What Percentage of Anti-Obama-ism is Racist?

Two answer which are obviously wrong:

1. 100%

2. 0%

After that, I'm pretty much at a loss.

I have some inclination to think that the vast majority of this is a different kind of crazy--roughly the same kind of crazy that Clinton faced, but fueled this time by a new, improved right-wing noise machine that now includes the fever swamps of the right side of the blogosphere and the strange phenomenon of winger mass e-mail forwards.

These people basically think that no liberal president can be legitimate (no matter how mild his liberalism). These are the kind of people who called Clinton a murderer, and said that Gore was attempting a "coup" by asking for the votes to be counted. The main problem here is a more generalized kind of ignorance, dogmatism and inability to sort fact from fiction.

There's racism in the mix, but if I had to bet, I'd bet that it's not close to being the major factor.

In a way, that's almost too bad. Racism is an evil that we seem to have become fairly good at fighting--and this in part because it is, among the sane, almost universally recognized as an evil.

It may very well be that the kind of crazy that views Glenn Beck with dewy-eyed adulation, the kind that allows itself to hear, with a straight face, Fox News's "Fair and Balanced" mantra, the kind that's willing to immerse itself in the groupthink of the echo chamber, continually allowing itself to be pulled by anger farther and farther out on a limb...it may well be that that kind of crazy is even harder to defeat than the rather more straightforward insanity of racism

Or maybe not.

That's just speculation. All we can do is all we can ever do--fight back and hope for the best.