President Obama, I identify with you in ways that I have not with other politicians. You and I lived in the same neighborhood. Your kids and mine went to the same school. You taught at the University of Chicago, where I did my graduate work. My daughter volunteered for your Senate campaign. I gave you money and I gave you my vote. You've reintroduced eloquence--thinking and speaking in complete sentences and even paragraphs--and reason, so sadly lacking in the eight years before you took office, into the national discourse. Sure, you're a bit more comfortable with business interests than me, a bit (or a lot) less outraged about the treatment of captured prisoners and their civil rights. We could discuss these differences, in that civilized Hyde Park way that allowed me not to clock any of the Deconstructionists I knew in the English department nor any of the Chicago School economists in the business school. (And that allowed them not to clock me right back, probably harder; Merton Miller in particular was kind of a bruiser. For a 70-year-old academic.) So, please, come over here, lean in close, and let me whisper a bit of advice in your ear...a bit closer now...

            SMACK! to the back of the head!

            Stop fucking coddling right wingers. I know that you think it's the right thing, the politic thing, a thing you can pull off. Mr. President, you cannot. You should not. Give up on them. Fuck tha right wing. They are racist scum--their very denials of their racism, which Stephen Colbert skewers with his "I don't see color" mantra, betray that racism--and they wish you nothing but ill. Jimmy Carter got it right; their hysteria, their crazy furor, is a bigot's terror. (Jimmy Carter was never, like Bill Clinton and yourself, a great politician, so he tends to speak the truth, that crazy old coot.) You, sir, in your recent statements that the rightwingnuts' disagreements with you are over policy, not race, have it wrong. You are not facing a debating society; you are facing a lynch mob. When they call you a Nazi, they are actually thinking another N-word. Give up on them. Fuck tha right wing.

            Let's just talk pragmatically here, shall we? You don't need the rightwingnuts, and you will never get them. You may or may not have a filibuster-proof majority, and some of your supposed allies are closer to your enemies than to you, but those are not insuperable problems. Promise Ben Nelson that Nebraska will never see another dime of that yummy pork he loves so well if he votes against healthcare reform; suggest--privately--to Max Baucus that an investigation of senators who took money from the healthcare lobby might be in order should he continue to stand in the way of progress. Discipline your troops, Mr. President, and roll over the batshit-crazy town-Hell fuckwits. In the immortal words of a notorious Republican criminal, who, like so many criminals,  found Jesus (was he lost?) (did anyone look behind the sofa cushions?), "When you've got 'em by the balls, their hearts and minds will follow."

(Chuck Colson was a better man when he was a worse man. What can I say? I like my criminals eee-vil. They should have eee-vil laughs--Bwahahahahaha!--and rub their hands together in eee-vil glee while laughing those eee-vil laughs.)

I believe that your slowness to move forward and, indeed, your administration's seeming willingness to move backwards on issues of importance to those of us on the left stem from a desire not to needlessly offend the right, not to produce a What's the Matter With Kansas-type reaction to ending torture, the Defense Of Marriage Act, civil rights abuses and other horrors you inherited from the Asshat Administration. With all due respect, Mr. President, bullshit. (Yeah, the whole "all due respect" thing is a work in progress for me.) Your very being offends these people, because--and I'm sure you've noticed this--you are black. They will not stop screeching, sir, as chimps will not stop screeching when stirred up by footfalls in "their" part of the forest. Your existence and achievements inflame their ape-brains with hatred and rage; they are not capable of reason with respect to you or your policies. Fuck them.

            I think I know where your belief that the right wing will eventually act reasonably originates. You have said that you came to Chicago after you graduated from Columbia because of our mayor at the time, Harold Washington, of sainted memory. Harold Washington was a large, canny great-hearted man, Chicago's first black mayor, who faced screeching opposition from aldermen representing the city's white ethnic (for which read: "racist") neighborhoods, led by a certain "Fast Eddie" Vrdolyak (seriously, if you wouldn't play poker with a guy, why would you vote for him or let him lead you?) and a certain State's Attorney named Richie Daley. You now face the same kind of screeching racist opposition from Congressthings hailing from states where marriage licenses include the line, "Bride's relation to groom."

Harold Washington could have punished--was urged to punish--those white ethnic neighborhoods by denying services like garbage collection, street repair and police patrols (as his opponents later did to his, and my, and your neighborhood, after his death), but he did not. He dealt fairly and honestly with the racists, treating them as reasonable even though they were not. (That he died of an enlarged heart is the kind of blatant and saccharine irony that only real life can provide; a fiction writer would be laughed to shame for indulging in it.) But, Mr. President, you left for law school in 1988. You missed what happened after Harold Washington died. You missed the virtual destruction of the Hyde Park neighborhood that Harold lived in and loved and which was his base of power. You missed the gangs of thugs roaming 53rd Street unchecked by police, and the garbage strewn across it from overflowing trash cans. You missed the potholes the size of small strip-mines on every side street.

            Harold Washington lost, sir. He was a wonderful man and a wonderful mayor, and I wish he had lived to be our mayor for a hundred years, but when he died, everything in Chicago returned to status quo ante. I think it's admirable that you remember him and honor him by trying to reach out to those who would do you harm. It's brave and it's strong and it's Christian.

            It's also incredibly fucking stupid. Stop it.

            You have learned a lesson from history, and dear god, that puts you about a billion light years ahead of the cowboy hat who preceded you in office, but, sir, I fear it is the wrong lesson. Yes, love your enemies, but not when they are brandishing loaded weapons in your presence. Shut them down. Or they will most assuredly shut you down, and the rest of us too. You cannot win them over, and if you continue to try you will lose  those hard-working middle-class people who, tired of being asked to donate their money on threat of jail so that it could be spent on tax breaks for the rich and blowing up Iraqis, voted for change. Mr. President, I implore you, just say it with me: fuck tha right wing.