Dangerous Game

N. Mills: Health Care and the Climate of Hate

WITH THE opponents of health care reform getting noisier and more violent since Congress began its summer recess, President Obama has decided that he will take a more personal role in the health care debate. His decision increases the likelihood of health care legislation passing, but it also puts the president at risk.

The latest attacks on the president and his health care proposals are not merely about policy differences. In combination with the claim of the “birther” movement that the president was not really born in the United States, they are attacks on Obama’s right to lead the country that bring to mind nothing so much as the kind of hatred rampant in America when Lincoln and Kennedy were assassinated.

“Sic semper tyrannis,” (“Thus always to tyrants”–the motto of the state of Virginia), John Wilkes Booth shouted after he shot Lincoln. Booth, like many Southerners, was convinced that he was ridding the world of a dictator who had unfairly assumed control over the Confederacy. In his own thinking and that of his Southern supporters, Booth wasn’t killing a legitimate president but doing a way with a usurper. As he wrote in a letter that he had prepared in advance for publication in the National Intelligencer, “The world may censure me for what I am about to do, but I am sure that posterity will justify me.”

A century later when John Kennedy flew to Dallas on a campaign swing through Texas, the country was not at war but Kennedy, like Lincoln, was seen by some as a traitor to America. Conservatives were furious over the civil rights legislation he had proposed in early 1963 and over the diplomatic agreements he had made with the Soviet Union. In October, Adlai Stevenson, America’s ambassador to the United Nations, was jeered and physically threatened during a visit to Dallas on United Nations Day; and in early November, Kennedy was told that if he traveled to Dallas he could expect the same treatment. Neither his youth nor his record as a hero of the Second World War would lessen the hatred of him. Dallas was in the thrall of the right-wing John Birch Society, which believed, in the words of retired general Edwin Walker, that “Kennedy is a liability to the free world.”

Echoes from this violent past are most visible today in the people who have shown up at health care meetings carrying guns, but they are also part of the doomsday rhetoric of Obama critics who believe he has put “the existence of the republic is at risk” and insist that “we don’t want this country to turn into Russia.”

Right now virtually anything goes if you are a critic of health care reform and want to targets its proponents. The swastika painted outside the office of Georgia Congressman David Scott–like the “Obama + Pelosi = Mein Kampf” sign that appeared when the president spoke in Portsmouth, New Hampshire–is fair game as far as Obama’s opponents are concerned, and to make matters worse, mainstream Republican leaders have not disavowed such attacks.

On the contrary, many have even encouraged them. Republican Congressman Todd Akin of Missouri, for example, received a lot of television coverage but little criticism within his district for his covert racism when he made a choking sign and joked about the lynching that health care reformers had been threatened with.

What will happen to this anger when a health care bill comes up for a vote this fall? That’s anyone’s guess. But history provides no comfort, and neither does the record of the Secret Service in protecting presidents in an atmosphere in which hate rules.

Nicolaus Mills is professor of American Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and co-editor of the forthcoming, Getting Out: Historical Perspectives on Leaving Iraq.

Photo: Obama speaks at a town hall meeting on health care reform in Green Bay, Wisconsin (Chuck Kennedy / White House).