i just finished a conversation with my lib jewish ofc friend who asked me to explain what the appeal of Trump was. It lead into a more generalized discussion of this being a racist inquiry and then to racism in general. Having these discussions with liberals is just EXHAUSTING! she cannot understand the inquiry into his grades, said that being president of Harvard Law Review is a huge deal [she went to Harvard law] and that they are so cutthroat and ridiculous that there’s no way he could have become president were he not brilliant. I said stop thinking that criticism of Obama is race-based. She said how can it not be when all the questions relate to his OTHER=ness. Honestly, people from multicultural urban areas really cannot but indict people from more homogenous backgrounds as racist, bc they truly believe that if you treat anyone remotely differently just based on their race, you are racist. I tried pointing out myriad other ways people are treated differently based on NONrace things, so how do you indict people for that? what label can you slap on that behavior?
But it’s not “just” based on race, or even race-based at all. It is about the otherness, the foreignness of the Obama experience.
He is an other.
If he was a black (or half-black) person who grew up in Connecticut or Alabama or California I think he would have more normal reactions. And people would feel more that he was one of us.
But he did not. He grew up in foreign places and under the tutelage of avowed socialists and America-haters.
If one believes America is a creed, a culture, a set of ideas that binds people together despite external differences then it is only natural to not want some “other” to lead our nation. Especially when he wants to fundamentally change it.
If you are a multiculturalist, all things are equal and it should not matter if an Afghani goat herder or a baker’s son from Michigan is President.
Nonsense! What does the public's fear and disgust at multi-trillion dollar debt have to do with Obama's OTHER-ness? Ditto for the healthcare fiasco, the czars, the kow-towing to our enemies, the crude treatment of our allies (Winston Churchill bust, anyone?)
Obama has used the race card widely and well. I know many people who voted for him, explaining: "It would be great to throw off any stigma of racism by proving to the world that Americans are open-minded enough to elect a Black President."
And, of course, once in office, the libs (like your "friend") immediately deflect any and all criticism of Obama by using a corollary of the commutative law of mathematics, i.e., If a=b and b=c, then a=c. Their version is: If you criticize Obama and Obama is Black, then you are criticizing him because he is Black.
After many frustrating conversations, emails, and open discussions with liberals, I have come to the (somewhat cowardly, but mentally soothing) conclusion that I no longer engage in any political discourse with them. The odds of changing a liberal's mind is approximately equal to the odds of a liberal changing mine, or yours: zero. So, save yourself the agita and keep discussions with them at the level of the weather or the sports scores.