Conservative Activists Fuming Against Obama

In Missouri, supporters of the Republican presidential nominee railed against the incumbent throughout the second presidential debate.

“Be quiet!” yells Peggy, a 60-something-year-old who is not keen on hiding her exasperation every time the president opens his mouth. “Sit back down!” she says a number of times, surrounded by her friends. At Mitt Romney’s local campaign headquarters in the outskirts of St. Louis, Missouri, the jeers, the sighs, the boos and the applause directed at the television screen continued without interruption for the full 90 minutes of the second presidential debate Tuesday in Fenton. The large room was filled with campaign signs calling for support for the Republican presidential candidate and several local conservative representatives. There are around 40 volunteers, mostly elderly people, who are huddled around a television watching the debate. The reactions from the crowd are, not surprisingly, in favor of Mitt Romney, who is constantly applauded. But there is still another form of disdain toward the president.

Curiously enough, the women are the most aggressive of the president’s critics in the room. Whenever Obama is attacked by Romney on the recent events in Libya, the president receives a wave of boos from female voices. “You have nothing that makes you a commander in chief!” is yelled to the president as his conservative opponent accuses him of attending a fundraising event in California the day after the tragedy. When Obama reminds his opponent that he went alongside the families “to pray with them” when the coffins of the ambassadors [sic] and the three diplomats returned from Libya, the women around the television hound the president. “You? Pray?” Throughout the entirety of the second debate, the women in Fenton never stop pestering the CNN moderator, Candy Crowley, accusing her of being biased when she was quite clearly trying to maintain a balance between the debaters. “These journalists are all liberals; it’s clear they’re all for Obama,” accuses Peggy. Everything about the president upsets her, even his wife Michelle, who, she says, wants to establish “a Gestapo for food” in schools “forcing kids to eat fruits and vegetables.”

With a more moderate voice, Daniel Morisseau describes the debate as being “a tie” and commends the president for standing his ground and improving his credibility. “He is very talented in this setting, but you get the impression that under all the spices, there isn’t any meat,” said Morisseau. A little embarrassed by the aggressive output of the Romney supporters next to him, this lawyer, originally from Normandy, France, explains that their attitude could be a result of Obama’s arrogance and the way he tries to falsely paint his adversary as “rich and evil.” He admits that “the little change he has made during his four years in office can be particularly irritating.”

David Robertson, a political scientist at the University of St. Louis, has suggested that the “lack of respect” of a certain part of the population for the president is provoked by something more profound. In fact, it has a much more racially-driven motive, especially in a southern state like Missouri. “If 10 percent of the U.S. electorate still believes that the president was not born in this country, what would you expect?”