THERE’S a profound difference between disagreement and disrespect. I respect a lot of people I disagree with, and I have no respect for many people who happen to share my views. Not everyone who cares about the environment, for example, cares about humans as passionately—and sometimes they’re just dicks.

Let me refresh everyone’s memory about how Senator Obama became President Obama. To even get the Democratic nomination, he had to take down the Clinton political machine. The Clintons had been working behind the scenes for over a decade to get Hillary into the White House. No one can claim that Obama got the nomination through chicanery or playing dirty. He beat her fair and square. In doing so, he achieved a goal that the Republicans were desperately trying to achieve for sixteen years: He got Hillary Clinton to shut the fuck up.

After he got the nomination, Obama didn’t get elected by scaring the country. He didn’t claim that a vote for McCain is a vote for another 9/11, and he didn’t attack McCain personally or attack his character. Every time Obama would say something or answer a question, people would go look at his books or go to his website. He created a perception that he could actually do things. This dude talked the country into voting for him based on the fact that he was going to go to Washington and change shit. He really told the country that although he may not have had any experience, he had this hope and this magic, and the country believed him. Did the Republicans regard him as a breath of fresh air, an opportunity to put partisanship in the past and to work together? Did they take it as an opportunity to disavow the wildly unpopular Bush years—or did the GOP immediately start plotting how to take the motherfucker down?

I don’t need to catalog what a shambles President Bush left this country in, both domestically and abroad. Let me point out the abysmal level of sophistication that Barack Obama was replacing. Like every other frat-boy drunk, President Bush loved his fart jokes. What he especially loved was to meet idealistic young aides, then fart like mad and stink up the place. Bush found it hysterical to watch their faces, trying to maintain composure and give the presidency the respect it deserved. Bush’s staff even had a name for it: the Austin greeting. That’s who Obama should be measured against.

White people thought Obama was going to be charming. I thought he was going to be hard-core, that he was going to get in there, grab his nuts, and go, “Shit just got real.” In the Bible it talks about “the last shall be first, and the first last.” It was supposed to be that kind of thing. But it sure didn’t work out that way.

When Obama was first elected, the right were crapping their pants. “How can we criticize him? He’s the chosen one.” They didn’t know what to say or how to engage with him. But when Obama didn’t respond when Joe Wilson said, “You lie!” in front of Congress, all bets were off. Let a motherfucker take your lunch once, and he’ll be eating it for the rest of his life.

The right just got increasingly emboldened—and President Obama never really fought back, and definitely not in the manner that he should have. I think Obama believes that he’s occupying some kind of intellectual and moral high ground. He definitely wasn’t prepared for the level of animus that he got. It irritates me that a black man doesn’t get how harsh things are and didn’t get how hard it would be. On some level he really thought it would be cool for him, that he could just forget all the bullshit that’s out there.

Then the dog whistles started, subliminal racist cues that your ear doesn’t hear but that your mind registers. Michele Bachmann said he “stole” money. She said he stole. Rick Perry brought up the fact that Texas can secede. Was that an accident? Every time in America when race comes up, there’s that same acrimony. It happened during the Civil War; it happened with the civil rights debate; it’s happening with President Obama. These are the stretch marks, the last bit of fat that America needs to lose before we can really see ourselves as post-racial. That’s why it’s the hardest—and if people aren’t interested in doing that, it’s downright impossible.

On some level, John Boehner and Eric Cantor really feel as though they’re superior to the president. They must feel that way, because that’s how they act. President Obama was going to deliver a jobs speech before both houses of Congress. John Boehner refused to let the president speak on the date he wanted, citing security risks. If John Boehner felt that unsafe on the floor of the House of Representatives, John Boehner would not be setting foot on the motherfucking House floor himself! But the kicker is, President Obama rescheduled for the next day. The speaker got the president to reschedule. What the hell is that? President Obama is the leader of the United States! He had to ask for permission? That’s like me asking my butler, “Can I come in?” John Boehner is third in line for the presidency, not first. Since when is the bronze medalist on the Wheaties box? Is that not a gratuitous slap at Obama to know his place?

The Republicans claim that our nation cannot survive another Obama term. So we can survive 9/11, two world wars, and the Great Depression, but we can’t hack another four years of this decent, well-intentioned American success story? Black dick fucks up a lot, but surely it ain’t powerful enough to fuck up a nation. This is coming from the party that alleges we are the greatest nation the world has ever seen! How strong were we to begin with, if one man can destroy us? How effective are these checks and balances, if one man can single-handedly overthrow all of them?

