As I hear the bloodlust boiling from America's primeval id, I know a section of the country is activated that long wondered if their time was over. It's making me wonder: what if Obama was just a liberal Trump?
The guy who got us libs riled up was a suave, charismatic, irresistible, hyper-intelligent black man. Was this just the ultimate fever dream of the mainstream left? What if this was no more or less than the conservative dream: an old, unabashedly masculine, unabashedly white man who tells it like it is, even despite not being able to "win" every argument the eggheads throw at him? In fact he turns it into an advantage. He figures out a way beyond simply knowing the conservative position to take on liberals. He offers them, literally, a trump card.
Obama broke through one glass ceiling. What if Trump's bending the bars of the P.C. prison is no less an accomplishment for conservatives?
We've been pretty scared about the prospects of Obama's legacy recently. I cringed at a tweet the morning of November 9 that said, I guess we found out Obama's appeal had way more to do with likability and personality than we'd like to admit. Could it possibly be so base? I remember agreeing with something Glenn Beck said in the days after the 2008 election, which was that Barack Obama's appeal was primarily one of celebrity instead of policy. That, to me, sounded more or less correct. I was attracted to his moderate pragmatism, but I knew he won because he was this impossible dream of race and identity. Skin as light as white people would have preferred on a black man, the shade of Muhammad Ali; facial features with a healthy dose of the familiar, striking Scotch-Irish; stentorian voice as crisply elocuted as a professor and as grand as a black preacher's; a message that more or less absolved the sins of god-damned America. He really had it all, if reconciling racial inequity was your thing.
And now we have Trump, to rescue the white masses from their nightmare of cosmopolitanism. In that way, are they really so different?
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