By Uche Onyebadi
JUDGING by the energy Republicans deployed to opening up a number of battlefields against President Obama last week, you might have mistaken the entire scenario for an indication that the president had managed to convince Americans to give him a chance to run for a third term in office. They attacked from all angles, reenacting their plans and vituperations that did not deter Americans from voting twice to confirm Obama as their president.

New Senate Majority Leader, Senator Mitch McConnell, kicked off the onslaught when he said this last month: “The uptick (economic recovery data) appears to coincide with the biggest political change of the Obama administration’s long tenure in Washington: the expectation of a new Republican Congress.” This blatant revisionist history of the revitalization of U.S. economy was as startling as it was bizarre. Put in more plain language, McConnell was claiming the current economic rebirth in the U.S. came about because people are happy that his party is now in control of both houses of Congress.

Rudy Giuliani

Of course, President Obama used an opportunity last week to poke fun at this aberration called Mitchnomics when he told his audience that “Our Republican leader in the Senate, as he was coming in, after trying to block every single thing that we have done to strengthen the economy, starts looking at jobs numbers, says you know, it is getting better because we just got elected. And people are feeling more optimistic.” Unfortunately, Mitch’s claim will find traction among some Republican zealots who would rather see Obama as a plague unleashed to their country by some malevolent spirits.

Malevolent spirits

An apparently milder form of anti-Obama rhetoric was last week fired by the incumbent governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, a man who has not hidden his ambition to contest the presidency in 2016. In an interview with The Washington Post, Walker was asked about something as simple as what he thought about President Obama’s faith. Instead of giving a straight-forwarded response, the governor said a highly suggestive “I don’t know”, claiming that he is yet to have a chance to discuss the matter with the president. The governor’s spokesperson later “clarified” the statement by explaining that “of course the governor thinks the president is a Christian.” It is so strange that the usually articulate governor could not express his thoughts.

But, by far the most bewildering anti-Obama sentiment came from a man known as Rudy Giuliani. His most important claim to prominence was the exemplary leadership as New York mayor in the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attack in his city in 2001. Time Magazine declared him Man of the Year for that year. But, when he attempted to ride on that fame to run for the U.S. presidency in 2008, he did not even do as much as capture the presidential candidacy of the Republican Party.

At a private function last week, the former mayor had this to say about his president: “I do not believe – and I know this is a horrible thing to say – but I do not believe that the president loves America. He doesn’t love you. And he doesn’t love me. He wasn’t brought up the way you were brought up and I was brought up through love of this country.” This statement is full of cankerworms, two of which are that: America has an unpatriotic president, who is, therefore, not qualified to hold that office; Obama is not one of us, a ghost of the age-old racist and discredited Republican fixation that the president is not an American by birth.

White House press secretary, Josh Earnest, last Friday lamented that the former mayor had discredited himself by asserting that “it’s sad to see when somebody who has attained a certain level of public stature, and even admiration, tarnishes that legacy so thoroughly.” Republican Party senator and a consistent Obama critic, Senator Lindsey Graham, even thought that his co-party member had gone overboard when he rather grudgingly said this in an ABC interview: “Well, I love Rudy, but I don’t want to go there. The nation’s very divided. President Obama has divided us more than he’s brought us together and I don’t want to add to that division. I have no doubt that he (Obama) loves his country. I have no doubt that he’s a patriot. But his primary job as president of the United States is to defend this country and he’s failing miserably.” In making this half-hearted criticism of Giuliani, the South Carolina senator could not help taking a swipe at the president.

Giuliani’s unprovoked ranting might be his way of calling attention to himself in an era where the Republican base is desperate for a leader who can represent the party in the forthcoming presidential election. There is little evidence that the former mayor has lost all appetite for presidential politics, especially now that the man who was viewed as a strong contender, Mitt Romney, has ruled himself out of the race. Perhaps, Giuliani is attempting to position himself as a credible candidate with enough national presence to pose a formidable challenge to Hillary Clinton.

By choosing to vilify Obama, Mayor Giuliani may be attempting to wheel himself into the forefront of Republican Party’s potential presidential aspirants or might be doing a yeoman’s job on behalf of his party. Either way, he has not done himself any favour.