”

“Huh.”

In the coming weeks and months, I would learn all about the Tea Party. FOX News made sure of that, splattering its programming with wall-to-wall coverage of angry, often elderly white people in 1770s-era garb brandishing signs with occasionally misspelled slogans.

They were mad as hell. That much was clear. Their grievances, mostly, were about the deficit and bank bailouts and a vague, pervasive sense that the little guy was getting screwed.

I sympathized. I also wondered: Where were these patriots over the last eight years, when George W. Bush put two wars on layaway, pushed through a boondoggle prescription drug plan and added trillions to the national debt, not to mention gutting our civil liberties and growing the surveillance state?

Why had their outrage been dormant for nearly a decade, only to bubble up like so much magma the moment President Obama took the oath of office?

Huh.

Look, at this point it’s obvious bordering on cliche to pin the frothing opposition to Obama on racism. Like most cliches, however, it’s coated in the afterbirth of truth.

The Republican Party and its media surrogates had been blowing bigoted dog whistles for years to incite voters and viewers, especially in the South. A black president with a funny-sounding name merely replaced those dog whistles with actual, PE-coach whistles that everyone could hear. It was inevitable.

The fact that Obama was a U.S. citizen rather than a Kenyan didn’t matter. The fact that he was a practicing Christian (and, I suspect, secret agnostic) and not a Muslim didn’t matter. The fact that he was a corporate statist and not a Marxist didn’t matter.

He represented something. He was a lightening rod for the seething, impotent rage millions of Americans were experiencing. Never mind that their plight was the result of decades of trade deals and supply-side economics visited by Republican and Democratic administrations alike.

They had their straw man, and they were going to burn him in effigy.

That brings us to President-elect Donald John Trump. Wait…hang on.

OK. /wipes mouth. I’m back.

Trump is going to be president (sorry, Jill Stein) and liberals from Medford to Manhattan are losing their collective shit.

Hitler comparisons abound. Pretend moves to Ottawa are being initiated. Half-baked screeds are whizzing around social media like so many bits of toilet paper in a tornado (ahem).

So, naturally, there’s a temptation to draw parallels. Knee-jerk right-wingers went full-blown Chicken Little when Obama won; now, knee-jerk left-wingers are doing the same. Tit for tat. Tweedle Dee, Tweedle Dum.

Except, no.

See, there’s opinion and political persuasion, and then there’s fact.

The fact is, Barack Obama was a mainstream Democratic Senator whose soaring campaign rhetoric masked a centrist politician/policy wonk whose greatest ambition was expanding a Republican state healthcare plan to the national level.

Go ahead. Search around. Find me the five most inflammatory things Obama has ever said into the business end of a microphone. I’ll wait.

There was the thing about hayseeds in the flyover states (my words) and how “they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Seems more prescient than controversial now, but whatevs. That was indelicately stated.

Now, find me the five most inflammatory things Donald Trump has said in the last, oh, week? Three days? Forget the whole campaign, or the years before he was running for public office and discussed the finer points of pussy grabbing with Dubya’s cousin.

It’s been said before but it bears repeating: Imagine if the first viable black presidential candidate had multiple divorces in his wake, a pending rape case and was recorded talking about sexually assaulting random women.

That’s just the optics, though. What about substance?

Obama’s critics accused him of being inexperienced. Trump has never held elected office. Obama’s critics accused him of being anti-American. Trump admitted to dodging federal income taxes for years.

Obama’s critics accused him of leading a radical socialist/fascist revolution. Trump’s supporters are throwing up honest-to-goodness Nazi salutes.

I am trying to avoid hyperbole and hysteria. But we just elected a reality television star and Twitter troll who has publicly stated his desire to deport millions of people and ban Muslims from entering the country and commit war crimes to the highest office in the land. Again, those are facts.

Forget all that, though. Well, don’t really. But for the moment, do.

Because this goes deeper. This goes all the way back to early 2009, and all those angry folks in tri-corner hats shaking fists under palm trees and across this great land.

They were mad about a lot of stuff, but ostensibly their central grievance was with the collusion of big banks and big government, the place where ordinary citizens get squeezed out.

Now, they have their champion. A New York real estate mogul who inherited tens of millions of dollars from his father and appears likely to appoint a former Goldman Sachs executive as Treasury secretary.

Where are the protests? Where is the outrage? Will they appear, from the ether, when the jobs don’t come back and Wall Street gets richer while Main Street turns into a shuttered ghost town?

Maybe. I don’t have a crystal ball. I predicted Trump’s defeat at least a dozen times before he won, leaving me speechless on the couch drinking vodka from a ceramic Santa mug.

Here’s something I do know: This man is not a populist. Neither was the last guy, but he wasn’t the love child of Stalin and Beelzebub, either, contrary to Bill O’Reilly’s fever dreams.

This new guy? Guess we’ll wait and see.