Uber racist.. is still an empty suit fuel for thought
iamnothere
2011/06/25 18:18:08
June 23, 2011 4:00 A.M.
Obama’s America in Black & White
Black political segregation, nurtured by the policies of the 1960s, has only hardened in the Obama years.
Platitudes about the civic utopia that would spring forth from the election of Barack Obama have vanished. Thomas Friedman’s claim that “the American Civil War ended, as a black man . . . became president of the United States,” has now been replaced by PBS host Tavis Smiley’s prediction that the 2012 presidential election is “going to be the ugliest, the nastiest, the most divisive, and the most racist in the history of this Republic.” E. J. Dionne’s trope that “it is time to hope again. Time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over,” has given way to the statement by CBS’s Bob Schieffer that recent criticism of Obama represents “an ugly strain of racism that’s running through this whole thing.” Paul Krugman, who wrote in 2008 that “Racial polarization used to be a dominating force in our politics, but we’re now a different, and better, country,” has taken to equating the anti-Obama Tea Party with the Ku Klux Klan.
It’s not just the punditry that overpredicted the soothing qualities of Obama’s presidential salve. Average citizens have also been chastened. A Rasmussen poll in October of 2010 found that just 36 percent of voters said relations between blacks and whites were getting better, down from 62 percent in July of 2009.
The experts can be forgiven their erroneous certitudes. They were enthralled by the historical significance of Obama’s election and, at least for those on the left, genuinely proud of how thoroughly involved they were in bringing it about.
Average citizens, too, should be given the benefit of the doubt. Most Americans are largely unaware of the important differences in political viewpoint between the races, and prefer to refrain from commenting publicly about such things.
So it wasn’t for them to point out what the pundits ignored: Obama is and always has been a hardened, bare-knuckled veteran of the culture wars, who not only pursues racial divisions among Americans for political gain but personifies the stark differences in political attitudes between whites and blacks. It was as obvious in 2008 as it is now that electing a man who describes a sermon containing the passage “white people’s greed runs a world in need” as the formative moment in his spiritual life would guarantee a period of unusual social bitterness and resentment.
And that is, in fact, where we are. A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that non-college-educated whites are the most alienated of racial groups. Only 44 percent of this demographic said they expected their economic situation to be better ten years from now, compared to two-thirds of minorities (and 55 percent of college-educated whites).
The familiar clichés with their subtle innuendos featuring “angry white males” who suffer from economic “anxiety” have been trotted out to explain white disillusionment. “The sense of being eclipsed demographically is almost certainly compounding the white working class’s fear of losing ground economically,” is how Ronald Brownstein of National Journal adroitly phrased it.
But the perception of an irascible white working class seems more of a projection of what liberal elites themselves would feel if they lacked power and prestige than it is an accurate depiction of white attitudes. More likely, white attitudes are being shaped by the perception that the top people in government, led by President Obama, embody a vision for America that is at odds with their own. Specifically, Obama’s efforts to broaden the role of the federal government through health-care reform, carbon capping, transfer payments, and profligate spending has amounted, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, to a redrawing of the American social compact, a recasting of “the relationship between government and citizen,” a sharp shift in power toward Washington, away from individuals and the free market.
America’s current social unease, in other words, stems from the feeling among large swaths of Americans that Obama’s agenda poses a direct challenge to the American Dream: the idea, as one prominent writer recently put it, “that through hard work and good choices the average American can be prosperous and independent, and that ordinary people . . . can govern themselves wisely and well without the ‘guidance’ of their ‘betters."
Half of the stimulus grants to states went for Medicaid and other transfer programs. The result, USA Today reported in 2010, is that Americans depend more on government assistance now than at any other time in the nation’s history: a record 18.3 percent of the nation’s total personal income came in the form of payments from the government for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits, and other programs. By August of 2010 government anti-poverty programs served a record one in six Americans. This growth in the number of dependent people, it is important to note, has taken place before the second of Obama’s two main legislative accomplishments — health-care reform — adds an estimated 16 million more to the Medicaid rolls, beginning in 2014.
Not surprisingly, given the factors outlined above, blacks are far more comfortable with Obama’s revised social compact than whites. Another Pew poll, in May of 2010, found that blacks were nearly twice as likely as whites to call U.S. economic conditions “excellent” or “good” (25 percent to 13 percent). They were also significantly less likely than whites to say that the American economy was still in recession (45 percent to 57 percent). Ellis Cose has even reemerged, 17 years after decrying the “rage of a privileged class,” to declare “the end of anger.” “In many ways,” Cose writes, “African-Americans today have more faith in this country than their white counterparts.”
