They hated him for what he was.
Obstructionism as a core tenet of the (former) Republican platform is reprehensible, and retrospectively probably led to quite a bit of discontent with the government’s inability to address problems that Americans face. That same discontent fomented the current reactionary swing, so in the end maybe they really got what they wanted. Shameful.
color bait.
I remember that day vividly.
It was the middle of the Great Recession, it was the worst our economy was doing in a long time. Millions were out of work. People were looking to the government to see what the plan was to get the country back on track.
A reporter asks McConnell what the senate’s number one priority was.
The answer? Not fixing the economy, not helping out every day Americans. Not finding the root cause of the crash and making sure it doesn’t happen that way again.
No, the answer was “make sure Obama is a one term president.” That’s all we would expect from the senate for the next 6 years.
The day McConnell said that, I said out loud: “I will never vote Republican again for the rest of my life.” (Prior to that point I mostly voted D but not 100% of the time.)
And I plan to keep that promise until I die.
Trump is well outside the norms of POTUS's through history.
Shows how poorly those politicians understood the constituency they were fomenting. He was boo'd for it by people that had come to see him specifically, and about 15 years later, republican voters built a scaffold outside the Capital they were breaking into while chanting about hanging the Republican vice president.
I feel like American politicians often play with fire without understanding its nature as something that burns.
> Here’s John Boehner, the likely speaker if Republicans take the House, offering his plans for Obama’s agenda: “We’re going to do everything — and I mean everything we can do — to kill it, stop it, slow it down, whatever we can.”
> Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell summed up his plan to National Journal: “The single most important thing we want to achieve is for President Obama to be a one-term president.”
Sure Trump took everything to an absurd level of "do the opposite of biden no matter what", but it started back then.
[1] https://www.politico.com/story/2010/10/the-gops-no-compromis...