Obama’s Racial Crisis
Our post-racial president has set race relations back decades.
In the current racial circus, the president of the United States, in addressing an assembly of upscale black professionals and political leaders, adopts the style of a Southern Baptist preacher of the 1960s. He alters his cadences and delivery to both berate and gin up the large audience — posing as a messianic figure who will “march” them out to speak truth to power. In response, the omnipresent Rep. Maxine Waters goes public yet again, to object that the president has no right to rally blacks in this way, when he does not adopt similar tones of admonishment with Jews and gays. (Should Obama try to emulate the way he thinks gays and Jews talk in his next address to them?)
Hope-and-change has now sunk into little more than a tawdry spectacle of racial spoils, as the president of the United States desperately cobbles together squabbling special-interest racial, ethnic, and gender groups in lieu of restoring the nation’s prosperity. Before the age of Obama, I don’t recall that some members of the Black Caucus were so ready to invite political opponents to “go straight to hell,” or to allege that they were veritable murderers eager to lynch blacks and restore slavery.
Instead, a new insidious racism is supposedly energizing opposition to Obama, most expressly on the part of the Tea Party. Generally beloved actor Morgan Freeman alleged just that: Racism, not stupid policies, is what is hurting Obama — and by extension blacks in general.
But does the charge that racism is the basis for Obama’s current unpopularity have any empirical foundation? Barack Obama, himself half white, and a graduate of prep school and Ivy League universities, defeated Hillary Clinton in part because of the help and money of white liberals. He could not have defeated John McCain without sizable white support. The white vote, incidentally, split far more evenly than did the black vote, which went overwhelmingly for Obama, at well over 90 percent.
Indeed, there is something curious in the liberal argument that Obama, once deified as the ideal megaphone for progressive agendas, is now to be faulted for the current unpopularity of liberalism, given that he remains a far more effective advocate than Jimmy Carter and a far more doctrinaire leftist than Bill Clinton. It is almost as if liberal scapegoating of Obama is an attempt to shift responsibility for progressive failure from the message onto the hapless messenger — an unfairness that a Freeman would never discuss.....snip~
Obama