Cose is, of course, right. Presidential job-approval polls by the Gallup organization have tracked two consistent trends in Obama’s ratings: overall decline from the highs of the exuberant first three months after his inauguration and a widening racial gap between black and white Americans. By October of 2010, Obama’s approval had dropped to a new low among whites (36 percent), but remained at 91 percent among blacks, a difference of more than 50 percentage points that has persisted ever since the end of the three-month honeymoon.
Pundits who spoke of a post-racial America if Obama became president were ignoring the fact, laid out in his two autobiographies and evident throughout his career, that Obama himself embodies the ambivalence that many blacks feel toward the “American creed,” a set of beliefs and attitudes born from a revolution against state authority and centered on the ability of individuals to determine their own destiny.
The result is that the country now seems to be teetering on the edge of race-based political partisanship. Unlike blacks, who are staunchly Democratic in their voting habits, whites have been far more evenly distributed between the major parties in their national voting preferences. They make up the vast majority of “swing” or “independent” voters, who lend the country its tone of moderation and centrism. Indeed, Obama carried almost half of them.
But Obama’s aggressive agenda for changing the vital structure of American life to reflect the more collectivist, less individualistic creed of the far Left has already triggered “white flight” from the Democratic party. In the 2010 mid-term elections Republicans carried the white vote by a 23-percentage-point margin (60 to 37 percent). Democrats performed worse with whites than in any other congressional election since the Second World War. Black voters remained at 89 percent for Democrats.
The Democratic party could become even more dependent on racial minorities, as blacks continue to interpret the white turn against Obama as cruel racial rejection. Arrayed against the party of minorities will be the predominantly white Republican party, completely bereft of blacks and increasingly heedless of their concerns. Rather than eliminating race as a significant issue in American politics, the Obama presidency appears to have rendered it the central cleavage in American life for years to come.
Obama’s America in Black & White
Black political segregation, nurtured by the policies of the 1960s, has only hardened in the Obama years.
Platitudes about the civic utopia that would spring forth from the election of Barack Obama have vanished. Thomas Friedman’s claim that “the American Civil War ended, as a black man . . . became president of the United States,” has now been replaced by PBS host Tavis Smiley’s prediction that the 2012 presidential election is “going to be the ugliest, the nastiest, the most divisive, and the most racist in the history of this Republic.” E. J. Dionne’s trope that “it is time to hope again. Time to hope that the era of racial backlash and wedge politics is over,” has given way to the statement by CBS’s Bob Schieffer that recent criticism of Obama represents “an ugly strain of racism that’s running through this whole thing.” Paul Krugman, who wrote in 2008 that “Racial polarization used to be a dominating force in our politics, but we’re now a different, and better, country,” has taken to equating the anti-Obama Tea Party with the Ku Klux Klan.
It’s not just the punditry that overpredicted the soothing qualities of Obama’s presidential salve. Average citizens have also been chastened. A Rasmussen poll in October of 2010 found that just 36 percent of voters said relations between blacks and whites were getting better, down from 62 percent in July of 2009.
The experts can be forgiven their erroneous certitudes. They were enthralled by the historical significance of Obama’s election and, at least for those on the left, genuinely proud of how thoroughly involved they were in bringing it about.
Average citizens, too, should be given the benefit of the doubt. Most Americans are largely unaware of the important differences in political viewpoint between the races, and prefer to refrain from commenting publicly about such things.
So it wasn’t for them to point out what the pundits ignored: Obama is and always has been a hardened, bare-knuckled veteran of the culture wars, who not only pursues racial divisions among Americans for political gain but personifies the stark differences in political attitudes between whites and blacks. It was as obvious in 2008 as it is now that electing a man who describes a sermon containing the passage “white people’s greed runs a world in need” as the formative moment in his spiritual life would guarantee a period of unusual social bitterness and resentment.
And that is, in fact, where we are. A recent study by the Pew Charitable Trusts found that non-college-educated whites are the most alienated of racial groups. Only 44 percent of this demographic said they expected their economic situation to be better ten years from now, compared to two-thirds of minorities (and 55 percent of college-educated whites).
