How Our Post-Racial President Uses Race Card As Both Sword And Shield By LARRY ELDER | Posted Tuesday, July 28, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Oops, President Obama did it again. He thoughtlessly, carelessly and offensively whipped out the race card.
Some people — not just black — voted for Obama because of his race. Many expected an Obama election to (a) improve "race relations" and (b) make a profound statement about America's inclusiveness.
Obama's election would show how close we've come to Dr. Martin Luther King's vision of a society that judges people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. He seemed so uplifting.
A biracial candidate (white mom, black dad), he refreshingly responded to Steve Kroft's "60 Minutes" question about whether his race hurt his bid for the presidency. "I think if I don't win this race," Obama replied, "it will be because of other factors. It's gonna be because I have not shown to the American people a vision for where the country needs to go that they can embrace." Well done.
On the 40th anniversary of "Blood Sunday" — a watershed civil rights march — Obama spoke optimistically about the great distance America has traveled, with but a small distance to go:
"There's still some battles that need to be fought, some rivers that need to be crossed . . . The previous generation — the Moses generation — pointed the way. They took us 90% of the way there, but we still got that 10%, in order to cross over to the other side." Excellent.
After all, polls showed that black former Secretary of State Colin Powell could have won the 1996 election assuming he secured his party's nomination. Back in 1958, when Gallup first posed the question "Would you vote for a well-qualified candidate who happened to be black?," 53% of Americans said no. By 2006, that number had fallen to 3% in a Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll, or about one-third the number who believe Elvis still lives. But now, out comes the race card.
Friend Of Skip
During Obama's press conference, he answered a question about the arrest of the black professor and director of Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Henry Gates.
Question: "Recently Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you and what does it say about race relations in America?"
Obama: "Well, I should say at the outset that Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don't know all the facts. What's been reported, though, is that the guy forgot his keys, jimmied his way to get into the house, there was a report called into the police station that there might be a burglary taking place — so far, so good, right?
". . . But so far, so good. They're reporting — the police are doing what they should. There's a call, they go investigate what happens. My understanding is at that point Professor Gates is already in his house. The police officer comes in, I'm sure there's some exchange of words, but my understanding is, is that Professor Gates then shows his ID to show that this is his house. And at that point, he gets arrested for disorderly conduct — charges which are later dropped.
"Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact . . . ."
In other words, the president decided, without any corroborating evidence, that the officer victimized Gates and committed an act of "racial profiling." Obama said nothing about Gates' racially charged verbal abuse of an officer simply trying to do his job and protect Gates' home, a home which — by Gates own admission — had been a target of a previous attempted break-in.
This is, in fact, why Gates used his shoulder to push open his front door, prompting a neighbor to call the police because she suspected someone was trying to break in.
Damage Control
Obama later gave a semi-apology and said he didn't intend to "malign" the Cambridge Police department. He called the incident a "teachable" moment. Indeed it was. But for whom — America or Obama?
Here's what the leader of the free world — a lawyer, a former constitutional law teacher, a man whom actor Sean Penn during last year's Academy Awards referred to as "elegant" — should have said:
"I know Professor Gates. He is a friend of mine, so I am biased. I don't know all the facts. But I know that the police responded to call from a neighbor who thought someone was breaking into his house. An officer arrived and ultimately he arrested Gates at the professor's own home.
"What led up to it, what kind of words were exchanged, the record of the officer, the local law on disorderly conduct, among other factors, are all relevant. And I simply do not know enough to comment.
"But all too often an exchange between a black citizen and a white police generates knee-jerk accusations of racism and racial profiling. The police perform a difficult job, and they, too, wish to return home every day to their loved ones.
"We should appreciate and congratulate them — recognizing that there are some bad apples in every profession — for their willingness to do a difficult and dangerous job. Beyond this, until I know more, I'm not prepared to comment
In full damage-control mode, the president invited Gates and Sgt. Crowley to the White House to resolve the "Cambridge Conflict." After his irresponsible "Cambridge Police acted stupidly" comment, Obama now says that "two good people" merely engaged in a "misunderstanding."
If the police audiotapes show both sides equally at fault in escalating the incident into an arrest, fair enough. Bring them both down for a can-we-get-along photo-op beer-drinking session.
But what if the yet-to-be-released tapes reveal that one of the participants committed an unwarranted, "yo mamma"-based provocation, that the parties were not equally at fault, and that Crowley legally used his discretion — even if he could have walked away — in making the arrest? Why reward the miscreant by giving him a sit-down with the president?
