The New Neo

…is that it shows Obama misrepresenting facts to a black audience in order to stir up racial resentment.

But like so many other things that Obama has said and done that belie the image he has carefully cultivated of “we’re all in this thing together” reasonableness, it will be ignored and/or dismissed by the MSM, and its messengers will be the ones accused of racism.

The problematic remarks are here:

Now here’s the thing, when 9/11 happened in New York City, they waived the Stafford Act ”” said, ”˜This is too serious a problem. We can’t expect New York City to rebuild on its own. Forget that dollar you got to put in. Well, here’s 10 dollars.’ And that was the right thing to do. When Hurricane Andrew struck in Florida, people said, ”˜Look at this devastation. We don’t expect you to come up with y’own money, here. Here’s the money to rebuild. We’re not going to wait for you to scratch it together ”” because you’re part of the American family.’ ”¦ What’s happening down in New Orleans? Where’s your dollar? Where’s your Stafford Act money? Makes no sense. Tells me that somehow, the people down in New Orleans they don’t care about as much.”

But just weeks before Obama gave this speech, the Stafford Act had been waived by Congress for Katrina relief. Obama, you may recall, was a member of Congress, and knew or should have known this [emphasis mine]:

by January 2007, six months before Obama’s Hampton speech, the federal government had sent at least $110 billion to areas damaged by Katrina. This was more than five times the money that the Bush administration pledged to New York City after 9/11.

Moreover, says the DC, the federal government did at times waive the Stafford Act during its New Orleans reconstruction efforts. On May 25, 2007, just weeks before Obama’s speech, the Bush administration sent an additional $6.9 billion to Katrina-affected areas with no strings attached.

So when Obama asks the crowd, “Where’s your dollar? Where’s your Stafford Act money?” he knew or should have known the answer, but chose instead to whip the audience up into (yes, there’s no other way to put it) the sort of victimization mentality that Mitt Romney was talking about in his notorious 47% speech.

To be fair (which I always try to be), in his Hampton speech Obama also explicitly disavowed the idea that race had anything to do with the federal government’s policies that he alleges were discriminatory against New Orleans. This, I think, is a fascinating demonstration of Obama’s remarkable ability to talk out of both sides of his mouth on this and so many other issues—to pander to racial resentment while simultaneously denying he’s doing so, and to ignore the contradictions and hope his audience will do so as well.

So in the same speech Obama also stated:

People ask me whether I thought race was the reason the response was so slow,” Obama said. “I said, ”˜No. This Administration was colorblind in its incompetence.’ But everyone here knows the disaster and the poverty happened long before that hurricane hit.

I’ve been having difficulty getting a transcript of his remarks that includes the off-script ones (that’s where the controversy lay), although I assume one exists. So I’m not sure which came first, the accusations or the disclaimer. But the explanation for the contradiction is that the accusations were ad-libbed whereas the disclaimer was scripted (here’s the text of his prepared remarks, which in general have a loftier tone than his spontaneous ones).

In general it’s true that extemporaneous declarations are much more likely to be heartfelt expressions than written ones would be. But in Obama’s case I’m not sure that either represent his true feelings and his true thoughts. I think his entire public persona is a series of masks adopted for purely pragmatic and strategic reasons.

That’s the significance of the accent so many people have remarked on that Obama uses for this speech, one that he often adopts when addressing largely black audiences. It is just another mask. That sort of phoniness doesn’t concern me nearly as much the content of his words, and especially his actions as president, which concern me most of all. I see the adoption of this accent as a response to the biggest defeat of Obama’s life, the 2000 Chicago primary race in which Bobby Rush trounced Obama by flashing his own superior black credentials:

Rush portrayed Obama, the Harvard-educated civil rights lecturer at the University of Chicago, as out of touch.

“He went to Harvard and became an educated fool,” Rush said then in an interview with the alternative newspaper Chicago Reader. “We’re not impressed with these folks with these Eastern elite degrees.”

Another opponent, state Sen. Donne Trotter, said Obama was seen as “the white man in blackface.”…

Chicago City Council member Toni Preckwinkle, an early Obama supporter, said, “I think he took a hard look at himself after that campaign and became a much better campaigner, more at ease on the campaign trail.”

That “long hard look” almost undoubtedly included a change to a more ethnic and less professorial type of speech when campaigning in front of black audiences. Not really a surprise.

I don’t think this video is some sort of unprecedented smoking gun. People who would be shocked by it just haven’t been paying much attention, and there’s no reason to believe they’d start paying attention now. I also think that most people have already bought the line that Katrina relief was inadequate, and so Obama’s charges will have a certain amount of resonance with them. A person needs to know some boring facts (such as the timing of the waiver of the Stafford Act for Katrina) to understand why his remarks were offensive.

It’s an interesting prelude to the debate tonight, though. Perhaps the biggest effect it might have would be to rattle Obama and put him a bit off his game. We’ll see.