Over the past year, a multitude of attacks have been launched against President Obama. The most recent have ranged from signs carried by individuals at Tea Party rallies to giant billboard ads. This week, for the second time this year in the state of Colorado, another giant billboard has been put up presenting the president in the form of a racial stereotype
The billboard is located in Grand Junction, Colo., and shows President Obama depicted as four caricatures. In the billboard he is presented as a flaming gay man, an Islamic terrorist, a cigar-smoking gangster and a Mexican bandit wearing a sombrero. The characters are seated at a poker table playing cards under the title “Vote DemocRAT, Join the game” in concert with a bevy of rats around the four images.
Many have noted that since America has elected its first African American president that the past evils originated under the times of the black codes and Jim Crow are rearing their ugly heads once again.
The billboard displayed in Colorado last year, which was commissioned by a car dealer named Phil Wolf, showed two images of Obama — with and without a turban, inscribed with the incendiary “PRESIDENT or JIHAD?” question.
To date, no one knows who commissioned and paid for the latest billboard. The artist who created the billboard, Paul Snover, a self-described constitutionalist libertarian, would not say who contracted him to create the work. Nor would the owner of the billboard, Dennis Lucas, say who rented it.
Grand Junction is located in Mesa County, a traditionally Republican and conservative region of the state. A large number of Tea Party organizations are active in the area where the sign was displayed. –torrance stephens, ph.d.
