Posted on 08/16/2012 9:30:54 AM PDT by Cincinatus' Wife
There has always been a measured slickness in how Barack Obama’s political operation has handled race, the third rail in politics. They have taken the guards off the rail and made an old obstacle an instrument of fashion. And they have done so with an instinct for the genuine and legitimate guilt surrounding race in American life. As political maneuver, it is a thing of grace in some ways.
At least until the thing turns shameless and expedient. Bill Clinton got the first dose of the treatment, when he protested that Obama’s credentials as an anti-war stalwart were “the biggest fairy tale I’ve ever seen.” That comment was then shape-shifted from a hard political jab at Obama’s rhetorical dodges on the Iraq War to an insinuation that the notion that Obama could win the presidency was wishful fantasy. No dispassionate observer who saw the video and heard Clinton in full cry would have arrived at the seamier interpretation, but with the nudging of Axelrod and Co., and with a little help from South Carolina’s congressman Jim Clyburn, the idea that Clinton meant much worse took hold.
The punch that Clinton absorbed was uncocked repeatedly. Sometimes on defense — when the Jeremiah Wright tapes surfaced, for example, the reasonable question of what drew Obama to a church with a history of incendiary rhetoric was cleverly converted to a teaching moment about an older generation’s fixation with race. When questions about the link between Obama and his old neighbor and fundraiser William Ayers started to burn, the line of inquiry was brushed off as an indirect method of raising fears about black radicalism, and it soon faded.
More often, the blow was an offensive one. The “Yes We Can” mantra always carried the insinuation that Obama’s primary wins were a triumph over the color line. Hillary Clinton’s campaign never found a way to channel that kind of power, even with another glass ceiling at stake. To the contrary, the Clintonites only added fuel to the fire through their observations about Obama’s struggle to connect with working-class whites — and through their lament that he was lucky to “be who he is,” in the words of the late Geraldine Ferraro. To desert Obama in the final throes of the 2008 primaries, Democrats would have had to break faith with their most loyal base and with their party’s identification with the civil-rights era. That was the cloud hovering over Hillary’s furious rally in the final quarter.
The transcendent moment of Obama’s triumph can’t be diminished. But one would have to be blinkered to deny that Obama’s race in 2008 likely empowered him much more than it weakened him — or to assume that Obama’s strategists and their acolytes in the press don’t recognize the power of recapturing race as both an offensive and a defensive weapon.
Enter Joe Biden in Danville, Va., on Tuesday, before a crowd with a large African-American presence. In forced colloquialisms, the vice president warned the audience that Republicans would “put y’all back in chains.” In the hours since, Team Obama has scratched hard to find a different subtext to his statement, but their mincing of words has only added insult to injury: Every African American in the room knew full well whom “y’all” referred to, and what chains meant — it’s one of the clearest codes in racial politics in the black community and has been for a while. At worst, the word “chains” signifies a retreat to a society where a person’s skin color amounted to a prison. At the least, the word bluntly and outrageously equates ordinary conservatism with racial viciousness.
Biden brought this rawness to a place the Obama campaign and its allies have spent much time cultivating this year. It is visible in David Axelrod’s breathless assertions about a decidedly innocent, non-political moment: a small black child touching Obama’s head in an Oval Office photo-op. It is visible in Eric Holder’s deployment of the Justice Department to a series of battles over state voter-ID laws, and in the New York Times’ editorial-page crusade against all manner of alleged race-baiting by Republicans. (Including one writer’s remarkable, if side-splitting, assertion that Mitt Romney’s blandness is a calculated ploy to invoke memories of a Fifties-era, pre-multicultural America. Who knew?) It is an unmistakable, unapologetic argument that to defeat Obama is to suspend progress on race.
Of course, there are different kinds of progress. There is the inconvenient fact that Obama has governed while black unemployment and the level of child hunger in the black community have risen to the highest rates in the modern era, and while educational achievement among African Americans continues to bottom out at appalling levels. This record is one that the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus said last summer would lead blacks to march outside the White House if it had a different occupant.