That would have been a home run with the possibility of actually improving police-citizen relations. But here's the problem. The media and the Democratic Party love to exploit and exaggerate the "tension" between blacks and whites.
Never mind that some of the attention-grabbing blacks-are-oppressed stories turn out bogus — the Duke lacrosse team "rape" scandal, the Al Sharpton-driven Tawana Brawley "sexual assault" story, the discredited black-churches-targeted-for-arson story, the Jena Six hyperventilation, and, of course, the mother of all "racism" stories — the double-homicide trial of O.J. Simpson.
Democrats gleefully exploit "racial divisions" when it suits them, because it protects and cultivates that monolithic black vote.
Then-First Lady Hillary Clinton once condemned the then-Republican-controlled Congress before a predominantly black audience: "When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about."
Then-Senate candidate, now Sen. Clair McCaskill, a Democrat, said, "George Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were poor and because they were black."
DNC Chairman Howard Dean referred to the GOP as the "white party" and calls Republicans racist: "The Republicans are all about suppressing votes. Two voting machines if you live in a black district, 10 voting machines if you live in a white district."
Once, during a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus, Dean said: "You think the Republican National Committee could get this many people of color in a single room? . . . Only if they had the hotel staff in here."
But now the media's knee-jerk pursuit of the whites-oppressing-blacks Gates-Cambridge story pulls their guy "off message," jeopardizing his pursuit of ObamaCare. Thus the president's press secretary calls the media's frenzy over the Gates-Cambridge affair an "obsession."
We've seen this before with Obama. And the picture grows clearer and clearer. Use the race card both as shield and sword, when necessary, then give uplifting speeches about the need to "come together." Follow this with the obligatory "how far we've come," but couple it with "how far we have to go."
Rather than apologize for his 20-year attendance at a church with a racist pastor, Obama first defended him as a product of his generation; then criticized the pastor's view of race relations as "static," as if things haven't improved; then treated the country to a lecture on the history of race relations; then dumped the preacher. Yeah, Sen. Obama, but why did you belong to a church whose leader refers to America as "the United States of KKK"?
Obama's assumption that Gates' arrest reflects a history of race relations that "still haunts us" comes straight out of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's playbook: Cry racism, facts to follow. The Obama-loving press doesn't notice, doesn't care or feels America, given its past, deserves it.
Focus On Color
GOP opponent John McCain, reflecting his party's near-pathological fear of being labeled bigoted, helpfully played along by instructing his staff to take Wright "off the table." McCain removed an explosive red meat (pardon the expression) issue lest someone call him . . . RACIST! Even Obama called Wright's views a "legitimate issue"!
During the campaign, Obama got away with calling his grandmother "a typical white person." He survived after demeaning people in Middle America and small towns who "cling to guns or religion." (Blacks live in Middle America and small towns too, but somehow one suspects they weren't the target.)
He selected, as the nation's first black attorney general, former Clinton Deputy AG Eric Holder. Holder then called America, as to matters of race, "a nation of cowards"?!
Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. In speeches over the last 10 years, she asserted that a "wise Latina" would make a better judge than a "white male." As an appellate judge, she agreed to throw out a New Haven, Conn., firefighters' promotion test because whites performed better than blacks. But few commented on Sotomayor's reasoning.
Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when the court sided 5-4 with the firefighters, wrote the dissent. Never mind that Ginsburg's reasoning was as different from Sotomayor's as Keith Olbermann is from Dick Cheney.
Ginsburg wrote that before calling the test unfair, the lower court needs to determine whether the exam truly tests knowledge necessary to the job. If the test requires a candidate recite from "Hamlet," and whites do better than blacks, that's bad. But Sotomayor only cared about the result. Whites did well. Blacks did not. End of story. Throw it out.
Even my Obama-supporting brother — who rose, as many do in this country of opportunity, from entry level to management at a major corporation — shook his head and said, "He just goes back and forth, doesn't he?" Obama's view of society increasingly looks less like one that is colorblind, but rather is color-coordinated.
Or, to paraphrase the United Negro College Fund, a race card is a terrible thing to waste.
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How Our Post-Racial President Uses Race Card As Both Sword And Shield
By LARRY ELDER | Posted Tuesday, July 28, 2009 4:20 PM PT
Oops, President Obama did it again. He thoughtlessly, carelessly and offensively whipped out the race card.
