Mickey Kaus has an interesting — and persuasive — theory.

The more I think about it, the more the townhall anti-Obama anger isn’t explained completely by the issues (sorry, Frank ). There’s also something about Obama himself-. But that something (or the main something) isn’t his race. It’s that he’s a relative newcomer, as Presidents go–an unknown quantity, an enigma, with a short track record and patches of that record left fuzzy. That means opponents can fill in the blanks with ominous possibilities. It makes paranoia more rational, if you will.

In Kaus’s view, this accounts for the strength of the anti-Obama backlash from the right.

The uncertainty about Obama made it wildly important that he not do things that would give the most common ominous speculation–that he’s way on the left of the possible envelope–any traction. Obviously, Obama’s White House understands this. Larry Summers is not a lighnting rod for the right. But the Obama-ites apparently failed to internalize this imperative sufficiently to allow them to exclude the Van Joneses and Yosi Sergants from government with the ruthlessness required in a year when they were asking taxpayers to trust them with administering an unprecedent stimulus package and restructuring Detroit and the financial system–all before transforming the nation’s health care system.

Kaus also describes Obama’s stance on card-check, the subject of my next post.