Here are Three Little Words for the Obama Haters: Get Over It

By: Deborah Mathis

I wish the Barack Obama haters would go away. But I’m not going to ask them to. Why not? Because, even though I rejoice in Obama’s victory and am eager for his administration to get underway, I understand.

I know what it’s like to feel so disappointed, so frightened, so alarmed, so furious and so outraged by the ascension of a certain someone to the highest office in the land. I know because that’s how I felt in late 2000, when George W. Bush connived to gain the presidency, with a conservative majority on the Supreme Court of the United States handing him the coup de grace.

I know because that’s how I felt in late 2004, when, at the last minute, the Bush folks recognized that the gullibility of some voters was the key to pulling ahead and, accordingly, played those folks like a fiddle, pretending that abortion rights and gay marriage were at stake in the race. They weren’t. But it worked.

I remember the anger that millions of my fellow Americans had actually fallen for the guy with his shallow intellect; his famous lack of curiosity; his avowals about “compassionate conservatism,” which, to this very day, has been neither defined nor produced.

I was dejected and incredulous the second time, when I had hoped that four years of foppishness and a dangerous, unnecessary war would have snapped Americans out of their daze. No such luck.

To make matters worse, he had a Republican majority on Capitol Hill for six of his eight years in office. And two Supreme Court seats were his to fill.

So it has been, for the past eight years, that I have despised and resisted so much of what Bush has done. Rarely did I approve of any thing he did or said in an official capacity. I have been unhappy, dissatisfied, ashamed, forlorn, worried and hungry for any and every signal failure, hoping that it might snap Americans out of their daze.

It did, eventually, as evidenced by the abysmal poll ratings. Only, there was never any consequence beyond that. Bush seemed not to mind that most of his countrymen and women thought he was lousy at the job. Such is the advantage of arrogance.

Now, the shoe is on the other foot.

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