It was definitely heavily because he was black.
They were merely representing their constituents.
I think I mentioned a customer who’s a officer in some local Tea Party group. I snarked at him a few weeks ago about dusting off his colonial LARPing clothing and without hesitation he claimed the tax reform will magically pay for itself and all 3rd party analysis is wrong.
Reality does not intersect with such people.
but obama wasn’t liberal, he was a centrist, like almost all democrats these days
Let’s not kid ourselves - it was because he was half black.
Racists consider a drop of black blood just black. It was because he was black.
And your evidence is . . .
Meanwhile the Tea Party supported Tim Scott, an African American Senator from South Carolina:
Look, I’m not denying that there are racists in the Tea Party and that some haven’t said racist things. But to say that their opposition to Obama was based on race just doesn’t hold up. Do you think they’d love Joe Biden instead because he was white?
Objectively, perhaps, but the Repubs have moved to far right, the center is now liberal. And from Bernie World, the converse is probably true.
Republicans moving further to the right doesn’t make centrist positions liberal
It kind of does, doesn’t it? I’m frustrated by this too, but it seems to be political reality. One side moving the goal posts further right does indeed make former centrist positions seem more leftist. That’s just how it is, it seems. Denying that is like denying reality.
No it’s not. Centrist positions are centrist irrespective of their relative place on the current political spectrum.
They would not have called Biden “un-American” or constantly harangued that Biden didn’t understand “American values.” And supporting a black senator (or Supreme Court justice) doesn’t make them any less racist.
AKA They have a black friend
Well, ‘centrist’ itself is a relative term, and political spectra are historical artifacts that are determined by all sorts of things. I mean it’s not like we’re talking about platforms that are carved in stone and handed down from Mt. Sinai.
True, but it’s also not like the left-right continuum is strictly contained by the DNC/ GOP axis either. There are broader political movements, even within the western democratic world that greatly expand upon the meaning of left wing.
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One can argue how centrist Obama was, but regardless, to Tea Partiers, he was a liberal, and since we are talking about what motivated them, we have to look at it from their perspective, not yours or mine.
One disgusting photo is nothing more than an anecdote. I would have thought you would understand that. If you want to prove race motivated the Tea Party you are going to need to provide some sort of statistically valid poll. Using your logic, I could find photos proving almost anything about a large group of people.
You have yet to prove that the majority of Tea Partiers thought of Obama in those terms. If you are going to say a group of people believe X then you are going to need to do that. So far no one here has shown that.
As if anyone polled Tea Partiers and asked them “are you opposed to Obama because of his race?”?
You’ll never get statistical data for that sort of question. It is certainly valid, though, for those of us who live in conservative areas and have daily interactions with a great many people who identified with the Tea Party and commonly made jokes, shared “monkey” memes, etc. My own personal experience within my own circle of acquaintances was that Tea Party largely overlapped with “racist and hated Obama and loved to compare him to monkeys, talked about him being Kenyan, being Muslim, etc.”
Demanding statistical data for that sort of thing is basically saying “I don’t want to listen to you.”
Did you sleep through the entire Obama Administration? 42% of Republicans are (still) birthers, which is the not-so-subtle GOP code for “black people aren’t allowed to be President.”