The Obama message, implicitly, is that the conditions on the ground, including in the black community, are small, grudging details when weighed against the epic fact that a black man occupies the Oval Office. It’s a point of view. But that argument is too charged, too at odds with Obama’s official de-emphasis on race, to be made out loud and in the light of day. Better to work through the hidden-hand approach, through surrogates who create plausible deniability and through commentators who can be disavowed. Interesting that the Sixties-era figure whom the Obama reelect campaign conjures up is neither a Kennedy nor a King but that great hidden-hand stone thrower, Richard Nixon.
If his race baiting is hidden, it’s hiding in plain sight.
The white liberals satiated their racial guilt in 2008. This time they will vote the man - I mean AGAINST the man.
The race card has been completely neutered outside of Obama’s racist hard line supporters. And even some of them realize that his election did not make their mortgage payment or magically impregnate their cars with gasoline.
“O” proved such an unfailing justification of all mainstream America's basic misgivings that now, they'll have to fight their fight all over again.
Minorities in this country earned and certainly deserve better representation than they got with “O”. He has made them look bad.
Even though he says what I think is obvious, it is very well written. Mr. Davis should be commended for this article. It’s obvious that he does have the black community in mind, and perhaps has finally seen the light as to who the “chainers” are.
I confess that if the tables were turned and I was, say, a white guy in Japan and for the first time ever a white guy was running for president, I’d be excited. But if it was Joe Biden, I think I’d be thinking, “but not THIS white guy”.
They pulled the trigger on the wrong black guy.
You’re assuming they want someone to do a good job. What they really want is someone to stick it whitey and hand out free stuff.
—What they really want is someone to stick it whitey and hand out free stuff.—
Yeah, but I’m talking about the non-black voters, which they need. The black “block” will vote for him because he’s democrat. A lot of moderates and even some republicans voted for him because they hated McCain and wanted to be a part of history by electing a “black guy”.
Well, now they’ve done it and they’ will be more careful this time. :-)
But I know some minority families who are nothing like the crude and grasping losers who support “O” wholesale.
THEY have been let down and maligned in the process. Too bad for them, though they are a minority OF a minority.
Race will continue to be a bludgeon until the other side (Republican, conservative, us...whatever name you want to give the other side) shoves it back down their throat by pointing out that the first man in any incident who makes the claim of racism is the racist. Whether he is white, black, brown or zebra striped.
As long as it is useful, it will be used.
Consequently, ‘racism’ was resurrected so that they would not be left flatfooted when politicians make their careers and campaign on actual and relevant issues in this country. Because of this, Liberals only see America at a remove of about 4 decades...and that's how they campaign too.
For sure, American Blacks have set themselves back at least fifty years in falling for the Obama bit. Too bad....they cannot see the forest for the trees. If they had any common sense, they would broom Obama, the NAACP and the CBC, immediately.
All these, so-called Black American leaders starting with Obama have thrown Black Americans under the bus, just to keep their evil and destructive power and control over American Black folk!!! Sad......but very true!!!
Well-written article says it like it is. So far, I’m glad that Mr. Davis switched political parties. It’s not just that he is lifting the cover off the formerly-hidden vat of racial goo that is used to smear “persons of non-color”, but it’s heartening to know that he represents others who are aware of it and want to see it stopped as well.
The best description of communism, like Obama’s, is total equality AT THE LOWEST COMMON DENOMINATOR. Take the poorest, most miserable person and then bring everyone else DOWN to that level. When nobody has anything then everyone is equal. Of course, the Kommisar leadership and their families live well.
The article below helps explain Obambi’s motivation and training - and his hate.
http://www.noiri.blogspot.com/2012/08/who-is-your-mama-who-is-your-papa-who.html
But it might have impregnated their neighborhoods.
Come on and bring it, Twayvon .... the neighborhood you burn may be your own.
There will be a lot of neighborhoods burning when Zero looses in November.
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