The familiar clichés with their subtle innuendos featuring “angry white males” who suffer from economic “anxiety” have been trotted out to explain white disillusionment. “The sense of being eclipsed demographically is almost certainly compounding the white working class’s fear of losing ground economically,” is how Ronald Brownstein of National Journal adroitly phrased it.
But the perception of an irascible white working class seems more of a projection of what liberal elites themselves would feel if they lacked power and prestige than it is an accurate depiction of white attitudes. More likely, white attitudes are being shaped by the perception that the top people in government, led by President Obama, embody a vision for America that is at odds with their own. Specifically, Obama’s efforts to broaden the role of the federal government through health-care reform, carbon capping, transfer payments, and profligate spending has amounted, in the words of Charles Krauthammer, to a redrawing of the American social compact, a recasting of “the relationship between government and citizen,” a sharp shift in power toward Washington, away from individuals and the free market.
America’s current social unease, in other words, stems from the feeling among large swaths of Americans that Obama’s agenda poses a direct challenge to the American Dream: the idea, as one prominent writer recently put it, “that through hard work and good choices the average American can be prosperous and independent, and that ordinary people . . . can govern themselves wisely and well without the ‘guidance’ of their ‘betters."
Half of the stimulus grants to states went for Medicaid and other transfer programs. The result, USA Today reported in 2010, is that Americans depend more on government assistance now than at any other time in the nation’s history: a record 18.3 percent of the nation’s total personal income came in the form of payments from the government for Social Security, Medicare, food stamps, unemployment benefits, and other programs. By August of 2010 government anti-poverty programs served a record one in six Americans. This growth in the number of dependent people, it is important to note, has taken place before the second of Obama’s two main legislative accomplishments — health-care reform — adds an estimated 16 million more to the Medicaid rolls, beginning in 2014.
Not surprisingly, given the factors outlined above, blacks are far more comfortable with Obama’s revised social compact than whites. Another Pew poll, in May of 2010, found that blacks were nearly twice as likely as whites to call U.S. economic conditions “excellent” or “good” (25 percent to 13 percent). They were also significantly less likely than whites to say that the American economy was still in recession (45 percent to 57 percent). Ellis Cose has even reemerged, 17 years after decrying the “rage of a privileged class,” to declare “the end of anger.” “In many ways,” Cose writes, “African-Americans today have more faith in this country than their white counterparts.”
Cose is, of course, right. Presidential job-approval polls by the Gallup organization have tracked two consistent trends in Obama’s ratings: overall decline from the highs of the exuberant first three months after his inauguration and a widening racial gap between black and white Americans. By October of 2010, Obama’s approval had dropped to a new low among whites (36 percent), but remained at 91 percent among blacks, a difference of more than 50 percentage points that has persisted ever since the end of the three-month honeymoon.
Pundits who spoke of a post-racial America if Obama became president were ignoring the fact, laid out in his two autobiographies and evident throughout his career, that Obama himself embodies the ambivalence that many blacks feel toward the “American creed,” a set of beliefs and attitudes born from a revolution against state authority and centered on the ability of individuals to determine their own destiny.
The result is that the country now seems to be teetering on the edge of race-based political partisanship. Unlike blacks, who are staunchly Democratic in their voting habits, whites have been far more evenly distributed between the major parties in their national voting preferences. They make up the vast majority of “swing” or “independent” voters, who lend the country its tone of moderation and centrism. Indeed, Obama carried almost half of them.
But Obama’s aggressive agenda for changing the vital structure of American life to reflect the more collectivist, less individualistic creed of the far Left has already triggered “white flight” from the Democratic party. In the 2010 mid-term elections Republicans carried the white vote by a 23-percentage-point margin (60 to 37 percent). Democrats performed worse with whites than in any other congressional election since the Second World War. Black voters remained at 89 percent for Democrats.
The Democratic party could become even more dependent on racial minorities, as blacks continue to interpret the white turn against Obama as cruel racial rejection. Arrayed against the party of minorities will be the predominantly white Republican party, completely bereft of blacks and increasingly heedless of their concerns. Rather than eliminating race as a significant issue in American politics, the Obama presidency appears to have rendered it the central cleavage in American life for years to come.
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This could be the future.
The additional fact that was alluded to above Obama's connection to the black liberation theology which is strongly anti-white!