They treat this president as if he was a fucking affirmative action hire. Nobody marched for him to get that job. He overwhelmingly beat out an old white dude, something that had never happened before. This isn’t Trading Places, where you dress some homeless guy up and stick him in the White House. That really is the fucking president. He’s in charge! This ain’t a dream, motherfucker. It’s real! Americans loved the idea of voting for a black dude and endorsing him. But listening to what he has to say? Then it became, “I didn’t sign up for that.” Some parts of this country hate the fact that we have a black president so much, they can’t even be honest about it to themselves. It would be a much easier conversation if they were.

For the first time in modern history, older white people took to the streets. The only thing different was that we had a black man in the White House. They didn’t march when Bush increased spending enormously, or when he took us to war. They didn’t march when Clinton tried to fix our health care system. They didn’t march under the progressivism of Jimmy Carter, the record unemployment of Ronald Reagan, or the price controls of Richard Nixon.

We are watching our president get bullied—and he’s letting it happen. I have never met Barack Obama, but I can state with absolute certainty that he was never bullied growing up. I know that this is true because of how he reacts to the way the Republicans and the Tea Party treat him. Being bullied as a kid changes your perspective forever.

In seventh grade, I was bullied by a half-black, half-white dude in my neighborhood named Bubba Rankin. Bubba was four years older than me, and he would pick on me all the time. He would always push me or kick me while I was walking, just all kinds of bullshit. If a group of us was hanging out, he’d slap the shit out of me. It was completely unprovoked. One second everyone is talking and having a good time, and the next this motherfucker would just feel like it and start slapping me. It got to where I couldn’t even go to the store by myself. I wasn’t bringing a motherfucker with me to the grocery so that he could help me fight. It couldn’t even get to that level. I was bringing a motherfucker to pull Bubba off me, so I could get away from the store and run home.

One time I came upon Bubba fucking with this girl at school. Maybe it was to impress her, who the hell knows, but he ran, caught me, and then he tackled me. I felt my shoulder bone hit me in the chin. “You broke my fucking shoulder!” I yelled at him.

He just shrugged and walked away. It was just dislocated and not broken, but in either case it didn’t matter to him. Bubba went back to his girl and did his thing. There was no way a small seventh grader is going to take on an eleventh grader and win, not even with some Mr. Miyagi Kung Fu Panda–type shit. I was genuinely afraid of him.

So one day my buddy Willie Brown, who I love to this day, took me aside. “We standing with you,” he told me, “but you’ve got to fight. Fuck whether you win or not, man. You’ve got to let this motherfucker know it ain’t going to be easy every time he wants to do something to you. He don’t fuck with none of us, man. You know why? Because it ain’t going to be easy.”

I was still afraid, but now I wasn’t going to roll over for him. The next time Bubba messed with me, I fought back. He hit me so fucking hard in the mouth that he split my lip wide open. I was drinking out of a straw all week, it was so bad. He left me a scar that is there to this day.

I kept fighting him, but I never beat him. What I could do was to get him to stop seeing me as an easy target, and that meant not slapping me whenever the mood struck him. That much I did accomplish. I wasn’t scared of him anymore. He just meant nothing to me. I knew that if I fought hard, after a while there would be a certain amount of respect that was afforded. After all that, I could go to the store by myself. Which, when you’re living in fear, is a big, concrete step and proof that you’re doing the right thing. I learned what Obama never had to: You need to fight even though you know you ain’t going to win. You can’t keep letting some dude do whatever the fuck he wants to you.

Of course race is playing a part in both how Barack Obama is perceived and how he’s dealt with. But my criticism isn’t really with the Tea Party on this one. They’d oppose him if he came out for God, Mom, and apple pie. They’d tell him with a straight face that he must mean the Muslim God, that he’s arguing for single mothers and the destruction of the nuclear family, and that he wants to make us all fat. The reason Obama’s having these kind of problems is because the people who love him aren’t forcing him to do what he needs to. Conservatives have no problem: If you don’t do what they want, they will do something to you. It’s quid pro quo. It’s no secret and there’s no trick; they treat him harshly because he’s black. Conversely, liberals treat him with kid gloves for that very same reason.

Even as his approval ratings dropped, America kept up a personal affinity for Obama. It’s hard to say you dislike him. The man has integrity. He seems forthright and honest and earnest and loves his family. He does all these things. A racist can like a black person who knows his place. But when it comes to having a black man being in charge of this country? People can’t take it.

The national unemployment rate for black people during this recession was as high as 17 percent. In some cities, it reached 40 to 50 percent. If a white president had these kind of numbers, black people would be up in fucking arms—and they’d be blaming everything on the president! If it were a white president, he would feel guilty or shamed enough to do something about it (or at least give a speech to acknowledge it, even if there was no follow-up). Look at what the first President Bush did after Rodney King. Even his son spent more time touring the destruction in post-Katrina New Orleans than Barack Obama has spent in the slums of Detroit, Baltimore, and St. Louis.

