Glenn Greenwald Has a Good Point

Glenn Greenwald is not my favorite political commentator (a little too knee-jerk lefty, especially about Israel), but he's a meticulous reporter and hard to argue against when he marshals his facts. In a recent column, he brings up a good point about how the grudging respect the Right Wing has for Obama will quickly turn sour. Yeah, we've all been predicting it, but he brings a good proof (and something I've marvelled at as well): "Hatred is their [the Right Wing Crazies] fuel. Just look at the bottomless personal animus they managed to generate over an anemic, mundane, inoffensive figure like John Kerry. At their Convention, they waved signs with band-aids mocking his purple hearts while cheering on two combat-avoiders."

I dislike Kerry because he's everything I don't like about machine Democrats. But, the GOP whipped the country into a Kerry-bash frenzy that extended even until the '06 election (cf. "the botched joke").

Note, that I don't think the Kerry-Gore hatred that the GOP created will work against Obama in the same way, just as it failed against Bill Clinton. The two men are natural politicians and charismatic as can possibly be. But it does mean that the same hatred that worked to almost impeached Clinton will be the same hatred brought against Obama.

Except for one BIIIIG difference: the GOP used the hatred to take over Congress and that caused the impeachment. It would take multiple miracles for the GOP to regain the House in the next 2 election cycles.

Hence why I'm not worried about the 'swift-boating' vs. Obama. The man has charisma which equals to Teflon. And the GOP is out of Congress, so all they can do is fan the race-bating flames. And I just don't know how well that flies in 2008.

We're in a different world. The mainstreaming of black actors, black sports figures, and especially black music has made them less marginal figures than ever before. And since the GOP has been trying to attack the immigrants (read: Mexicans) for the past four years, that's made the black question more off the table.

And, it very well may be that the bald-faced tokenism of Condi Rice has also inured many of the younger voters as well.