Mr. President you are everything that frightens them, everything that threatens their order, and everything they hate. You cannot win them over. They will always hate you. They hate you because your father was black, your mother was a white intellectual woman, because you are educated and because you are successful. Your very existence threatens their world.
At a blood red precinct in a small North Carolina town, I handed out Democratic voter information sheets to all who would take them. Out of the hundreds of white voters who walked up to vote, I was hard pressed to hand out a dozen. Blacks and Hispanics gladly took them. I chatted with the Republican candidates for local office and listened to what they said to their supporters. They hate you Mr. President. Evangelical white voters came united by hatred for you on a mission against you and Democrats who supported you.
Mr President, I challenged a local Republican candidate about his criticism of your success in saving General Motors and hundreds of thousands of American jobs. He dismissed those good American jobs as "union jobs". Then he said many of those jobs went to Canada. What he didn't say, but hinted in code, was that many of those jobs went to African Americans.
He said he would cut taxes as county commissioner. When I challenged him to what he would cut: schools, fire fighters or police, because that's what almost all of the budget goes to, he said he has a 12 point plan for the schools but he won't give it out until the election is over.
His plan is as real as Reagan's "supply side economics". It's as real as George Bush's tax cuts. It's as real as John Boehner's latest plan. It is a fraud.
Republicans have been telling economic fairy tales for generations to ensure that government enforces laws that direct money from the poor and the middle class to the rich. Of course, when the middle class runs out of cash and credit the system crashes. That's what happened in 2008. In 1936, FDR faced even harsher conditions than we face today and the Republicans came up with the same type of ridiculous economic plans.
Roosevelt didn't take those ridiculous plans seriously. He didn't bargain. He didn't cut a deal. He eviscerated them with humor.
"Let me warn you, and let me warn the nation, against the smooth evasion that says 'Of course we believe these things. We believe in social security. We believe in work for the unemployed. We believe in saving homes. Cross our hearts and hope to die.
(laughter)
'We believe in all these things. But we do not like the way that the present administration is doing them. Just turn them over to us. We will do all of them, we will do more of them, we will do them better and, most important of all, the doing of them will not cost anybody anything'"
(Rounding applause and laughter)
Announcer: FDRs re-election was the biggest landslide in American history.
I listened as a winning local Republican candidate mocked the theory of evolution. These people don't believe in progress. They hate evolution, both biological and social. They believe in a fixed social order. They believe in the social order of the small plantation town where everyone knows their place. Mr. President, you threaten that order more than an Al Qaeda terrorist, just by the fact that you are president. To restore their social order they must destroy you and your allies.
Negotiations can only be done from a position of strength because Republicans won't bargain in good faith. Take cap and trade legislation, for example. A cap and trade bill that slashed emissions of gasses causing acid rain is one of President George H. W. Bush's proudest accomplishments. Cap and trade is business-friendly, market based concept for minimizing the costs of reducing pollutant levels. It was a Republican approach to environmental regulation. It successfully reduced acid rain more quickly and at far lower cost than predicted by economists. However, when President Obama, Nancy Pelosi and House Democrats pushed for cap and trade Republicans called it a socialistic attack by Democrats on free enterprise. Negotiations failed because Republicans were more interested in defeating the President and Democrats than in the health and welfare of all the world's people.
Mitch McConnell has effectively declared war on the President concerning health care and the major accomplishments of President Obama's first 2 years.
"We can — and should — propose and vote on straight repeal, repeatedly," McConnel said. But he warned, "We can’t expect the president to sign it,. So we’ll also have to work, in the House, on denying funds for implementation...
McConnell is speaking for his aging southern white Republican base. They don't want bipartisanship. They want surrender. They want to intimidate, shame and humiliate President Obama.
I watched and listened to the aging white southern Republican base for hours, half the time alone and the other half with a fellow Democratic volunteer who is black. I kept a positive, persuasive approach, never losing my cool despite what I saw and heard. Everyone was polite on the surface, but the hate was palpable. My fellow volunteer occasionally whispered to me about the hate he was seeing.
Bill Clinton was one of them who rose too high and joined the other team so they had to drag his name through the mud with months of investigations, leaks and trials. But they didn't really hate Bill.
Mr President, if you want to know what bipartisanship brings you, ask Hillary in for a chat. They threw everything and the kitchen sink at her to humiliate her and break her will, because she is a strong woman. Republicans didn't try to destroy just Bill Clinton. They tried to destroy his family. And he was one of them.
There hasn't been anything close to this level of Republican anger since Franklin Roosevelt, but with Roosevelt the anger was more political and less personal. Don't welcome their hatered like Roosevelt did in 1936.
For nearly four years you have had an Administration which instead of twirling its thumbs has rolled up its sleeves. We will keep our sleeves rolled up.
We had to struggle with the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering.
They had begun to consider the Government of the United States as a mere appendage to their own affairs. We know now that Government by organized money is just as dangerous as Government by organized mob.
Never before in all our history have these forces been so united against one candidate as they stand today. They are unanimous in their hate for me—and I welcome their hatred.
I should like to have it said of my first Administration that in it the forces of selfishness and of lust for power met their match. I should like to have it said of my second Administration that in it these forces met their master.
That could incite them to violence.
I have not seen so much hatred since I walked the streets of Mobile Alabama wearing long hair in 1970. All those hateful eyes staring at me left an unforgettable impression.
But they hate you more than that. I can only guess that the last time conservative southern whites were this angry was when Lincoln freed the slaves and crushed their traitorous racist revolution in the Civil War.
Mr. President, a huge number of angry Republicans went to the polls because they hate you. You cannot compromise with them or their elected representatives because they will see any attempt at compromise as a sign of weakness and an opportunity to attack you.
They hate you Mr. President.
The best you can do, Mr. President, is earn their hatred, like Lincoln did, by soundly defeating them.