It took three years for the Congressional Black Caucus to start speaking out against Obama. After a while, it starts to hurt so much, you’ve got to yell uncle. Obama has not been forced to deal with black people. The Democratic Party typically takes black people for granted—and President Obama is no different. Imagine a man making all these promises to a woman (particularly a black woman!): “I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do that, and I’m going to change everything, and it’s all going to be great.” If by three years into a relationship none of that has happened, that woman would be out the door.

Greatness is not coddled. It’s snatched. When someone’s a great athlete, there was a guy along the way who he thought hated him. It is only years later, after the athlete reaps the benefits, that he sees what the guy did. That guy drove him—or her—crazy. Look at the Williams sisters. They were trained since they were walking, and now they dominate their sport like no one dominated it before. Obama has got way too many cheerleaders and not enough coaches. It’s easy to pooh-pooh people who don’t like you, because you can never please them. To get great, the people who love you are going to have to be hard on you.

But the Democrats refuse to do it.

Barack Obama is the president of the United States of America, the most powerful man in the world. He can take the criticism. Because of stereotypes, people expected a certain thing from President Obama. The right were afraid they were going to get a nigger, and the left hoped they were going to get one: That angry, I-don’t-give-a-fuck, I’m-going-to-set-shit-to-right attitude. But all they got is Carlton Banks. Obama needs to fight. His political struggles would go a lot better if he just acknowledged that race played a huge part in the Tea Party and in the acrimony that he receives. I think that would be kind of a relief for everybody, to get the elephant (no pun intended) out of the room.

Obama doesn’t have the luxury of being genteel about the situation. America needs him to step up for the sake of our country. We are not what we were from a manufacturing standpoint; we’re not what we were from a banking standpoint. But we can kick ass. You can leave all the learning to India and China. But when you want some asses whupped, that’s us. There has to be a guy who embodies that, in the same way that the queen is supposed to embody England. We are still cleaning up the mess that Reagan left us, but, boy, did America ever feel good about itself when he was in charge.

It’s not the economy, stupid. We’ve had recessions before. Even during the Great Depression, we knew FDR was going to carry us through. What America is primarily suffering from is a lack of confidence. We don’t have our swagger. Obama doesn’t have it. Look at the other side of the aisle. Rick Perry has swagger. He’s a fucking idiot, but he has swagger. What makes men have swagger is knowing their strengths—and not being afraid to use them. People have to be afraid of you. Republicans were terrified of Bill Clinton. They knew that politically, there would be repercussions. People may not have been afraid of George Bush, but they were definitely afraid of Dick Cheney. Now the Republicans fear the Tea Party more than they fear the president—again, the most powerful man in the world.

To some degree, President Obama allows this to happen. This dude is being disrespected constantly. That served him well in the electoral process, but it doesn’t serve him in the governing process. When you’re governing a country, you have to look like you’re the leader. When you know that somebody’s called you a liar and a thief the night before, somebody has to respond. Every president has hatchet men to do his dirty work for him. Dick Cheney did it for W; Clinton had James Carville and Paul Begala; Reagan had Nancy. Obama has many, many people who want to go on the attack, but he’s the one telling them to shut the fuck up. He’s got to be, or else they’d be going nuts.

Jimmy Hoffa Jr. begged the president publicly and explicitly for permission to take off the kid gloves. His exact words were, “President Obama, this is your army. We are ready to march. Everybody here’s got a vote. Let’s take these sons of bitches out and give America back to an America where we belong.” What happened is that Fox News and their allies made Hoffa out to be a terrorist calling for assassinations, and President Obama said nothing. It’s irritating as all hell.

Besides my bully, there’s another half-white, half-black Bubba that President Obama can learn from: Bill Clinton. In the 2008 Democratic debates, there was a big laugh when Barack Obama was asked if he agreed with Toni Morrison’s characterization of Bill Clinton as America’s first black president. “Blacker,” Morrison had said, “than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.”

Although the premise of the question was humorous, there really was truth to her statement. Obviously, in a strictly skin-color sense, Obama is black (or at least, mixed) and Bill Clinton is not. But in terms of which one of them is more a product of a black upbringing, I would argue that Clinton has the leg up on Obama.

Obama’s upbringing wasn’t just white—it was the American dream! He was raised by a white family from Kansas. That’s how Superman was raised. That’s how Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz was raised, and that movie was so fucking white that they had to make The Wiz so that black people could relate to it. Obama worked hard and made his way through top colleges due to hard work and intelligence. It was a record of achievement and pulling himself up by his bootstraps.

Bill Clinton had more experiences that were common to black people than Barack Obama did. He grew up in a rural home in the Deep South and he had to hustle all his life. He was raised by a single mother who was a nurse. He constantly interacted with and had a lot of experiences with black people. From playing the saxophone and wearing the sunglasses to all the consequences of his slick talking, in many ways he acted like a black man—both good and bad. The dude used to be chubby and endangered his marriage for a big-assed shawty. Clinton loved his fried food and would jog with a fucking Big Mac in his hand. All that stuff is things that blacks could relate to, and it was really him.

