Home » Obama the racial healer

Comments

Obama the racial healer — 18 Comments

  1. The cold truth is you can’t be a leader who “heals divisions” with an attitude of sanctimony, dishonesty, and narcisism. It should be obvious, but those qualities only sow more division. To heal divisions you have to be capable of true humility or some level. You have to be able to acknowledge the basic humanity in those you may disagree with… and not reduce them to merely deplorable simpletons who cling to guns and religion. That sort of talk may make those who are on you’re side very happy since it reinforces their own biases and belief that they’re the truly good and smart people, but it also pushes those on the other side further away.

    Obama is and always will be an insufferable narcisist with narrow vision and a chip on his shoulder. It’s just who he is. It’s sad that so many people seem to believe otherwise just because he says things they like even though they’re lies.

  2. True enough, but I think he was more of an empty suit or figurehead than anyone consequential, let alone the determined revolutionary that some people assume he was. People in other parts of the world have more experience with people who come from the left but are basically grifters and timeservers by the time they rise to the top of the heap than we do.

    What he did understand was that he was the leader of a party or faction and what he had to do to stay in power was to appeal to the prejudices and complacencies of his supporters. Presidents are “uniters” of their party, and that means being “disuniters” of the country as a whole.

  3. What an opportunity Obama had, as our first president of half-African ancestry! What a missed opportunity! He’s at core a racist, and race is what he sees everywhere.

  4. I think the big problem Obama had was he needed to prove his bona fides to the African American voters. He had a lot of things holding him back on that score. He was half white raised mostly by his white family. His black half was not from the US so he has no genuine African American cultural roots. Attacking the racist Republicans was an easy way in on that score.

  5. How quickly people forget that the Democrats have been openly talking about replacing white working class voters who were the bulk of the ‘Reagan Democrats’ in the 1980s in their coalition with a growing non-white underclass, largely through illegal immigration, that would be more reliable Democrat voters since 2002. This was the entire thesis of Judis and Teixeira’s work, though Teixeira has been backfilling that they never meant the Democrats should abandon the white working class as has been widely evident since Trump won.

  6. People who are forever complaining that the politicians they vote for turn out to be “Republicans In Name Only” might consider that Obama didn’t want to be seen as a “Democrat In Name Only.” He could have made efforts to bridge the gap between Republicans and Democrats, but his base would have thought him a sell-out, so he had to play his partisan cards, including the racism card.

    Obama was less radical than many Republicans thought he was, but he had to double down on the “us” and “them” to conceal that from his base. It wasn’t insincere. He really didn’t like the other side, but the “not liking” was also part of the political drama, and I couldn’t say that it had anywhere near much in the way of real world consequences as it does under Biden.

    Ortega used to say “I am I, plus my circumstances.” It’s certainly like that for politicians. They are what they may happen to be, want, and believe, plus what is politically practical at any given time (or minus what is politically impossible). Maybe Obama would have liked to have a free path to impose some more radical agenda on the American people or maybe he wouldn’t. Can we really say? Biden has the opportunity to go further and he’s reached the point where he doesn’t have doubts or qualms about what he’s told he has to do.

  7. Mr Smith,

    IMO you greatly misjudge Obama’s influence in the democrat party and on the left, as well as the content of his character.

  8. What I remember most about Obama as president is that any time there was a controversy between a black and a white, Obama ALWAYS took the side of the black, facts be damned.

    Consequently, he did more to hurt race relations than any president in my lifetime.

  9. Barb Rhubarb:

    Obama, the racist heller.

    During the 2008 campaign, after my friend and I figured out who Obama was, we agreed Obama would set back race relations by decades.

    Nailed that one.

  10. Neo wrote, “None of these candidates gives a rat’s patootie what color these ‘immigrants’ … are.”

    Maybe yes, maybe no. There’s a basic point here that, in our time, people are generally uncomfortable with. But it’s important and was handled superbly by the late Lawrence Auster in a blog entry titled “IMMIGRATION AND RACE: FACING THE ISSUE HEAD-ON.” Here are two key paragraphs:

    “Race and race differences are a part of the total fabric of human reality. Further, racial and ethnic differences overlap to a great degree with cultural differences. While race and culture are not identical, there is no human way to separate out race entirely from culture. The result is that if the majority population of a country opposes the mass immigration of foreigners because they are culturally unassimilable to themselves, the foreigners’ racial difference from the natives is going, ineluctably, to be part of the total package of traits describing the foreigners. Similarly, a restrictionist policy aimed at keeping out people from backward countries because they will drag down our economy to Third-world conditions is going to affect non-whites disproportionately. The point is that even if you sincerely do not care about race at all, but only care about preserving certain cultural or political or economic qualities of your country, your position is still going to have racial implications.

    “As long as restrictionists keep running away from the racial side of the issue and frantically denying that they’re racist, they are trapped in the left’s own definitions and moral terms. In the eyes of the left, they will always seem at best hypocritical, claiming that they’re not racist while pursuing a policy that would disproportionately slow the immigration of non-whites. There is therefore no alternative but for us to take the initiative and deal with the racial issue head on. We need to acknowledge the simple, commonsense fact that race is an integral part of human and social reality, one of several factors that significantly differentiate human groups from one another. Race and culture are to a certain degree linked, though of course, as I said, they are not identical. Individuals of any racial background can, potentially, assimilate into a culture different from their own. But the greater the racial and cultural differences between the newcomers and the host population, and the greater their numbers, the more difficult and unlikely such assimilation becomes. The upshot is that if it is legitimate to want to preserve our own culture, it is legitimate to want to preserve a country in which people like ourselves continue to be the majority, culture-defining population.”

    From http://www.amnation.com/vfr/archives/003531.html

  11. Obama is a Chicago Machine Democrat. That was all I needed to know, to not vote for him.

  12. “the Democrats’ calculation that these are people who will (or whose offspring will) ultimately keep voting for Democrats. Thus, they are being allowed to enter illegally and even encouraged to do so in order to increase the Democrats’ voter rolls.”

    I honestly don’t think this will go the way the Democrats think it will. In my experience Hispanics tend to be socially conservative and Catholic. Of course not all are particularly devout. But still, Catholicism has to some extent formed them. How do you think the Democrat party’s social agenda will go over with them? That they want among other things to trans their kids?

    Frankly, I don’t see them embracing the Dem freak show.

  13. obama is a destroyer, like the horned god in the conan sequel, now is he doing this of his own volition, or soros or schwab

  14. Obama is a Chicago Machine Democrat. That was all I needed to know, to not vote for him.

    See Elaine Krewer (lapsed Illinois reporter) on this subject. Chicago ward politics is labor intensive retail activity. It requires you have people skills and take an interest in your constituents’ mundane problems. Obama is nothing like that.

  15. miguel, I agree completely. After all, that’s what community organizers do. They are simply organizing communities into hostile, competing groups.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

HTML tags allowed in your comment: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>