Over at ThinkProgress, George Zornick has a nice roundup of the hypocrisy in John Boehner‘s umbrage at Obama calling on Latino voters to “punish our enemies” at the polls. This comes, of course, from a leader of the party whose members have called Obama un-American and compared him to Hitler.
But it doesn’t matter whether his accusation makes sense, much as the truth hasn’t mattered much in this election, either. There are scores of Americans who are ready to believe the heightened, frenzied anti-Obama rhetoric without much concern for its source or purpose and are ready to pounce on anything he says in the opposite direction. It’s always been true that these accusations would be made against any Democratic president, as many have argued, and that we were probably destined for a midterm year with Republican gains driven by anti-Obama sentiment. But it’s hard to ignore how much of the tone is affected by race, and for the people who listen to Boehner, this isn’t hypocritical at all.
— Monica Potts
