@bea2345 – I think you answered your own question there, but I guess it depends on the perspective from which you asked it. If you really meant, why would it bother people IF Obama were a Muslim, then that’s a different answer than, why does asking if he’s a Muslim bother people, and essentially the answer to one leads to the answer to the other.
Here’s the big problem…politics in the US is a game of one upsmanship…it really hasn’t historically been about fleshing out the best person for the job. Essentially, people in the US have an alarmingly low voter turnout rate for a Democratic process…even in this last election, as this website shows in great detail, an election which had the highest turnout in over 40 years, of 212 million people who were eligible to vote, 131 million showed up. This means only 61% of the people, in an election which drew more actual people than any other US Presidential election in history, and which drew a larger percentage of the population than we’ve seen since JFK (and one of the largest percentage turnouts ever, certainly within the top 5), even still, 39% of the people….over 81 million people who could have voted, chose “none of the above”.
That is symptomatic of a problem with our elections, not enough viable choices because of a two party system, which would not be as big of a problem if either party were seen as upstanding, but unfortunately, both parties pretty much have some pretty bad aspects to them and that keeps people away. One of the worst things is the preponderance of negative advertising and just general cutting down of one’s opponent.
You really have to go back to what happened starting in the primaries and leading up to election day. Obama for the most part rose above it, and he was the first viable Presidential candidate in most American’s lifetimes to have done so. In fact you can draw interesting parallels…the last time voter turnout was this high was when LBJ was elected in 1964. Much of his win was attributable to the fact that JFK was no longer around and had not gotten to fulfill his legacy and voters’ hopes that LBJ could fill those shoes. JFK’s 1960 numbers were even bigger, but prior to that, there wasn’t as much excitement…turnout had been lower in previous years. One big thing besides just looking for some attachment to JFK which motivated voters in 1964 was the threat of nuclear annihilation, and LBJ knew how to exploit this. He created an ad called Daisy, which can be seen here shows the first real visceral use of fear in American political ads. This one played on peoples’ fears, which were real and visceral and it got people to the polls, in much the same way that GW Bush got people to the polls in 2004 by invoking the theme that the stakes were too high to not vote in the incumbent President when the terrorists were planning another 9/11. In 2004, 9/11 was only 3 years removed, and a number of people were still petrified. In 1964, Bay of Pigs was only 3 years removed, and people were scared shitless. Both times the incumbent prevailed, and both times election results had been very high historically speaking, but neither was a record turnout either.
What this essentially did (this ad) was to prove that fear was a powerful motivator to win elections, but as time wore on, that’s all that Presidential politics became in this country, scaring Americans into being afraid of your opponent. And when one side used fear to bludgeon the other, that side did well. But what happens when BOTH sides start to bash each other about the head? Well, then both sides have some would be supporters who are scared away from the polls by their opponent’s attack ads. So, for 44 years, turnout was even more depressed than usual. Again, this last time 82 million people voted for neither, while Obama got 69 million votes. And he did NOT pull these scare tactics, but his oppponent DID, and that was key. Many would be voters have grown up with this custom of scaring off voters, where people chose a side by default, but essentially were left with a “lesser of two evils” feeling about the whole thing. What no candidate had done in a long time was to give voters a reason to vote FOR him, and build that case. And as such, a lot of people not only voted for Obama, but were happy to have that opportunity, finally.
But his opponents both in the primary and general election did EVERYTHING they could to scare peolpe off, and what they really employed more than anything was this fear of the unknown…they tried to paint Obama with this sense of “otherness”. Basically, they tried to exploit peoples’ fears, many of which were racially motivated, without actually just coming out and saying, “you’re not really voting for the BLACK guy, are you?” Like you said, racism can spoil anything. But there just aren’t enough white Americans who are afraid of black people anymore….of course there are two types of black man, you’ve got your regular black man who is just like your regular white man, but then you’ve got your angry black man. White America would NOT vote for an angry black man, which is why we heard so much about Reverend Wright…Wright was angry at the injustices of the past and he had a job which was part theater…he had to go up in front of people and rant and rave and holler and decry moral outrage….and to white America, that made him an Angry black man…and the fact that Obama went to his church (even though 10,000 other Chicagoans did as well), just that association was nearly enough to sink him….certainly kept Hillary in the race for another 4 months. So, Obama had to struggle to make sure that when people tried to exploit irrational fears (which most Americans assumed would happen if a black guy ever tried to become President), that he kept saying, “this is ME, THAT is not me.” If Obama had pulled a Howard Dean and blown his stack even once, we’d be looking at President Hillary Clinton right now. As it was, 59 million people still voted against Obama, and that’s more than voted for John Kerry 4 years before.
So, here’s the deal, even though Muslims are peaceful, the 2nd largest religion in the world, and it’s only an infinitesimally small percentage of all Muslms who believe their God wants them to kill non-believers (probably about the same percentage as there are Christians who believe this, yet no one is scared of Christians in this country) 19 Muslims attacked the United States in 2001, killing nearly 3,000 people on our own soil, in the name of their God. For far too many Americans, that’s all they need to know to know that all Muslims, hell, all the people they think of as “sand niggers” are dangerous and evil. And therefore, Muslims are our enemies. Now, we were over 7 years removed from 9/11 on election day, and it seems that America is starting to get over some of the fears that make them scared of any Muslim association, but right now, I’d be willing to bet that far more Americans fear Muslims than blacks. In 1964, Americans feared Communists, all one had to do was to invoke the Communist threat if their opponent were to win, and he’d be swept into office.
