Obama's 100 Days Pt 2
Jonah Goldberg
The Corner
One remarkable development is the dog that hasn’t barked: Obama’s race. Sure, it’s come up, but not nearly so much as you would have expected. And the people who've really tried to play the race card have made fools of themselves. For instance, Janeane Garafalo lived up to her reputation as unparodiable liberal when she went on a tear about how the tea parties were “about hating a black man in the White House. This is racism straight up.”
Overall, Obama’s status as the first African-American president amounts to one of the few areas of pro-Obama consensus out there. It’s not that everyone is equally ecstatic about it, but even most anti-Obama conservatives see it as, at minimum, a nice bellwether of social progress.
Still, given the liberal hysteria over race and Obama last year, you’d think Obama’s race would amount to more than human interest filler and cover stories in African-American magazines. Last Summer, Tim Noah at Slate magazine (which generally hyped the idea that anti-Obama = racist) insisted that even noticing that Obama is “skinny” amounted to racism because it called attention to his physical otherness or some such nonsense. This month, the much publicized cover of the Washingtonian features a picture of the Commander-in-Chief topless in a swimsuit, giddy over the fact that our new neighbor is “Hot.” So far there’s been nary a word of racial hand-wringing over it. Such are the wages of racial improvement, I suppose.
But here's the thing. Polls show he's popular now. Eighty percent of Americans — that means a lot of conservatives and Republicans — find him likeable. I'd even put myself in that camp, and I think he's wrong about so, so, so much. When Obama's numbers fall to Earth, it will be interesting, and entirely predictable, to hear his supporters blame it on racism of some kind or another. It's going to be a hard argument to make, unless you believe that a large chunk of that 80% are lying racists of some kind. But it's going to happen. Mark my words, or if you prefer, bookmark this link.
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