I think almost everyone expected that once President Obama embarked on a highly partisan agenda at a time of record deficits in the midst of a recession, he was going to meet resistance. And I think almost everyone likewise expected that when he did, his supporters would cite racism, and angry white males, as the culprits for popular discontent (the most recent attempt at that is by Michael Crowley in the Guardian with the headline: Barack Obama must beware the rise of the angry white man: Bill Clinton faced the sometime violent fury of middle America’s dispossessed. Now, the same ugly face confronts Barack Obama).

Three observations: (1) The Left needs to get its story straight. Most recently, the theme had been that the protesters were well-dressed elites and the upper privileged classes, who selfishly did not wish to imperil their own singular health care. Now, apparently, they have morphed into something like the Pennsylvania clingers, with Nazi-like, mob-like, and un-American-like tendencies.

(2) Identity politics and racialism have so far been more prominent on the left. The so-called white vote was fairly evenly split in the last election; the African-American vote, in contrast, rejected liberal Hillary Clinton in the primary by vast margins along racial lines. The Gates incident, the Sotomayor references, the president’s “stupidly” comments, the Holder “cowards” outburst, etc., are all simply a continuum from the campaign’s “typical white person” comment and stereotyping of the so-called white middle class, as in the infamous clingers remark. These polarizations are the natural wages of identity politics when one’s race and ethnic profile are seen as essential for careerist purposes rather than incidental to the content of one’s character.

(3) Barack Obama has had little experience with partisan attacks of the type that were pursued viciously against both Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. In Illinois he used lawsuits to eliminate potential candidates in a state race, and later he benefited from mysterious but opportune leaks about sealed divorce records that eliminated both his primary and his chief general-election rivals in the 2004 U.S. Senate race. Once elected, he compiled the most liberal record in the Senate. In the presidential campaign he benefited from unpopularity of the incumbent Bush, a record amount of campaign money, and a rather subdued campaign waged by the moderate/centrist McCain. So today’s 50/50 poll ratings, coupled with an angry opposition that feels strongly about $2 trillion deficits, cap-and-trade utopianism, nationalized health care, and the inevitable taxes to come (given the size of the deficits), are all something entirely new to Obama.

But what is old is the predictable smearing of legitimate opposition as somehow racist in spirit. It is an unfortunate act of desperation, but one that if pursued will probably take the president’s ratings down another 4–7 points and accomplish in 9 months or so what took the similarly once-popular George Bush 6 years.