Barack Obama has been our president for almost four years, and no president in my lifetime has been more viciously and falsely maligned and disparaged.

Indeed, the minority leader in the Senate, Mitch McConnell, R-Ky., stated that the number one priority of the Republican Party is to make Obama a one-term president, to which I would ask:

“Is this a legitimate reason for electing legislators to high office?”

We the people pay them well and provide them free health care and other perks that they don’t want the rest of us to have because it’s “socialism.”

This agenda of defamation includes questioning of his birthright in the attempt to portray him as “not one of us” when he has proven his native birth and his Christian faith and excelled in the same Ivy League university attended by other presidents, and contenders in the current campaign.

This GOP agenda also includes blocking of any legislation he introduces, or any intiatives he proposes.

We have had two national political conventions recently, the first of which presented a popular actor talking to an empty chair presumably occupied by our president who offered unheard obscene answers to the actor’s crude questions.

We also heard untruths such as Obama deleting the work-to-welfare aspect of the law to continue the attack on the president as being easy on welfare recipients, which is untrue.

I have watched presidential campaigns since the advent of television and before that listened to them on radio. Never have I seen such tactics as used in this one.

Of course, corporations and unions were not yet persons, huge sums of money were not allowed to “buy” elections, and we had no ID laws to thwart voter turnout.

I think we should go back to being a democracy.