With potent left hook, Obama is first democrat in a generation not to say “Please don’t hurt me”

President Obama has come out swinging against rival Mitt Romney and the republicans. Again. This time it’s Romney implying that Obama wasn’t really born in the United States, and Obama swinging back by selling campaign buttons which read “Made in the USA.” It’s yet another instance of the President exercising his increasingly potent left hook and fighting back against the lies which conservatives have been spreading about him. It wasn’t always this way. But with Obama having faced the most vicious smears of any presidential candidate in decades, he’s showing that he’s grown quite the backbone – and among democrats, that makes him remarkable…

The fictional character Bruno Gianelli in Aaron Sorkin’s The West Wing phrased it perhaps best when, while advising a democratic president on how to get reelected, stated that he was tired of democrats cowering in the face of conservative smear tactics and replying only with “Please don’t hurt me.” After having kept his head down and quietly gone about his job while going out of his way to stay away from the controversial nonsense being made up about him for the first few years of his presidency, Obama is breaking the mold which says that democrats have to be political wimps, for fear that fighting back will cause the snottier liberals to conclude that “both sides are exactly the same” and stay home on election day. But here we’ve got a sitting President who, heading into reelection, started using the term “ObamaCare” as part of his own campaign even though it had been cooked up by his opponents as a way to pretend that health care reform is a bad thing. And then he comes out in favor of gay marriage, not because it necessarily helps him with moderates in the election, but because it’s the right thing to do…

And now you’ve got a guy who is unafraid to be perceived as the smartest kid in the class (which he is), and unafraid to show off his moral superiority, conservative loons who use their religious extremism as an excuse to discriminate be damned. Then he goes and refers to Romney as a wannabe “birther-in-chief” and ties him to the lunatic fringe group who insanely thinks Obama was born in Kenya, or on Mars, or wherever the voices in their heads have whispered to them this week. Taking the fact that Romney made an inappropriate joke and using it to paint him as being part of a mentally ill group of extremists is a vicious move on Obama’s part. And if more democrats had taken this path over the past generation, there might have been more democratic presidents. Obama isn’t just playing for a moral victory; he already won that race a long time ago. No, he’s playing to win.