Even 
today 20% of American believe Obama was born outside the US and 29% of them believe he is a Muslim. (43% of Republicans believe he is a Muslim.)
And my Republican / conservative friends, most of whom are reasonable and moderate, if conservative, people, still want to insist that opposition to Obama is just to the policies he puts forward and not the result of bigotry.
I’ve got one thing to say to you: If you would have stood up and beat this back when you had a chance, instead of taking advantage of it, you would not be dealing with Trump’s imminent takeover of your party and the electoral devastation that is going to follow in November.
And I predicted all of this, by the way. I told you that you would regret being quiet or, even worse, putting up all those stupid memes that echoed talking points on the ACA that were so blatantly untrue that only someone utterly indifferent to the truth or bigoted against Obama would believe them.
Obama wanted to govern as a slightly left of center president. He adopted the Republican proposal on health care reform. He was ready to cut back spending after a large stimulus got the economy back on its feet (which you guys said, wrongly, it didn’t do). He was ready to make a deal (which I would have opposed) on taxes and entitlements.
He really did want to turn down the heat. He seemed to believe–and I sort of agreed–that as the first Black president, he might have been in a unique position, to find a way to lead this country back to the center and begin to address the economic and cultural disputes of our time with a little less rancor and a lot more pragmatic policy-making.
And instead of telling your party to embrace his offer, you emboldened the treason of Mitch McConnell’s decision to oppose him at every turn for the sake of short term political victories. And you put your head in the sand when McConnell, Boehner, and his henchmen rode the tea party to victory in 2010.
You guys should have known better. And because you didn’t, you are more responsible than the ignorant fools you helped unleashed. They don’t know any better. You should have.
I’ve been thinking about the lost opportunity we had with Obama as president. If his moral authority with half of us had not been undermined by the right wing campaign of hate against him, how much more he might have been able to do when Black people were killed by police officers for no good reason. His calm and reasonabl evoice would have been there articulating both the reality of structural racism and the mistake of blaming all individual police officers (which BLM did not make). He might have pointed us to changes in attitudes and policies that would have made a difference in the future. He could have led a debate that might have involved far less rancor and unreason.
But when half the country already distrusted him because they had been told that he was a tyrant bent on a socialist-Muslim dictatorship, his capacity to carry on that kind of leadership was drastically undermined.
It’s very sad.
But, I’m totally convinced, we will keep learning the lessons of his presidency. It may take twenty years, but there will be a reckoning and great regret even on the right about what they did during this period.