Some people — not just black — voted for Obama because of his race. Many expected an Obama election to (a) improve "race relations" and (b) make a profound statement about America's inclusiveness.
Obama's election would show how close we've come to Dr. Martin Luther King's vision of a society that judges people by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. He seemed so uplifting.
A biracial candidate (white mom, black dad), he refreshingly responded to Steve Kroft's "60 Minutes" question about whether his race hurt his bid for the presidency. "I think if I don't win this race," Obama replied, "it will be because of other factors. It's gonna be because I have not shown to the American people a vision for where the country needs to go that they can embrace." Well done.
On the 40th anniversary of "Blood Sunday" — a watershed civil rights march — Obama spoke optimistically about the great distance America has traveled, with but a small distance to go:
"There's still some battles that need to be fought, some rivers that need to be crossed . . . The previous generation — the Moses generation — pointed the way. They took us 90% of the way there, but we still got that 10%, in order to cross over to the other side." Excellent.
After all, polls showed that black former Secretary of State Colin Powell could have won the 1996 election assuming he secured his party's nomination. Back in 1958, when Gallup first posed the question "Would you vote for a well-qualified candidate who happened to be black?," 53% of Americans said no. By 2006, that number had fallen to 3% in a Los Angeles Times-Bloomberg poll, or about one-third the number who believe Elvis still lives. But now, out comes the race card.
Friend Of Skip
During Obama's press conference, he answered a question about the arrest of the black professor and director of Harvard University's W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research, Henry Gates.
Question: "Recently Professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested at his home in Cambridge. What does that incident say to you and what does it say about race relations in America?"
Obama: "Well, I should say at the outset that Skip Gates is a friend, so I may be a little biased here. I don't know all the facts. What's been reported, though, is that the guy forgot his keys, jimmied his way to get into the house, there was a report called into the police station that there might be a burglary taking place — so far, so good, right?
". . . But so far, so good. They're reporting — the police are doing what they should. There's a call, they go investigate what happens. My understanding is at that point Professor Gates is already in his house. The police officer comes in, I'm sure there's some exchange of words, but my understanding is, is that Professor Gates then shows his ID to show that this is his house. And at that point, he gets arrested for disorderly conduct — charges which are later dropped.
"Now, I don't know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that, but I think it's fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge Police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there is a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That's just a fact . . . ."
In other words, the president decided, without any corroborating evidence, that the officer victimized Gates and committed an act of "racial profiling." Obama said nothing about Gates' racially charged verbal abuse of an officer simply trying to do his job and protect Gates' home, a home which — by Gates own admission — had been a target of a previous attempted break-in.
This is, in fact, why Gates used his shoulder to push open his front door, prompting a neighbor to call the police because she suspected someone was trying to break in.
Damage Control
Obama later gave a semi-apology and said he didn't intend to "malign" the Cambridge Police department. He called the incident a "teachable" moment. Indeed it was. But for whom — America or Obama?
Here's what the leader of the free world — a lawyer, a former constitutional law teacher, a man whom actor Sean Penn during last year's Academy Awards referred to as "elegant" — should have said:
"I know Professor Gates. He is a friend of mine, so I am biased. I don't know all the facts. But I know that the police responded to call from a neighbor who thought someone was breaking into his house. An officer arrived and ultimately he arrested Gates at the professor's own home.
"What led up to it, what kind of words were exchanged, the record of the officer, the local law on disorderly conduct, among other factors, are all relevant. And I simply do not know enough to comment.
"But all too often an exchange between a black citizen and a white police generates knee-jerk accusations of racism and racial profiling. The police perform a difficult job, and they, too, wish to return home every day to their loved ones.
"We should appreciate and congratulate them — recognizing that there are some bad apples in every profession — for their willingness to do a difficult and dangerous job. Beyond this, until I know more, I'm not prepared to comment
In full damage-control mode, the president invited Gates and Sgt. Crowley to the White House to resolve the "Cambridge Conflict." After his irresponsible "Cambridge Police acted stupidly" comment, Obama now says that "two good people" merely engaged in a "misunderstanding."
If the police audiotapes show both sides equally at fault in escalating the incident into an arrest, fair enough. Bring them both down for a can-we-get-along photo-op beer-drinking session.
But what if the yet-to-be-released tapes reveal that one of the participants committed an unwarranted, "yo mamma"-based provocation, that the parties were not equally at fault, and that Crowley legally used his discretion — even if he could have walked away — in making the arrest? Why reward the miscreant by giving him a sit-down with the president?
