How Obama's Election Drove the American Right Insane

The following is adapted from "Over the Cliff: How Obama’s Election Drove the American Right Insane," due out next month from PoliPoint Press.

On the day Barack Obama was elected president of the United States, much of the nation -- particularly those who supported and voted for him -- celebrated the election of the first African American to the country's highest office. For those who voted for his opponent, John McCain, there was naturally the usual bitterness and disappointment.

Among a certain subset of those Americans, however -- especially those who opposed Obama precisely because he sought to become the nation's first black president -- it went well beyond the usual despair. For them, November 5, 2008, was the end of the world. Or at least, the end of America as they knew it.

So maybe it wasn't really a surprise that they responded that day with the special venom and violence peculiar to the American Right. Like the noose strung in protest from a tree limb in Texas.

Students at Baylor University in Waco discovered the noose hanging from a campus tree the evening of election day, near a site where angry Republican students had gathered Obama yard signs and burned them in a big bonfire. That same evening, a riot nearly broke out when Obama supporters, chanting the new president's name, were confronted outside a residence hall by white students who told them: "Any nigger who walks by Penland [Hall], we're going to kick their ass, we're going to jump him." The Obama supporters stopped and responded, "Excuse me?" -- and somehow managed to keep the confrontation confined to a mere shouting match until police arrived and broke things up.

There were also the students on the North Carolina State University campus, in Raleigh, who spent election night spraypainting such fun-loving messages as "Let's shoot that Nigger in the head" and "Hang Obama by a noose." The university's administration was so upset by this behavior that it protected the students' identities and refused to take any legal action against them or discipline them at all.

Those were just warm-ups from the student cheering section. The real thugs, exemplars of the dark side of the American psyche, were shortly to make their mark.

That night, four young white men from Staten Island "decided to go after black people" in retaliation for Obama's election. The men first drove to the mostly black Park Hill neighborhood and assaulted a Liberian immigrant, beating him with a metal pipe and a police baton, as well as their fists and feet. They drove next to Port Richmond, where they assaulted another black man and verbally threatened a Latino man and a group of black people.

The hooligans finished up the night by attempting to drive next to a man walking home from his job as a Rite Aid manager and club him with the police baton. Instead, they simply hit him with their car, throwing him off the windshield and into a coma for over a month. The pedestrian was actually white, but this crew of geniuses managed to misidentify him as a black man. All four of the thugs wound up convicted of hate crimes and will spend the duration of Obama's first term in prison. Look for them to turn up on Fox News in a few years claiming to be victims of the oppressive Obama administration.

The day after the election in Midland, Michigan, a discarded Ron Paul activist named Randy Gray (he had been peremptorily dismissed from the Paul campaign when his white-supremacist activism was revealed), dressed in full Ku Klux Klan regalia, stalked the sidewalk in the middle of a heavily trafficked intersection and waved an American flag. He also toted a handgun.

Police talked to Gray but let him continue his display after he told them his behavior had nothing to do with Obama winning the presidency.