It’s not a political circus, Mr. President!

President Barack Obama
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue NW
Washington, D.C. 20500

Dear Mr. President:

It has been eight months since you took the oath of office and became our nation’s 44th president. You entered the White House on the heals of a landslide victory that millions believed would lead to the formation of a truly transformational administration. In the beginning, that transformational character was apparent. You signed an executive order closing down the Guantánamo Bay Detention Center, giving hope to those of us who still believed in the Constitution as well as the knowledge that America was not exempt from following the rules of the Geneva Convention, no matter how justified it felt its actions were, or how safe it perceived its actions as being. Your cabinet choices also proved your willingness to be diverse and invite those who most would consider rivals into your inner sanctum. It was clear that Lincoln meant a lot to you.

But the hope that we had during your campaign proved to be short-lived. Over the last seven months you have refused to prosecute those who committed torture and expanded the Bush domestic surveillance program. Those of us who voted for you and who believed in true justice were stunned at such actions and remain stunned to this day. And now you are transferring detainees from Gitmo to Bagram in Afghanistan, in essence circumventing the Supreme Court’s decision in Boumediene v. Bush. Appalling. It seems, Mr. President, that in this arena of foreign policy, the only difference between you and your predecessor is that your justifications are more lucidly articulated. But they are no less offensive in the annals of international law. A Harvard Law graduate should know better.

But the glass is not completely empty with respect to foreign policy. There are several bright spots in your young administration that are noteworthy, among them your stance with regard to active engagement in the Middle East. You at least have acknowledged that the cowboy diplomacy, so widely adhered to by your predecessor, was clearly not working. Your decision to stay out of the Iranian election debacle, when virtually all of your opponents demanded you to intervene, was a sign of true presidential wisdom; the likes of which hasn’t been seen in this country for quite some time. You have also shown courage with regard to Israel, challenging Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on the issue of expanding Israeli settlements in the West Bank, no small feat given the powerful pro-Israel groups within America. Bravo, Mr. President, on this one!

Domestically you have had your ups and downs. True enough, you inherited the worst economic meltdown since the Hoover Administration and you needed to act quickly and decisively to avert a national calamity. While virtually every respected economist agreed that doing nothing, which is what most of your opponents were recommending, would’ve been disastrous for the economy, nearly all agreed that the manner you went about first the stim package and then the budget left way too much opportunity for your adversaries to define what it was you were attempting to accomplish. Off loading both the stim and budget process to the Congress was an error that could’ve been averted had you simply been more involved. Working with Congress is laudable; letting it run riot over two huge spending bills with your name attached to it was the height of naïveté.

One would’ve thought you learned your lesson from those two experiences, but alas, you repeated the mistake with the health-care reform bill. Once more you set out lofty goals for a program that was badly needed and long overdue, and once more you stood on the sidelines and allowed Congress to define and draft it. This time your opponents had a field day. The August town-hall meetings and the astro-turf Tea Party demonstrations were the result of intense corporate underwriting and relentless conservative rantings, coupled with rank, amateurish, rookie mistakes of an administration that should’ve seen the woods ahead, but instead drove headlong into them. The resultant car wreck now threatens the success of a reform bill that millions desperately need and the nation cannot survive without.

Your excuse? You were trying to avert a repeat of the Clinton Administration’s disastrous health care reform bill, which they tried to ram down the throat of Congress and which Congress promptly rammed right back at them. Fair enough. The Legislative branch has historically treated such attempts with predictable contempt. But, the opposite of arrogance isn’t apathy, Mr. President. It behooved you to find a middle ground where you could’ve met with senior congressional leaders, outlined specifics you wanted in the bill, co-wrote parts of it, and then left the rest up to Pelosi and Reid. By the time you got directly involved your opponents had an eight-week jump and had claimed a moral high ground they never should’ve been allowed to have. You became the poster child for socialism and death panels, principally due to your unwillingness to roll up your sleeves and directly take on your political enemies. That more people fear the government than the insurance industry is based not on any real facts, but the sort of fear mongering that the Right is extremely adept at. Shame on you, sir, for allowing that to happen; especially when it was avoidable.

And now we come to the crux of your real dilemma: the issue of your political opponents and the dire threat they represent to your presidency. Heated debates and partisan politics are part of our history and as old as the Republic itself. Jefferson and Adams loathed each other and threw everything but the proverbial kitchen sink at one another. Teddy Roosevelt so despised Republican William Taft that he ran against him for President as an independent, thus assuring the election of Democrat Woodrow Wilson in 1912. Talk about spite. And more recently, your Democratic predecessor, Bill Clinton, was so reviled among his Republican rivals, they stopped at nothing in trying to bring down his administration. Though with all due respect to the Republicans they did have a little help in the form of Clinton’s indiscretions that unfortunately would end up defining his presidency.

