Obama must be jizzing in his pants

Obama must be jizzing in his pants about Donald Trump.

( If you've been living under a rock, or are not from the USA, or are reading this years later when Obama will be remembered as the 44th President of the United States and Trump won't be remembered at all, let me give a brief summary of what is going on: Billionaire and shameless self-promoter Donald Trump has decided that he wants to run for President in 2012 ( or least wants to make people think he's running for President in order to get more attention for his TV show ).  In order to attract Republican voters, he is now publicly taking positions that are 180 degrees removed from positions he publicly took just a few years ago.  In the past he'd voiced his support for gay rights, abortion rights, and advocated a 14.25% wealth tax on all Americans with a net worth of more than 10 million dollars.  He now claims to be against raising any taxes, against gay rights, against abortion rights, and most significantly, has taken up the widely discredited "birther" cause which maintains that President Obama was not born in the United States.  As crazy as this all might sound, this strategy has been working for Trump.  He is now leading all other potential Republican candidates in polls of likely Republican voters. )

Even before Trump emerged on the scene, things were looking pretty good for Obama in 2012.  Sure, the economy is still rather stagnant ( Though it is doing MUCH better than it was when Obama took over in January of 2009.  Back then, the US economy was in a deep recession and on the brink of a depression.  Now the economy is on a streak of 13 months of positive growth. ) and the Republicans gave the Democrats a "shellacking" ( as Obama called it ) in the 2010 midterm elections, but the 2012 Republican Presidential field was full of candidates who stood no chance of winning a national election.  The Tea Party movement was forcing otherwise semi-reasonable Republicans ( None of the Republicans seem reasonable to me, but at least some of them could seem reasonable to most Americans ) to take positions so far to the right that they were all ruining their chances to gain the support of the moderate "swing voters" that often decide Presidential elections.  To make matters worse, the only well-known semi-moderate Republican ( Mitt Romney ) has zero chance of winning the Republican primaries, because he signed a health care bill as governor of Massachusetts that could virtually be the twin brother of the Obama health care bill that all Republican primary voters hate.

Yeah, so things were looking pretty good for Obama, but Donald Trumps takes things to a whole other level.

For as long as I can remember, Republican Presidential candidates have had to play a game in which they speak in a kind of code in order placate the far-Right base of Republican voters ( in other words, the voters they would have to win over to win the Republican primaries ), while not offending moderate voters ( The voters needed to win the general election for President ).  For example, when asked in a 2004 Presidential debate about what kind of Supreme Court Justice he would pick, George W. Bush said he wouldn't pick a justice who would agree with decision in the Dred Scott case.  This baffled many people ( including me ), because the Dred Scott case was an 1857 decision which affirmed that slaves remained the property of their owners, even if they were taken to places where slavery was illegal.  Most people couldn't imagine how a potential justice's  view of an 1857 pro-slavery Supreme Court decision ( Obviously, any justice today would be against the decision ) would have any relevance today.  However, I later found out that in Christian Right circles, "Dred Scott" is code for "Roe vs. Wade" ( the 1973 decision that made abortion legal in the USA ).  So, Bush was using the "Dred Scott" code word to make it clear to the Christian Right that he would appoint a Supreme Court justice that was strongly anti-abortion ( which he did twice during his second term ), while trying not offend pro-abortion moderates.

These Republican secret codes have become even more prevalent during the Obama administration.  Republican politicians are acutely aware that a significant percentage of white Repblican voters have racist views about President Obama.  Republicans candidates want to motivate these racists voters to go out and vote for them, but they clearly need to be very careful about how they appeal to these voters.  Not only do they have to be careful not to offend moderates, but they also have to be careful not to offend the racist voters themselves.  Let's face it, most people don't want to think of themselves as being racist, so most people with racially motivated negative views about President Obama have found ways to rationalize that their negative views are not racially motivated.  For example, I know somebody ( We'll call him "Joe" ), who voted for Bill Clinton over Bob Dole in 1996, but voted for John McCain over Barack Obama in 2008.  Anyone who understand politics at all ( and Joe does ) can see that John McCain has basically the same political philosophy as Bob Dole ( Both are Center Right, though I would say that John McCain campaigned far further to the right than Bob Dole.  Bob Dole never called the progressive tax system "socialist" as John McCain did during the 2008 campaign  ), and Barack Obama has basically the same political philosophy as Bill Clinton ( Center Left.  I think both their campaigns were equally positioned to the Left, and as a frustrated liberal I can state definitively that Bill Clinton governed further to the Left than Barack Obama has so far. ).  So, with all that in mind, you would expect a supporter of Bill Clinton in 1996 to be a supporter of Barack Obama in 2008.  Instead, Joe voted for McCain, and now trashes President Obama every chance he gets.  Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to say that every white person who opposes President Obama does so for racial reasons, but there are a lot of "Joes" out there, and Republican politicians know this.

So, because even the most right-wing Republicans can't get away with saying they don't like President Obama because he's black, they find other ways to imply that he's not a Real American ( in other words, not a white Christian ).  This is where we get all this "birther" ( The claim that Obama was actually born in Kenya, and back in 1961, his mother, the State of Hawaii ( Which has the official documents that prove he was born in Hawaii ) two different Hawaii newspapers ( which printed birth announcements of Obama's birth back in 1961 ) conspired to fake that he was born in the USA so that he could one day become President. ) and "Obama is a Muslim" nonsense from.  However, most mainstream Republican can't even get away with talking about the birther stuff or the Muslim stuff directly.  Instead, they need to speak in code again.  When asked if they believe if Obama was born in the USA or if he is a Muslim, just about all the potential Republican Presidential candidates say stuff like "I take President's Obama's word for it that he was born in the USA" or "I take Presidents Obama's word for it that he's a Christian".  In other words, they are telling the far-Right base of the Republican party "Look, for the sake of keeping the liberal mainstream media from tearing me apart, I've got to pretend I believe that President Obama is a Christian who was born in the USA - but you and I both know that he's really a foreign Muslim socialist who wants to turn the good old USA into a Muslim caliphate.".

Trump however, isn't playing that secret code game.  He's come right out and said he doesn't believe the Obama was born in the USA.  He's even claimed that his investigators in Hawaii have uncovered evidence ( none of which he's released to the public ) that Obama wasn't born there.  Instead of hiding the crazy aspects of the Republican party that could scare away moderate voters, he's letting it all hang out.  Sorry to use a second crude analogy in this post, but the emergence of Trump really does makes it seem like the Republicans are walking around with their dick hanging out.

,,, and Obama has got to be loving this.

What's worse for Republicans is that because Trump's now leading in the polls, lots of the other Republican candidates might decide to follow Trumps lead.  It things keep going the way they're going, it will eventually get to the point that where the Republican's will nominate a Presidential candidate who is completely unelectable in the general election.

Of course, I don't think the Republican's will really nominate Trump.  In fact, fact I don't even think Trump really intends to run for President.  I think this is all just a big publicity stunt to feed his ego and put more money in his pocket.

However, a guy can dream, can't he?

Rich