When Obama was starting to rise in the polls in the 2008 election, some black comedians started to fantasize about what it would be like to have a black President. I even got into the humor, telling people at work there was going to be this big barbeque at the White House with lots of 40s and Snoop Dogg bringing the music. It was all funny until South Carolina hit, when it seemed former President Clinton made a remark that seemed to run the wrong way with black constituents.

What we have forgotten in the early days of the 2008 campaign is that a lot of the older black establishment didn’t like Obama. They thought he was an interloper, a pretender and all of this stemmed from the fact that Obama didn’t come up through the ranks like most black politicians before him. He wasn’t part of a church organization; he didn’t march for black pride. He was just a guy who wanted to be President who happened to be black.

I bring this up because as I’ve sat down and heard all the accusations from birthers and other right wing radicals fearful of the President, it occurred to me their ammunition might have come from the campaign. When Bill Clinton had a lot of his problems during his Presidency, the ammunition came from the campaign and people in his party. The elephant is the room that became Whitewater was from a debate between Jerry Brown and Clinton. It was Brown who brought Whitewater up, because of an article written in an Arkansas paper. I know because I found the same story a month before the debate. The womanizing information also came up during the primaries. All it took was for Republican operatives to move in and use the information.

Right now Obama is being hit hard because of opposition that can’t stand him. Some want to be cautious and say this is just political fighting, that the Democrats did the same thing with Bush. I went through some of the articles I’ve saved over the years and I wanted to see when this anger Democrats had against Bush started. It’s tough because you’re going with hindsight and what might have seemed over the top back then, considering the discourse happening now, would seem tame today.

Essentially, what I saw, and I’m not an expert, but I saw where there was some grumbling from Democrats because of the nature of the election. When you have the media make Bush’s win seem like it came from one county in Florida then the Supreme Court making the decision, you’re going to have people question the legitimacy of the outcome. It can be argued, unlike the birthers, there were legitimate issues since you had a trail of information to prove the point. The thing is, all this changed when 9/11 happened. When Bush got on the rubble with the firemen that was when a large amount of Bush criticism ended. Bush had a built in loyalty because of the attack and anyone who disputed him, in the eyes of many, attacked the Presidency and the thousands that died in 9/11. You just had to look at Bill Maher, who had a hit night time show, who made a comment about the hijackers and was kicked off the air to understand the type of respect Bush had in the country.

When people seemed to wake up and find fault with Bush seemed to have occurred during his second election run and when people started to question the reason why we were in Iraq and not finding the weapons of mass destruction. So, just to do some comparisons, it seems Bush had conservatively 4 years before opposition rose widely against his administration. I wouldn’t say his first 4 years were a breeze, but he had time before Democratic Party members as well as fringe groups were openly against him to where people took notice.

Obama hasn’t been in office a year. We had, during the summer, commentators wanting him to fail and saying that openly, commentators calling him a racist against white people, people calling him a socialist, a communist or any other –ist and some feeling it’s quite alright to bring guns to where the President is speaking. All of this had built up to the “You lie” shout during his address to Congress by the South Carolina representative.

With the rancor coming from the opposite side, I almost wish Obama would peel off an imaginary mask and become the hidden Black Panther leader I’m sure many whites are afraid of. I want to see the fiery Samuel L. Jackson type shouting from the rooftops that The Man is dead and the brothers have power. I want that scene from In Living Color, when in reference to Clarence Thomas becoming a Supreme Court justice and realizing he can’t be fired, he breaks out into Shaft mode and sings the theme to the movie. If they want to have the fear of a Black Planet, let’s give them the REAL fear instead of manufacturing phantoms for conservative whites to go Casper on.

I know I’m going to get grief for saying only white people have fear for the black President, but when I watched the coverage on FoxNews about the protest against the government in Washington, I strained to see any black faces in the crowd. They were there and the cameras sure interviewed them, but a lot of the talk said by the whites in the crowd talked about bringing America back to what it used to be. That phrase frightens me because I remember what America used to be. I’m not talking about going back to slavery times or the height of Jim Crow.

Just from my little corner of the world, I remember when there were few opportunities for non-whites to get ahead. I remember the picture of the black man getting jabbed at by the American flag by a white protester in Boston because of bussing. Last week I heard a local radio talk show host bemoaning why Obama wanted to have a socialist agenda. He fumed about how Obama and Michelle Obama were privileged because they ‘somehow’ got into an Ivy League school. See, that’s the America I remember, when no matter what a minority did someone was going to assume they got their position because of affirmative action or quotas. It was never because of merit. Now we have a black President who got there because of merit and still there are many in this country who believe he got there because of affirmative action. The America of white being right is the America I think of when I hear about us going back to the way it used to be.

I don’t think we’re perfect yet, far from it, but I refuse to go back to the way things were. As Khan said, quoting Moby Dick, “To the last, I will grapple with thee... from Hell's heart, I stab at thee! For hate's sake, I spit my last breath at thee!” I will not have this country go back to the way it was.