This motherfucker got impeached, almost fired from his job, and he still went back to work like shit didn’t happen. Only a black dude is going to do that. He could just slick-talk his way out of anything, like, “That depends on what your definition of ‘is’ is,” and, “I did not have sexual relations with that woman.” All those iconic statements that we now remember are the speakings of a hustler. Bill Clinton stole the Republicans’ ideas and sold those very same ideas back to them as his own. That is straight hustling.

I definitely am not using the word hustling in a negative sense. The basic characteristic of a hustler, in my estimation, is someone who gets shit done. You might not like what he gets done, and you might want to avoid hearing about his methods, but that cat will deliver for you. That’s what a hustler does, and that’s what Bill Clinton did. He was one nickel-slick motherfucker.

President Obama is probably a more principled man, but in terms of political tactics, there is just no contest. A true politician doesn’t keep getting his ass whupped like Obama does—and then do nothing about it. Bill Clinton got his own “shellacking” in 1994. But he learned that first lesson and then ran the table against the Republicans. If Bill Clinton talked as much as Obama talks, he’d get everything he asked for. When Bill Clinton took his case to the people, there has not been a more effective speaker. And by “effective,” I mean it had an actual effect. His words caused people to take action. Famously, Bill Clinton’s teleprompter went down when he was giving a State of the Union address. He didn’t look at it again and delivered a rousing speech on no notes.

Barack Obama is an eloquent speaker, but you get the sense that he’s detached from what he’s saying. When Clinton said, “I feel your pain,” people thought that this motherfucker really did feel our pain. I sometimes get the impression that Barack Obama doesn’t feel anything. He is very intellectual, but I don’t think he loves people the way Bill Clinton loves people. When Barack Obama is finished with the presidency, he’ll go away and do lectures and be well regarded. But when it comes to Bill Clinton, politics is what he is.

Sixteen years after Clinton’s government shutdown, the Republicans were about to try the same thing with Obama. “Don’t call my bluff,” Obama told Eric Cantor. Cantor did—and Obama folded immediately. The Republicans got everything they asked for and made no significant concessions. If that was Bill Clinton, the Republicans would have feared telling him no. They might have still done it, but they’d be waiting for the other shoe to drop at any minute. Obama needs to learn from Bubba. What the president doesn’t seem to get is that you can be loved and feared. He is loved and well regarded, but Bill Clinton was loved and feared.

The ultimate test of blackness is not taking no bullshit. Who would be the fastest to slap the hell out of someone in an argument: Bill Clinton or Barack Obama? That’s the answer to Toni Morrison’s question, and it’s an answer you don’t need an Ivy League degree to know.

It’s not too late for President Obama to change, and maybe he just doesn’t have it in him. But the principle here is bigger than one man, even if that man is the president of the United States. Bubba Rankin taught me a lesson as a kid, and then I taught him one when we got older. After Bubba dislocated my shoulder and generally made a fool out of me, he moved out of our neighborhood. When I was eighteen or nineteen, he came back to visit. But things had changed in the intervening years. I had dudes around me who I got high with. They were my people.

So five of us young dudes were hanging out, and Bubba came walking down the block. He was now a grown man, reminiscing about the old days and glad to be in the neighborhood. Of course his memories were positive. He wasn’t getting his ass whupped. No one remembered Bubba’s and my history.

But I sure as fuck did.

When Bubba came up to us, I started saying something smart in response to whatever he said. Then he’d say something else and I’d say something else smart. I was like some sort of sarcastic parrot, and no one likes a back-talking bird.

“Hey man, how you doing?” he said.

“Motherfucker, how you doing?” I repeated.

Even though he came up to us all friendly, eventually I started to get on Bubba’s nerves. “Hey, motherfucker,” he yelled at me. “Who you talking to like that?”

Soon after that, we all jumped him. Now it was my street and my neighborhood. I still couldn’t whup him—but six of us could. Man, oh, man, that was the best shit ever. My mother even saw what was happening, and she let it go for a while. Eventually she came out of the house and had to put a stop to it because it was getting so bad. I stood up, looked Bubba square in the face, and I said, “You can’t never come on my street no more. It’s my street.” He never bothered me or my friends again. Now he feared me.

So Mr. President, I understand how you want to remain above the fray and not fight these people. But Mr. President, we’re standing with you. Fuck whether you win or not. You’ve got to let these motherfuckers know it ain’t going to be easy. If you’re going to be treated like an angry black man, then maybe you should start acting like one. My entire street is behind you, and many, many other streets like mine. All we need is for you to give us the word.

What we need more than anything, Mr. President, is for you to lead. Because we sure as fuck aren’t getting that from the other side of the aisle.