Al Cross: "[POTUS Barack] Obama Hatred Growing In State." Yes, Al, That's Because There Are A Lot Of Tin Foil Hatters In Kentucky. *SIGH*.

Obama hatred growing in state

If there was any doubt that emotional hatred of President Obama has poisoned our political process, a Republican congressman proved it Wednesday night by yelling “You lie” during Obama's health care speech to Congress.

South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson's unprecedented outburst, which he blamed on emotion, landed him on Democrats' 2010 election target list. Maybe he should move to Kentucky, where hatred of Obama, and the ignorance, suspicion and fear that feed it, have been much in evidence this month.

First came the Daily Kos-Research 2000 poll that showed only about half of Kentuckians, 51 percent, said they believed that Obama was born in the United States. (The error margin was plus or minus 4 points.) “Not sure” ranked second, at 29 percent. Among Republicans, the main results were 30 percent yes, 36 percent no. If the poll had asked about Obama's religion, many would have said he is a Muslim.

Next, state and local school officials were too quick to offer alternatives to Obama's TV speech to students. Some even kept it out of classrooms altogether! Those included the superintendents in Paintsville and surrounding Johnson County, normally two of the state's best school districts. In Oldham County, also majority Republican, many students opted out. In Lexington, one parent organized what she called a “parent-authorized skip day” at a pizza parlor, telling a TV reporter, “We would rather be there so we can talk to our kids about what the country is doing.”

Those children seem likely to be misinformed; the woman made that remark even after the text of Obama's non-political remarks had been released in advance, and after the feds revised their suggested lesson plan to eliminate the suggestion that younger students write about how they “could help the President.” Obama-haters saw something sinister in that, though the first President Bush asked students to do likewise during a similar appearance in 1991, when he was running for re-election. Three years earlier, lame-duck President Reagan was overtly political in a speech to students, advocating tax cuts and the line-item veto.

The encouraging thing about this episode in Kentucky was that so many people wrote letters to newspapers defending Obama. In Johnson County, The Paintsville Herald published an editorial and a cartoon ridiculing the two superintendents.

“The sad thing is that if John Calipari were to visit the schools, classes would likely be dismissed for half a day just so the students could hear an inspiring speech,” the Herald said. “Nobody's perfect, but the superintendents of our local schools dropped the ball this time.”

The new University of Kentucky basketball coach had a surprising encounter with Obama haters when he announced on his Facebook page that he had sent a Wildcat jersey with the number 44 and the name of the 44th President to the White House. Some responses were so vitriolic and hateful that Calipari took down the post, but he defended it, saying, “Don't you think it's a good thing if we get some Kentucky blue in that White House?”

Yes, Coach, because Kentucky could use the attention. It surely looks to the White House like a thoroughly red state, unworthy of much time and effort. After Hillary Clinton trounced Obama in last year's primary by 31 percentage points, and exit polls showed much of the opposition to him was racially based, he wrote off the state. He hasn't set foot here for more than a year, except a stop at the Cincinnati-Northern Kentucky International Airport for his Labor Day speech in the Queen City.

The lack of an Obama campaign in Kentucky left fertile ground for the weeds of ignorance, suspicion, fear and hate. He has no strong base of support and defense outside the state's major cities, and many of his supporters probably feel intimidated into silence when they hear him attacked by people like state Republican chairman Steve Robertson, who called the school speech “creepy.”

That kind of talk casts Obama as a bogeyman unworthy of trust, which is outside the mainstream of civil discourse. Mainstream Republican leaders seem happy to let the haters dominate the debate, but that domination may have ended nationally with Wilson's revealing misstep. In Kentucky, it subsided at least temporarily with the raft of letters defending the school speech.

Perhaps those letters show the public will only take so much hatred and fear-mongering. Perhaps people of good will in both parties can set a better standard. Perhaps they will keep speaking up, following the implicit advice of Albert Einstein: “The world is a dangerous place, not because of the people who are evil; but because of the people who don't do anything about it.”

Al Cross, former Courier-Journal political writer, is director of the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues in the School of Journalism and Telecommunications at the University of Kentucky. His e-mail address is al.cross@uky.edu. His views are his own, not those of the University of Kentucky.

Editor's comment: True, Al Cross.

The problem is that there are simply too many tin foil hatters in Kentucky, including RACISTS.

Keep trying to get your message through tin foil hats.

Maybe, some day, the message will get through!