Obama the racial healer
President Obama could really have been a positive and healing force in America, and he presented himself that way. Some people even believed that he fit that description, and continue to believe it.
They weren’t paying attention then and they’re not paying attention now.
One of the earliest things I noticed about Obama during his 2008 campaign was the way he called Republicans racists. The accusation had a regretful tone, as if he really didn’t want to have to say these things about what bigots Republicans are but circumstances forced him to do so. He played this theme early and often. My first post on the subject was in June of 2008:
Barack Obama, the candidate who wants to end divisiveness, and who wants to run a clean and honorable campaign without negativity, said the following in a recent campaign speech at a Florida fund-raising reception:
“It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy. We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid. They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”
We have here a truly masterful attempt to flames of paranoia on the part of his followers and adopt the mantle of victimization for himself, thus raising rather than lowering the amount of divisiveness and vitriol in the campaign. Pretty good for just a couple of sentences.
Obama is correct in saying that there have been racist remarks against him. These have originated from fringe elements and/or commenters in the blogosphere and/or anonymous email campaigns. They focus on his “funny name,” for example, or the fact that he’s black.
But in this speech he appears to attribute—or to encourage his supporters to attribute—these charges to the entire Republican Party, couched as a threatening “they.” At the same time, he fails to differentiate these attacks—and actually connects them as part of an undifferentiated list—from extremely legitimate concerns that people have voiced about other characteristics of his, such as his inexperience.
In the final sentence of the paragraph he slyly encourages a phenomenon I’ve noticed happening more and more: the charge that any criticism of Obama emanates from racism.
I wrote a second post on the subject about a month later because I noticed Obama continuing in the same vein:
The Obama camp says the McCain campaign is wrong to accuse him of playing the race card in the following remarks Obama made while addressing a crowd in Missouri yesterday:
“Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me. You know, ‘he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name,’ you know, ‘he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.’”
Yeah. You know.
It’s not that Obama can cite anyone officially connected to the McCain campaign actually making such a statement. Apparently. Obama doesn’t need to back up his accusation; it’s just a prediction, you see. He just needs to say that they will—and some people will nod sagely, just as some people consider any criticism of Obama to be racially motivated.
Ah, but it’s not about race at all, say Obama’s spokespeople. Not in the least; how could John McCain think such a thing?
And then of course there was Obama’s grandma, the “typical white person” who supposedly had a kneejerk, “inbred” fear of black men.
What a healing force he remains. Last Sunday he had this helpful comment to make:
“Right now, the biggest fuel behind the Republican agenda is related to immigration and the fear that somehow America’s character is going to be changed if, people of darker shades, there are too many of them here,” Obama told moderator Gary Acosta, the co-founder and CEO of the National Association of Hispanic Real Estate Professionals.
“I wish I could be more euphemistic about it except (they’re) not that subtle about it — they’re just kind of saying it,” Obama said. “You hear it on hard-right media, you hear it from candidates and politicians, you hear things like ‘great replacement theory’ — I mean, this is not subtle. Unless we’re able to return to a more inclusive vision inside the Republican Party, it’s going to be hard to get a bill done.”
Same modus operandi, same regretful above-the-fray tone, same everything. He so very much wishes he could be more “eupemistic” about it, but those darn Republicans are just kind of saying it. Not actually saying it, you know, but kind of.
Here’s the sort of thing Obama is referring to:
Three weeks ago in Arizona, Republican Senate candidate Blake Masters accused Democrats of trying to flood the nation with millions of immigrants “to change the demographics of our country.” A few days later in Missouri, Senate hopeful Eric Schmitt, the state attorney general, said Democrats were “fundamentally trying to change this country through illegal immigration.” And in Ohio, Republican Senate nominee JD Vance accused Democrats of trying to “transform the electorate.”
Warning of an immigrant “invasion,” Vance told Fox News Channel that Democrats “have decided that they can’t win reelection in 2022 unless they bring a large number of new voters to replace the voters that are already here.”
None of these candidates gives a rat’s patootie what color these “immigrants” (that is, illegal immigrants/aliens) are. It is crystal clear that the demographic they are talking about is a voting demographic: 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.
It may not work out exactly as Democrats have planned, but that is certainly the plan.
NOTE: The word “demographics” is defined this way: the statistical characteristics of human populations (such as age or income) used especially to identify markets.” Race or national origin is just one of an enormous number of variables that constitute a population’s demographics, and political affiliation is certainly another. This is about political affiliation and predictions about political affiliation made by the Democrats themselves.
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.
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.
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.
He’s a racist.
He’s projecting.
FBO
Dapper Barry of Martha’s Vineyard off to the races again.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
Obama is a Chicago Machine Democrat. That was all I needed to know, to not vote for him.
@ Barb Rhubarb > Are you any relation to this lovely German lady?
https://www.germanwithantrim.com/rhabarberbarbara-a-german-tongue-twister-with-english-translation/
“One of my favorite German tongue twisters is the story of Rhabarberbarbara (Rhubarb Barbara).”
“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.
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
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.
miguel, I agree completely. After all, that’s what community organizers do. They are simply organizing communities into hostile, competing groups.