If they aren't our presidents, then this may not be our country

I came of age during a turbulent time in America, and I saw at first hand the terms of two of the most controversial presidents ever.

In fact, you might call them the two presidents who changed everything and left us where we are today.

Nixon in 1974

Ironically for two men who turned out to have so much of an effect, it's very possible neither of them would have been elected at all except for the turmoil of their times. In 1968, Richard Nixon gave America its outlet for a backlash against crime in the streets, riots in the ghettoes and college students in protest against the war. In 1980, Ronald Reagan essentially won because Jimmy Carter's effort to rescue the hostages from Teheran in the spring came up short.

Between the two of them, they taught the country that you couldn't trust the president (Nixon) and that the government was basically useless (Reagan).

But as much as their opponents disliked or even despised them, they accepted the fact that they were president.

You see, at that point we were still in either the first or second of the four stages of disagreement, stage one being "I disagree with you," and stage two being "You're wrong."

But with the ascendancy of hard-core conservatives under Reagan, we moved into stage three, which is "You're stupid (or weak)."

Along with that, as Thomas C. Frank wrote in his wonderful book The Wrecking Crew, there was a conscious decision by Jack Abramoff's Young Republicans and others like them to make conservatism much more macho and in-your-face and to make Democrats look like wimps.

Add to that the increasing influence of fundamentalist Christians, and we slipped over into stage four of disagreement, the one in which you look at your opponent and see them as evil.

It started when Bill Clinton was elected in 1992. For the first time, there was no honeymoon from the other side. The right wing noise machine attacked him relentlessly before he ever took office, saying his 43 percent of the vote in a three-way race made him an illegitimate president. Rush Limbaugh was attacking him with an "America Held Hostage" countdown during the transition period.

But it was Moral Majority founder Jerry Falwell who went far beyond the pale in promoting a book and video -- "The Clinton Chronicles" -- that purported to prove Clinton had been responsible for more than two dozen murders of people who got in the way of his ambition.

The radical right never accepted Clinton as their president, and did everything but try to kill him to keep him from governing. The endless Starr investigation, which finally uncovered something -- the affair with Monica Lewinsky -- that hadn't even happened when the investigation started.

Most of the overt "he's not my president" talk started with George W. Bush in 2001. For one thing, he lost
the popular vote by 500,000 votes. For another, the election came down to Florida, where Republicans controlled the election apparatus and Bush's younger brother was the governor.

In the end, the Supreme Court intervened, stopping the recount and awarding the election to Bush.

That was when the "he's not my president" talk started, and for eight years it never really stopped. Democrats in Congress did work with Bush on things like education reform, which was more than Clinton had gotten out of the GOP while he was in office.

But when everything fell apart for Bush in his last year in office, Democrat Barack Obama was elected by the widest margin in 20 years, an election in which Obama carried such hard-core Republican states as Indiana and North Carolina.

All of a sudden, we had a president who was a Democrat, who had the middle name "Hussein" and who was half African-American. While many people who had supported Obama saw the election as a giant step forward for our country, there were those on the far right for whom we might as well have elected Osama bin Laden.

Not all of the opposition to Obama was based on racism, but it did seem as if every racist in America with an Internet connection used the election as justification for recycling every stupid racist remark they had ever heard. In addition, publicity hounds like Donald Trump insisted that Obama had not been born in this country and was therefore ineligible to be president.

Republicans decided that they would not work with Obama on anything, even when he proposed things that had been Republican ideas. Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell said his only goal was to make sure Obama was not re-elected.

Of course he was re-elected, and ever since his second inauguration in January, he has received no co-operation at all from Republicans.

After all, he is not their president.

So we have a country where when the Democrats are in power, Republicans opt out. And vice versa. Each side refuses to accept the other as legitimate or even as American. I'm as guilty as anyone. After the debacle of December 2000, I never saw Bush as a legitimate president.

Still, if you don't accept a legitimately elected president, it's just a short step from there to saying it isn't your country.

And with talk in certain states like Texas about secession, I find myself wondering something. If Texas or any other red states wanted to secede, who would be the Abraham Lincoln who would believe that it mattered to hold our country together?

I'm afraid I don't see one on the horizon.