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" Read more of Esquire.com&amp;#039;s &amp;quot;The Year of Obama&amp;quot; series with part two from John H. Richardson, part three from S.T. VanAirsdale, part four from Thomas P.M. Barnett, and Scott Raab&amp;#039;s evaluation of race coming on Friday Toward the end of September, a couple in Fredericktown, Ohio, named Richard and Jacqueline Ruhl decided to build a float for the annual Fredericktown Tomato Show Parade. Apparently, the Ruhls had been bothered over the previous nine months by the activities of President Obama, whose three hundred and sixty-three days since we elected him have broken open the fibrotic lesions holding back the old infections of the body politic, the way tuberculosis can lie dormant in the lungs for years then burst through, choking.  Anyway, the Ruhls became convinced that the Obama administration was preparing to expand Americorps \u2014 probably to take their guns and restrict their access to the Internet, all in preparation for forcing them and the rest of us into the authoritarian embrace of the North American Union. (Authoritarian Canadians? Isn&amp;#039;t that like Vicious Beagles?) In order to fight what they felt was the ever-tightening embrace of Obamofascism, the Ruhls decided that they would make their stand in the Frederickton Tomato Show Parade. What the hell \u2014 political movements have started in stranger places. So the Ruhls built their float. On the float, a picture of the president wearing a swastika on his arm was linked to a Nazi flag. &amp;quot;WAKE UP AMERICA!&amp;quot; read a sign on the float exhorting the town&amp;#039;s tomato lovers. Or would have read, had the organizers of the parade not stepped in and told the Ruhls that, no, they would not be allowed to take their own personal paranoia out for a walk \u2014 entertaining and baroque as it may have been. You have to get up pretty damn early in the morning to put something past the Board of Directors of the Fredericktown (Ohio) Tomato Show Parade. The Ruhls didn&amp;#039;t develop this view of modern politics all by themselves. Almost as soon as Obama&amp;#039;s hand left the Bible, there arose a loud and curiously atavistic opposition. Granted, you didn&amp;#039;t exactly need the Enigma Machine to decode the racial and xenophobic undercurrents driving much of the anti-Obama rhetoric. (A white lady in Arkansas moaning &amp;quot;I want my country back&amp;quot; on TV isn&amp;#039;t exactly laden with what you&amp;#039;d call subtext.) What was startling, however, was the fact that a great part of the most hysterical reaction \u2014 the Tea Party folks, Glenn Beck&amp;#039;s Chutes-and-Ladders approach to political history, the free-range lunacy of what&amp;#039;s left of the conservative &amp;quot;movement&amp;quot; \u2014 turned out to be good old-fashioned nutjob populism, straight out of Father Coughlin.  Obama, of course, didn&amp;#039;t help matters by hiring a lot of foxes to help rebuild the chicken coop they&amp;#039;d already burned to the ground, thereby making the Democrats appear to be simultaneously the party of Big Government and Big Business. And his attempt to reform the way this country does health care became a proxy in many fevered minds for what he believes about government in general. And he found himself accused of being both Hitler and Stalin, which must have set a number of people buried in and around, say, Stalingrad to begin spinning at 78 RPMs. Hence, we had someone reputed to be a transformational figure of the new century wallowing around in recycled Clintonisms while being attacked with arguments that had passed their sell-by dates before Richard Nixon was elected for the first time. American politics, which already hadn&amp;#039;t been coherent in a very long time, has fallen into burlesque. Obama ran as sane and decent, as though we were electing a mood, and not necessarily a set of policies. Unfortunately, Obama has governed the same way \u2014 and misread the mood, which is all there is, really, because being crazy and stupid is all we&amp;#039;re really good at politically any more. He caught something of a break because the putative institutional opposition failed utterly, but even the Republicans are not safe from the rising crackpottery that they, at least, spent three decades encouraging. (Bill Kristol is pitching the PNAC crowd on Sarah Palin as the latest empty vessel into whom they can pour their vicarious imperial fantasies.) But electoral politics \u2014 one year down the line or three \u2014 is not as important as the political mood, which has metastasized into something dangerous. There is genuine economic dislocation, a jobless recovery playing out while the various Masters of the Universe are deemed too big to fail. Unemployment in Flint is edging toward 30 percent, and Detroit is becoming a dead zone. At the same time, there are generals drifting off the reservation as Obama attempts to keep whatever the mission is in Afghanistan from degenerating from the merely futile into a bloody generational farce \u2014 all while there&amp;#039;s still that other war in that other place. Many of the constitutional atrocities of the previous administration remain in place \u2014 constant goads to a national paranoia never far from the surface, and far too easily stoked. Amid these crises \u2014 and directly centered on Obama himself \u2014 a politics arises that marries rightist populism to vicarious militarism, a politics in which the craziest notions get a legitimate airing from the most serious people simply because those notions manage to achieve a kind of legitimacy among the frightened, the gullible, and the ignorant. (Around the time the Ruhls were getting booted out of the Tomato Show Parade, the Washington Post was still earnestly sucking its thumb about whether it had not taken the crazy people seriously enough, while Time was &amp;amp;lt; target=&amp;quot;_blank&amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt;putting Beck on its cover.) It is a dangerous time to be president because it is a dangerous time to be a democracy. A president elected because he flattered the better angels of our nation may govern out his term merely trying to control the wolf in our souls. So in the vital area of not taking public lunatics seriously, we all need to demonstrate the essential intellectual integrity of the Board of Directors of the Fredericktown (Ohio) Tomato Show Parade. That&amp;#039;s a job that&amp;#039;s too big for us to bungle. We&amp;#039;ve lost our immunities to the ancient poisons. RELATED LINKS:  CHARLES P. PIERCE: What If Obama&amp;#039;s Out of His Mind?  EARLIER: Pierce Takes a Skeptical Look at Obama&amp;#039;s Candidacy  ELECTION NIGHT: Pierce on an American Turning Point  PLUS: John H. Richardson Heads to Birth Country \u2014 Three Different Times   "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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