A Crescendo in American Anger

The Washington Post reports:
American disapproval of Obama is on the rise
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer - Wednesday, January 27, 2010
"The state of the union is obstreperous. Dyspepsia is the new equilibrium. All the passion in American politics is oppositional. The American people know what they don't like, which is: everything. That sounds like nihilism, but they're against that, too. Consider the poll last week by The Washington Post and ABC News. People were asked a standard question about how much confidence they had in President Obama to "make the right decisions" for the nation's future. A majority -- 53 percent -- gave the two most dismal of the four possible responses: "just some" and "none at all." The same question had been asked a year earlier; in just 12 months, the "none at all" camp had tripled, from 9 percent to 27 percent. We are at a strange moment: a crescendo in American anger even as the man in the White House hums along in a state of preternatural equanimity. Obama, who will take over prime-time television Wednesday night for his annual address to Congress, has seen such a drastic erosion of popularity that he may get only about 35 or 40 standing ovations instead of the usual 50 or so. The Againstness Epidemic has been years in the making. Individual strains of opposition have been cultivated in the petri dishes of special interest groups, religious fundamentalists, blogs, cable TV shows, talk radio, fringe subcultures (birthers, truthers, tea partiers). They feed into, and are fed by, entrenched industries of disagreeableness (fossil fuel companies, labor unions, the Chamber of Commerce, Rush Limbaugh). We live in a country in which being contrarian now means advocating a mainstream initiative."

The media is always late to the party.

"Obama has a bright future. I hope for his sake that he loses, because he will be the “fall guy” and historically during “inflection points” those presidents have been the recipients of bullets (Lincoln, McKinley, Kennedy, Reagan). The “mob” has emerged and they’re seeking someone to lynch."
Random Roving - June 30, 2008

"The mob will get even more angry."
Random Roving - January 1, 2010