Politico: Yes, Obama Hates America

Barack Obama’s hatred of his own country has become so palpable that even the most milquetoast moderate media outlets can no longer ignore it. Keith Koffler, a former reporter for Roll Call who currently runs the White House Dossier website, wrote an op-ed in yesterday’s edition of Politico entitled, “Obama’s Dark Vision of America.” The piece blasts the president’s “relentless reelection focus on America’s demons.”

“Obama’s vision reflects the worldview of a former community organizer, whose long focus has been on the disadvantaged,” Koffler wrote. “But this seems to have spurred him to see injustice around every corner.”

While Koffler wrote that, while “Americans want to be told the truth,” they cannot swallow Obama’s “message that there is something fundamentally wrong with the nation that Obama, like some prophet preaching through Gomorrah, was sent to fix.”

Koffler contends that previous candidates seeking re-election highlighted challenges Americans must overcome together, but Obama is stumping with the message that the problem is America itself:

Obama is trying out a reelection model that posits a broken country which needs him to “finish the job” he started.

America, in Obama’s view, is an unfair place, where “our school system” is working “for just some children;” where immigrants live “in second-class status”…

For too many, Obama suggests, the American Dream is dead or dying…The avenues to success are not passable for everyone, and only Obama can reopen them.

The article’s significance is less what it says — this author made the same argument more than three years ago — than where it appears. Politico is a dependably left-leaning website whose snarky bits of Beltway gossip regularly favor the president and demean his opponents. The website has a hefty presence on MSNBC, with its reporters or editors making at least 24 appearances on the channel last week alone. If Politico cannot hide a problem, it is a major problem indeed.

Obama has been anything but bashful about his disdain for his country. On the campaign trail in 2008, he drew attention to America’s “tragic history.” “There’s no doubt that when it comes to our treatment of Native Americans as well as other persons of color in this country, we’ve got some very sad and difficult things to account for,” he said. “I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged.”

At the same time, Michelle Obama — she who had not been proud of her country during her entire adult lifetime until her husband stood poised to run it — told a campaign crowd in North Carolina:

We’re still living in a nation and in a time where the bar is set – I talk about this all the time – they set the bar…and then you work and you struggle, you do everything that they say, and you think you’re getting close to the bar, and you’re working hard, and you’re sacrificing. And then you get to the bar. You’re right there. You’re reaching out for the bar. You think you have it. And then what happens? They move the bar. They raise it up…it’s always just quite out of reach…The sad irony is that’s exactly what’s happening to most Americans in this country. (Emphasis added.)

Nonetheless, Obama carried North Carolina in 2012.

Just before the election, Americans heard the audio of a 2001 Chicago public radio interview, in which Obama said the Constitution “reflected the fundamental flaw of this country that continues to this day.”

Since becoming president, he has kept up the assault. In a budget speech earlier this year, he said the United States “would not be a great country” without a commitment to wealth redistribution programs such as Medicaid, meaning in his view America was not a great country from 1776 to 1965.

In a 2009 speech before the United Nations, Obama belittled America B.B.O, (Before Barack Obama) as a lawless, deadbeat nation that “has acted unilaterally,” “has too often been selective in its promotion of democracy,” tortured terrorists, and had not “paid our bill” to the United Nations.

As the electorate has turned its back on him, he has responded in kind. Why is the economy cratering like an asteroid barreling into a vat of pudding? According to Obama, it’s all your fault. In September, he told an Orlando TV station, “This a great, great country that had gotten a little soft, and we didn’t have that same competitive edge that we needed over the last couple of decades…We need to get back on track.” The next month he a gathering of CEOs assembled at the Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) meeting, “We’ve been a little bit lazy over the last couple of decades.”

I asked three years ago:

Famed political scientist Larry Sabato wrote in his book Feeding Frenzy that an individual’s “subtext” – the general assessment of his character – determines much of a candidate’s public perception and media coverage. Why, then, has this not become the dominant image of Obama – pushing aside accurate assessments of his paper-thin resumé and even-thinner list of achievements?

The Politico piece in the Establishment media is a welcome, if insufficient, description of how Barack Obama’s hatred for the essence of the United States continues to grow. Imagine how it will explode next year when it becomes his last in office. (For a preview, see Carter, James Earl.)