7 years on, President Obama still a bridge too far for GOP

Here’s a little story.

A couple of weeks ago I dropped a large gray earthenware bowl that broke neatly into two pieces when it hit the floor.

It made me sad even though we rarely used it and it wasn’t very valuable.

But the bowl was done. Nothing could change that.

Why am I telling this story?

For some time I’ve been struggling to make sense of how Republicans talk about our president. They yammer on and on about the Founders, and the Constitution, and our great country and democracy and “the people” but then say the most damnable things about a man who has been decisively elected twice to the presidency.

With the death of Justice Antonin Scalia, and the whacko Republican reaction, they’ve sunk into total denial.

They just can’t deal with the fact that Barack Obama is president.

Maybe it’s because he’s a black man. After all, it never happened before. In November 2008 the club had been breached, the order of things disrupted.

But it might have been OK if it turned out to be just a one-term aberration. Our Sen. Mitch McConnell made it clear after that first presidential victory it wasn’t supposed to happen again.

Maybe that’s why on election night in 2012 the Republicans had so much trouble coming to terms with the fact that Mitt Romney had lost.

CBS news reported that Romney and his camp were “shellshocked” by the results. “I don’t think there was one person who saw this coming,” the news organization quoted a senior Romney adviser. Romney took forever to deliver his concession because, apparently, he was not at all prepared for it.

That same night, in one of the more bizarre instances of public denial ever broadcast, Republican operative Karl Rove, working as a commentator on Fox News, just lost it after Fox called the election for Obama. Rove was still parsing votes in a few Ohio holdouts, including “a good suburban Republican county,” insisting the result could change.

Sadly for Mitt, Karl and many others, it didn’t change.

Sadly for the rest of us, the Republican establishment has remained in denial about the results ever since.

During Obama’s first term they clung to the notion that he was a false president, perhaps not even a U.S. citizen despite a birth certificate released by the state of Hawaii.

But now they seem to have migrated to a different, more ephemeral vision of illegitimacy.

They don’t believe that Obama represents a group they call “the American people.” This group is defined, apparently, not as voters in the last two presidential elections but as the people the Republicans want to think of as American.

To quote McConnell, speaking only hours after Scalia’s death, “the American people should have a voice in the selection of their next Supreme Court Justice.”

It’s a strange combination of cynicism and wishful thinking.

Like it or not, the American people qualified to vote who chose to do so did speak: They re-elected Barack Obama president in 2012. And, like it or not, presidents nominate people to fill Supreme Court vacancies.

That “like it or not” gets me back to my bowl.

It had been given to me by my sister, who died over a quarter of a century ago from breast cancer. Perhaps that’s why I hadn’t used it much, I didn’t want to risk breaking it or see it get worn and chipped, slowly diminishing, another sign that my sister has been gone so long.

I didn’t like it that the bowl broke, I don’t like it that my sister died so early. But no denial or wishful thinking will change those realities.

I like Obama, I voted for him twice. I have my complaints but I admire his thoughtful approach, his humanity and his restraint.

But I respect that people have legitimate, profound disagreements with his approach to governing. I get it that they think something broke in the American soul when Obama was elected, twice.

They should fight with all they’ve got to offer an alternative vision, to try to elect a president and a Congress that align with their views.

But what I really wish they would stop doing is denying he’s president.

It’s hard, I know. We’ve all felt that powerful yearning to go back, even just a minute, to change the outcome, repair things that are broken, bring people back to life.

But we can’t. Obama is president. It won’t last too much longer but it’s really true now. Get over it.

This story was originally published March 4, 2016 at 8:28 PM with the headline "7 years on, President Obama still a bridge too far for GOP."