We know how Barack Obama feels about Mitt Romney. He holds him in contempt -- and, speaking through his proxies, has all but called him a felon, tax cheat, and murderer.

Who cares? Trash talk is Obama's political lingua franca. He relishes delivering these insults face-to-face while shielded by the respect his victims have for the office of the presidency -- a reverence he does not share.

What should be important is how he feels about us: the American people. And how should this impact the so-called likeability gap between him and Romney as election day approaches?

In 2008, Americans questioned Barack Obama's feelings towards Americans. His famous gaffe was the tipoff:

You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them[.]

So it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

Yawn -- everyone knows about that broad-based insult. And everyone certainly knew that Obama's "moral compass," Pastor Jeremiah Wright, Jr., had scathing views of America and toward Americans. One was explained away as a "gaffe" and the other explained away by claims that Obama was never in the pews when a stream of anti-America invective poured forth from Wright -- an excuse belied by Obama's own words in a newspaper interview and by keen investigative work by Stanley Kurtz in his book Radical-in-Chief (pages 320-3).

But Obama's condescension towards broad swaths of Americans was presaged years before, and it has deepened and widened over the years. In 1990, he said that "suburbs bore me." By implication, suburbanites bore him but do have their uses -- donations and votes, for example.

But Barack Obama has never been able to keep his feelings towards Americans hidden for long. Americans don't see the contempt too often, though, because Obama's speechwriters are more circumspect than he is on the stump.

The truth comes out Washington-style: as "gaffes."

There is a stream of insults that has flown forth over the past few years -- and have been all but smothered by the media.

Read more: http://www.americanthinker.com/2012/09/what_obama_thinks_of_americans.html#ixzz26nvFTWen