My point, Mr. President, is that mud-slinging, bitter rivalries and personal attacks are facts of life in politics, as you well know. But what is occurring in this nation over the last few months is owed not principally to a divisive political discourse, but has its genesis in something far deeper and more insidious. It goes back farther than the mere divide of political parties, farther even than the Republic itself. The principle issue before us, Mr. President, is race.

Like most political pundits, we all figured that the true test of the nation was whether we were mature and advanced enough to elect an African American to the office of President. What we did not count on was that the real test would not come until you actually assumed the office. It was at that moment that we as a nation came face to face with an even uglier truth about ourselves: that there were certain elements in our society that simply could not accept being governed by a black man, especially a black man who is the chief executive of the country. They are mad as hell and they aren’t shy about strutting their racism.

Make no mistake about it, Mr. President, it is racism, pure and simple. Jimmy Carter, a life-long southerner, who witnessed overt and covert examples of racism in his native Georgia, said it best.

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," Carter told Brian Williams of NBC Nightly News. "I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that shares the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans."

You should take Carter at his word, Mr. President. It isn’t just the South. I have witnessed small examples of such attitudes in my own home town. Your mere presence in the Oval Office has stirred up centuries of hatred, which is both irrational and potentially dangerous. Some of the language used at town-hall meetings and Tea Party demonstrations has been particularly racist and demonstrably violent in its tone. These are no mere adversaries voicing their opposition to a particular political party or policy; they are mobs looking for someone to string up. Look at the pictures, Mr. President, look at them. Do you not see the correlation between your caricatures and the lynchings that took place in the segregated South?

You know there is truth in my words, and worse yet, so does the Secret Service. Death threats against you are four times more numerous than they were for your predecessor, which is quite a statement given how unpopular he was during the last two years of his administration. Failure to call this what it is, in the vain hope that time will lead to cooler heads prevailing and a peaceful resolution will take place is about as naïve as Neville Chamberlain declaring he had achieved “peace for our time” by appeasing Hitler. Less than a year later World War II started. This is not a political circus, as you so flippantly put it during your interview with 60 Minutes last Sunday. This is the prelude to a potential national tragedy that is unfolding before our very eyes and sadly right under your nose. Waiting for “responsible” right-wing conservative talk show hosts to “dial down” their rhetoric and call out their minions is foolhardy. Just what is it you expect from the likes of Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity and Rush Limbaugh?

Mr. President, you must act, and act now. You must look those who mean you harm right in the eye and say, “Bring it on!” You must openly refute the lies and distortions that are quickly gaining traction with many of the populace by calling out the racist elements contained within them. You would prefer, I’m sure, to let bygones be bygones and behave as an adult, believing that your foes will come to their senses and see the light. Trust me, Mr. President, they will not see the light; nor do they want to. Hearts lost in darkness will never see the light of reason. And that is why it falls on you to be that light.

This is not the time for pragmatism or taking the high road. That shipped sailed a while back. The relentless assault by right-wing, extremist elements within the Republican Party want nothing less than your removal from office and before the 2012 election. While stopping just short of implying assassination, the tone of this group could hardly be confused with that of pacifists. There are times when you seek peaceful coexistence; and other times when you fight fire with fire. Guess which time this is, Mr. President?

Perhaps you are thinking this is impossible given all we’ve been through in this country. Certainly we have progressed far enough so that we can have an intelligent debate on the real issues without sinking to the depths of our most base fears and prejudices. Certainly America is better than this. I wish this were so. But it isn’t, and the last few months have born this out. Men showing up at town-hall meetings with loaded weapons sporting signs with comments too crude to include here with your picture on it, are way beyond having adult discussions with. They are thugs who are no better than the ruffians who routinely beat and hung African Americans in the old South simply because they could get away with it. Like Hitler’s Storm Troopers, they are driven by hatred, pure and simple. You do not reason with hatred, Mr. President, you defeat it.

I was only two years old when President Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas in 1963. It had been almost a century since the nation had a sitting president assassinated and one could almost forgive the Secret Service for not being totally prepared for the possibility of it happening on their watch. That mistake cost the nation dearly. Forty-six years later, we are again faced with the real threat of assassination against a sitting president. There is no excuse now for not being prepared. The actors in this potential tragedy have not hidden their sentiments; in deed they have made them all too clear. It would be doubly criminal if as President your intellect, your higher ideals if you will, clouded your judgment and further encouraged an unstable individual to attempt the unspeakable.

The ball is in your court, Mr. President. You can do with it as you wish. For now, you are the chief executive of the country. It is high time you acted like it. It is high time you led by example and put those who are out of line in their proper place. Your predecessor had no such difficulties in this area. Of all the shortcomings George Bush had, one of them was not timidity. He did what he felt was best for the country, no matter how it was perceived. That he was wrong in his judgment most of the time should not be an excuse for not following, at least in this manner, in his footsteps. To do so would be akin to throwing out the baby with the bath water.