And why is this? Because Americans look for the easy answer. The first question that was on EVERYONE’S mind on 9/11 was “Why?” Why did they attack us? Well, the real reason is that US has adopted an interventionist foreign policy when it serves her own economic interests, but has had little regard for the lingering negative affects left by doing so. Essentially, we held the Russians off when they invaded Afghanistan in the late 80s but when we got what we wanted, we forgot about Afghanistan like it was a redheaded stepchild. For us it wasn’t about making sure that Afghanistan was ruled by good people, but about keeping Russia from expanding. Once our objective had been met, we left them high and dry, to fall into the hands of the Taliban, who were run by that small faction of Muslims who had bastardized the religion by making it not only acceptable, but desirable to kill in the name of their God. And they didn’t forget how we left their country war torn and in shambles, so really, the reason Al Quaeda formed and took up the purpose of destroying America had more to do with the fact that America’s foreign policy was often times destructive to other people in the world if that was what served America’s best interests. Which by the way is exactly the point Rev Wright made when he said that God would not bless America, but would damn America, but God Damn America does not exactly make Americans feel like you’re on their side, now does it.
But we missed a golden opportunity, instead of pointing out why people hated us, the pictures of Bush administration officials shaking hands with the likes of Saddam Hussein and Osama Bin Laden back in the 80s went unseen by most Americans, and our “fearless” leader chose to say that they attacked us because they hate freedom. It was a simple answer, designed not to inform people, but to keep them scared of an irrational, widespread force, which we could now attack. Rather than using this as a learning opportunity about the problems with fundamentalist radicalism in religion so that people could see that even with Christianity, radicalism was a destructive force, instead it was in the best interest of those in power in America at the time to poison the well against the whole Muslim religion in order to serve a greater foreign strategic goal, essentially, repeating the mistakes of the past which led to these problems in the first place. As such, Muslims became the new American whipping boy, and an alarmingly high number of Americans simply distrust Muslims in general. So many simply see the very visible reality of women covering their faces in public, even in this country, and relate to the stories they heard about Afghanistan and the Taliban and how much they seemed to be living in the 1400s, and weren’t enlightened like us smart Americans. So we distrust it and see it as backwards and that scares us, giving people who would have a motive to scare us something with which they could.
So, why are people upset by the question, again if you’re wondering why people would be upset IF Obama was a closet Muslim, that pretty much answers it, because we’ve manufactured and institutionalized fear of Muslims in our culture using 9/11 as the catalyst, and this was done deliberately for political gain on the part of the Republican party.
But why are people who know this not to be true upset? Well, that’s because we know that the only reason someone is asking this question is because they heard it from someone who spread that rumor/lie out there in the first place. We know that the shitwad who started this rumor knew full damn well that Obama was not a Muslim, and was using Minnesota’s Congressman Keith Ellison’s story (a black Muslim) and conveniently juxtaposing it on Obama, because they know that people stupid enough to think that this was true (even though the internet could disprove it in 2 seconds), were the same people who lacked the critical thinking skills to realize that not all black politicians are the same person…and they very well could find two black men to be interchangeable. I get viscerally angry when I see peoples’ ignorance exploited and turned into fear, particularly when the reason for so doing is to pump up an agenda of a vein of political thought which is only going to perpetuate ignorance and fear exploitation if they gain power.
Bottom line is, people can’t help being stupid…sure, they could do their homework, but they don’t. And the fact that there are so many of these mouth breathing troglodytes out there means that there will always be someone who can figure out how to exploit their ignorance. But when people do exploit that ignorance, they do it at the expense of a better world. We have the opportunity to level with these people…people uncritical enough to take what you tell them at face value in this day and age are dangerous if they are not told the truth. And it’s the fact that there are some forces out there so evil that they would put a rumor out there like this, knowing that this (cess)pool of humanity would believe it, that makes it utterly disgusting. So, I felt at the time that I heard this question that it was important (the same as Obama did) that whenever and wherever we heard information that was patently untrue, we owed it to the betterment of our nation to call bullshit on it. So this question as you can see was a hot button for many, for those who believed it, this was an acceptable way to express their fears which were founded on nothing but racism. For those who didn’t, it was a symbol of all of the lies told to foster a sense of otherness about the first person we actually WANTED to vote for since JFK (or in the case of people like myself who weren’t even born when JFK was around, for the first time EVER). The question itself could be a very innocent confusion of a recent political occurrence, and without that context, it’s easy to question why such a question would upset anyone. But given what America has gone through since 9/11 and the history of Obama’s rise to power, that was anything but an easily resolved misunderstanding. That question to me embodied what was truly at stake in this last election…are we as a nation going to continue down the path where lies and character assassination win elections, or for once are we going to collectively grow a pair of fucking balls and tell all the racist, ignorant motherfuckers to suck it?
And I’m happy to say, they’re sucking it hard, and I hope Limbaugh, Coulter and Hannity suck it so hard they choke to death.
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