Now the left plays the race card for Obama
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
August 12, 2009
America’s golden age of race relations, which began when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 with a seven-point lead over Republican Sen. John McCain, came to a tragic end a couple of weeks ago in July 2009.
That’s when, according to the left, the country that had elected him awoke from its state of denial, or stupor, and realized, to its unrelieved horror, that the man it had chosen was ... black. How else for them to explain why his poll numbers slipped from astronomical to just about 50 percent, his approval ratings for his pet projects fell even further and his golden-tongued eloquence failed to persuade?
To the saner among us, these developments were due to one of three things, or perhaps all three together: the inevitable end of the honeymoon period; the fact that hopes for him were so overblown that the soufflé was bound to sink sometime; and the large block of people seduced by his temperate manner came to believe there was nothing temperate at all about his agenda, which was far more extreme than they cared to accept.
On the left, however, it seems this is all a facade, and these issues are merely a familiar channel through which racial fears are diverted. “They’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing ... than to who he is,” as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman assures us, citing the belief of some loons that the president wasn’t born in this country and supporting the conviction of Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., that “the birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same.”
To those on the left like Krugman and Durbin, racism inspires the birthers and all other deranged political concepts, which is why liberals never concoct kooky theories themselves. They never insist that mothers didn’t give birth to their children, never compare conservatives to demonic mass murderers, never obsess that Diebold voting machines have been rigged to steal millions of votes from their party, never hang people in effigy (Sarah Palin, Halloween 2008), never insist that elected officials lie to start wars for no reason, never proclaim that our leaders knew in advance of plots to attack and to damage the country and just let them happen, for fun.
Krugman says the American right is consumed by “racial anxiety.” And the American Prospect assures us that “the mainstream right’s ‘Americanism’ ... implicitly rejects people who aren’t white.”
So that’s why it raised such unholy hell when President George W. Bush made Colin Powell and Condi Rice secretaries of state in succession, and tried to put Janice Rogers Brown and Miguel Estrada on the fast track to Supreme Court nominations. It’s also apparently why Republicans made Michael Steele their new national party chairman, why some of them begged Powell to please run for president in 1996 on their ticket and others ran a brief Condi for President boomlets in 2006!
In fact, Obama’s deep slide isn’t the work of these terrible GOP bigots, who were for McCain anyhow. It’s the fault of the wide swath of swing voters, independents, soft Republicans and more centrist Democrats, who boosted him in the summer, swung to McCain in the first weeks of September and swung back to the rookie when the stock market crashed.
And they voted for him on Election Day, many because he’s not white, and they have no problems with that part of the package. It’s the far-left ideological part, the spending and deficits, to which they seem to object. Polls show that Obama himself is far more popular than his major proposals, and that if he’d only gone with a somewhat more moderate program he’d still be just fine with these folks.
So the left has this problem of trying to explain how the enlightened and race-neutral country they imagined last November became the tragically race-obsessed America it now sees today.
One story is that the November enlightenment was a lie and facade that could hold up only so long before cracking. The other is that millions of voters thought Obama had a really great sun tan, and realized only last month and now realize with shock that the color is permanent.
Sadly, these two are the left’s only real options. And neither of these turkeys will fly.
Examiner columnist Noemie Emery is contributing editor to The Weekly Standard and author of “Great Expectations: The Troubled Lives of Political Families.”
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