Is Obama big enough to take the Race Card off the table?
Nothing in his background (the racialist autobiography, the 20 years in Jeremiah Wrights church) would indicate it. But TWT.
The moment has arrived for President Obama to start working on his legacy as the first post-racial president. Either that, or to face a legacy of having the most racially divisive presidency in modern American history.
With the opposition to his health-care proposal and its imminent failure, the race card is being heavily played on Obama’s behalf by a wide and somewhat prominent array of people on the left … from comedian and actress Janeane Garofalo to New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd to U.S. Rep. Hank Johnson, D-Ga., to former President Jimmy Carter … to smear dissent. If you virulently disagree with the idea of a public option, and fear that it will destroy a large swath of our economy, ruining the quality of health care in this country and driving up the deficit and taxes in the midst of a recession, there are prominent people who will call you are a racist. They have provided no evidence whatsoever to support this position. They cite only gut feelings and inferences. They actually cite things that weren’t said.
With the latest loss of fringe GOP support in Olympia Snowe, it increasingly looks like Obama’s health-care initiative is going down. The first black president is facing the prospect of losing his major domestic agenda item. Not only will he look weak and inept, but so will his majority party. Seeing as the majority party is not going to be interested in taking the blame for that going into the mid-term elections, it will fall to him. And the storyline that is developing is that white racism has hamstrung the nation’s first black president. White racists will not let the first black president govern (Garofalo, Carter). The nation is consumed by white racist rage (Dowd), which is on the verge of violence, with dissent signalling a Klan resurgence (Johnson), and under threat of other varieties of violent, disaffected white supremacist extremism (U.S. Department of Homeland Security).
Barack Obama is smart enough to know this is not true. He knows he has sold his initiative poorly, that his timing is bad and his politicking is worse. Having given up on the public option, he apparently also knows that his ideas are fundamentally not viable, as amply demonstrated by the history of those ideas in this country, quite independent of race. He knows that racism has nothing to do with it.
That’s why it is time for the president to rise above his own shortcomings and political agenda, and do something for the nation. At some point in the not-too-distant future, whether his health-care plan continues to crash and burn or is resurrected in a new figleaf evolution, the president needs tell the nation that it is OK to disagree with him, that political dissent and even anger do not equal racism. Also, that if he fails, he prefers to be seen as having failed on his own merits, as an American political leader, rather than as a black man who is being handed the crutch of theoretical racism, for which there is no evidence whatsoever in this debate. Not simply as a throwaway remark in an interview with a TV news anchor, or an aside in speech. He could invite U.S. representatives Joe Wilson and Johnson, former President Carter, New York Times scribbler Dowd, shrill standup act Garfalo and a lot of Tea Party organizers over for beers, but that approach was trite before he tried it last time, and this situation is more serious than a Harvard professor’s attention-grabbing antics. Given the level to which Democratic race-baiting has now risen, it is becoming apparent that Obama is going to have to do it in a more purposeful and sober manner, possibly in a major prime-time speech. In fact, if he wants to restore civility to the debate and possibly pave the way for reasonable compromise in health-care reform, he should do it sooner rather than later.
Obama was applauded in last year’s campaign for a big speech in which he excused the racism of his pastor, and said that white America is incapable of understanding the black experience, that racism on the part of blacks is different. A lot of people thought it was a watershed moment in American race relations. It wasn’t. It wasn’t even a particularly good speech.
The watershed moment in American race relations was Barack Obama’s election with a respectable majority, after winning primaries in areas where the pundits had predicted racist backlashes. That was followed by historically significant approval ratings. The good will has since been squandered by a string of actions, inactions and utterances, but mainly, apparently, by his insistence on pushing his bad ideas about health care at the wrong time, without preparing the ground.
Obama can let a growing chorus of prominent Americans call his failure racism and his opponents racists, a development which is itself driving a deeper partisan wedge and heightening the rancor and bitterness. He can let it further demean our national dialogue and intimidate speech. He can let it be his excuse, a smear in the history books. Or he tell America and the world firmly that in this country, political dissent does not equal racism. He will then have shown himself to be a statesman, who is worthy of respect no matter whether you agree with his politics and policies or not.
It is time for President Obama to take the race card off the table.
julescrittenden.com |