That would have been a home run with the possibility of actually improving police-citizen relations. But here's the problem. The media and the Democratic Party love to exploit and exaggerate the "tension" between blacks and whites.
Left To Die
Never mind that some of the attention-grabbing blacks-are-oppressed stories turn out bogus — the Duke lacrosse team "rape" scandal, the Al Sharpton-driven Tawana Brawley "sexual assault" story, the discredited black-churches-targeted-for-arson story, the Jena Six hyperventilation, and, of course, the mother of all "racism" stories — the double-homicide trial of O.J. Simpson.
Democrats gleefully exploit "racial divisions" when it suits them, because it protects and cultivates that monolithic black vote.
Then-First Lady Hillary Clinton once condemned the then-Republican-controlled Congress before a predominantly black audience: "When you look at the way the House of Representatives has been run, it has been run like a plantation, and you know what I'm talking about."
Then-Senate candidate, now Sen. Clair McCaskill, a Democrat, said, "George Bush let people die on rooftops in New Orleans because they were poor and because they were black."
DNC Chairman Howard Dean referred to the GOP as the "white party" and calls Republicans racist: "The Republicans are all about suppressing votes. Two voting machines if you live in a black district, 10 voting machines if you live in a white district."
Once, during a meeting with the Congressional Black Caucus, Dean said: "You think the Republican National Committee could get this many people of color in a single room? . . . Only if they had the hotel staff in here."
But now the media's knee-jerk pursuit of the whites-oppressing-blacks Gates-Cambridge story pulls their guy "off message," jeopardizing his pursuit of ObamaCare. Thus the president's press secretary calls the media's frenzy over the Gates-Cambridge affair an "obsession."
We've seen this before with Obama. And the picture grows clearer and clearer. Use the race card both as shield and sword, when necessary, then give uplifting speeches about the need to "come together." Follow this with the obligatory "how far we've come," but couple it with "how far we have to go."
Rather than apologize for his 20-year attendance at a church with a racist pastor, Obama first defended him as a product of his generation; then criticized the pastor's view of race relations as "static," as if things haven't improved; then treated the country to a lecture on the history of race relations; then dumped the preacher. Yeah, Sen. Obama, but why did you belong to a church whose leader refers to America as "the United States of KKK"?
Obama's assumption that Gates' arrest reflects a history of race relations that "still haunts us" comes straight out of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright's playbook: Cry racism, facts to follow. The Obama-loving press doesn't notice, doesn't care or feels America, given its past, deserves it.
Focus On Color
GOP opponent John McCain, reflecting his party's near-pathological fear of being labeled bigoted, helpfully played along by instructing his staff to take Wright "off the table." McCain removed an explosive red meat (pardon the expression) issue lest someone call him . . . RACIST! Even Obama called Wright's views a "legitimate issue"!
During the campaign, Obama got away with calling his grandmother "a typical white person." He survived after demeaning people in Middle America and small towns who "cling to guns or religion." (Blacks live in Middle America and small towns too, but somehow one suspects they weren't the target.)
He selected, as the nation's first black attorney general, former Clinton Deputy AG Eric Holder. Holder then called America, as to matters of race, "a nation of cowards"?!
Obama nominates Sonia Sotomayor for the Supreme Court. In speeches over the last 10 years, she asserted that a "wise Latina" would make a better judge than a "white male." As an appellate judge, she agreed to throw out a New Haven, Conn., firefighters' promotion test because whites performed better than blacks. But few commented on Sotomayor's reasoning.
Liberal Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, when the court sided 5-4 with the firefighters, wrote the dissent. Never mind that Ginsburg's reasoning was as different from Sotomayor's as Keith Olbermann is from Dick Cheney.
Ginsburg wrote that before calling the test unfair, the lower court needs to determine whether the exam truly tests knowledge necessary to the job. If the test requires a candidate recite from "Hamlet," and whites do better than blacks, that's bad. But Sotomayor only cared about the result. Whites did well. Blacks did not. End of story. Throw it out.
Even my Obama-supporting brother — who rose, as many do in this country of opportunity, from entry level to management at a major corporation — shook his head and said, "He just goes back and forth, doesn't he?" Obama's view of society increasingly looks less like one that is colorblind, but rather is color-coordinated.
Or, to paraphrase the United Negro College Fund, a race card is a terrible thing to waste.
Glenn Beck is correct!
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