During his interview with Steve Kroft of 60 Minutes over the weekend, President Obama was asked a question:
“Do you think if you ran again, could run again, and did run again, you would be elected?”
To which the President replied:
“Yes.”
Kroft must have been surprised by that answer, so he got the President to expand with this follow-up query:
“You do?”
Obama then got a bit philosophical and said:
“You know, it’s interesting…you go into your last year and I think it’s bittersweet. On the one hand, I am very proud of what we’ve accomplished and it makes me think, I’d love to do some more. But by the time I’m finished, I think it will be time for me to go, because there’s a reason why we considered George Washington one of our greatest presidents. He set a precedent, saying that when you occupy this seat, it is an extraordinary privilege.”
Personally, I would love it if President Obama could run for a third term, and I truly believe he would be reelected, perhaps by an even bigger margin than the first two times he ran.
But from the reaction from the right wing nutjobs who wear tinfoil hats and see conspiracies behind everything the President says, he might just as well have declared that he would be suspending the Constitution indefinitely and would soon be turning us all into zombies. Here is some of the online reaction–much of it blatantly racist–which has appeared on social media since Sunday:
I wish I knew where this kind of hatred comes from. Something tells me it has a lot to do with the color of the President’s skin and not his policies. It is ugly, and I would love to say it will get better–that people will one day get better–but despite my optimism, it doesn’t ever seem to. And that is a very sad commentary on this country.
Featured image by Flickr, available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license.
