by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
National Review Online<\/em><\/p>\n Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried \u2014 as is evident in everything from politics to popular culture, from statistics to anecdotes. Yet from late 2007 to 2012, Barack Obama has been establishing new rules of racial referencing. In general, his utterances follow a disheartening pattern. When he is ahead in the polls, has won an election, and is not campaigning, then he emphasizes the unity of the country. But when he is running for president, or campaigning for others, or sinking in the polls, he and his closest associates predictably revert to charges of racial bigotry, albeit usually coded and subtle. America is redeemed when it champions the Obamas, but retrograde when it does not.<\/p>\n Obama\u2019s race-based strategy is predicated on some unspoken assumptions: Any short-term damage incurred by engaging in racial tribalism can easily be later erased by soaring teleprompted speeches on racial harmony; the media will either not widely report his emphases on race or generally support his charges; a person of color can hardly be culpable of racial polarization himself given the history of racial discrimination in this country.<\/p>\n In a recent speech before a Latino audience, President Obama, in blasting congressional Republicans, recalled that he had run for office because \u201cAmerica should be a place where you can always make it if you try; a place where every child, no matter what they look like, where they come from, should have a chance to succeed.\u201d The obvious conclusion from his increasingly frequent \u201clook like\u201d trope is that his critics predicate success in America on just the opposite criteria. That is, supposedly racist opponents do not wish every child to succeed, and so it certainly matters to them a great deal what Americans should \u201clook like.\u201d<\/p>\n Recently, First Lady Michelle Obama complained about a description of her White House infighting in an otherwise favorable account of the first family, written by a\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0reporter. She suggested that the book\u2019s criticism was unfair because \u201cThat\u2019s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced, that I\u2019m some angry black woman.\u201d<\/p>\n Oddly, the first lady did not cite anyone who, in fact, had tried to stereotype her as an \u201cangry black woman.\u201d To be sure, \u201cpeople\u201d have characterized her as \u201cangry,\u201d given her prominent role in the 2008 campaign, during which she repeatedly found herself in dramas of her own rhetorical making (saying Americans were \u201cjust downright mean\u201d; never having been proud of America before the nomination of her husband; etc.). But no one suggested that her overt anger derived from being either \u201cblack\u201d or a \u201cwoman.\u201d<\/p>\n Again, these invocations of race always raise logical antitheses: Do only those who do not find Mrs. Obama \u201cangry\u201d escape her charge of racism? Second, the race-obsessed Mrs. Obama forgets that outspoken first ladies, especially those like herself who have refined tastes and are political infighters, are always natural media targets. The press savaged Nancy Reagan on topics as diverse as her purchase of new White House china, her reliance on astrology, and her legendary infighting with chief of staff Don Regan. Fairly or not, Mrs. Reagan never quite shook the stereotype that she had roamed the West Wing as a sort of Lady Macbeth with aristocratic appetites \u2014 a theme of Mr. Regan\u2019s memoirs. It is likely that Michelle Obama will not either.<\/p>\n Attorney General Eric Holder has often found race a convenient refuge from criticism \u2014 most recently accusing his congressional auditors of racism, for their grilling him over government sales of firearms to Mexican cartel hitmen. Again, there is an obvious inference: To the degree that you do not criticize Eric Holder you are not racist; to the degree that you do, you may well be. Holder, remember, earlier called his fellow countrymen \u201ccowards\u201d for not sharing his own particular take on racial relations, as if all of a craven America had now become Barack Obama\u2019s clueless Pennsylvania clingers. In exchanges over his office\u2019s dismissal of voter-intimidation charges against New Black Panther Party members, Holder described African-Americans as \u201cmy people.\u201d Again, note the natural corollary once we descend into these racial quagmires: If Holder can talk of his \u201cpeople,\u201d are those who do not share his racial heritage\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0then quite the attorney general\u2019s \u201cpeople\u201d?<\/p>\n Our new racial profiling ripples out from the top. When Rick Perry referred to \u201ca big black cloud that hangs over America \u2014 that debt that is so monstrous,\u201d he was accused of racism; the second half of the quote was conveniently omitted. Chris Matthews referred to Perry\u2019s support of federalism with the quip, \u201cThis is going to be Bull Connor with a smile.\u201d Lee Siegel just wrote in the\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0that \u201cMitt Romney is the whitest white man to run for president in recent memory.\u201d Think for a minute of prominent public figures who at one time or another have been accused by the Obama team of either being racist or playing racial politics against them: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Darrell Issa, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum. The list grows in direct proportion to the uncertainty of Obama\u2019s political fortunes.<\/p>\n President Obama and his supporters insist that they deemphasize matters of race, but their record in just the last four years reveals a veritable obsession with it, in a manner that was never true of prior minority members serving in high office \u2014 think of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, or Alberto Gonzales. We are not that far away from Obama\u2019s appearance on the national scene as a serious presidential candidate in early 2008. Yet he has already reformulated racial discourse in America, most famously blasting Pennsylvania whites who \u201ccling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren\u2019t like them,\u201d and introducing \u201ctypical white person\u201d into the national lexicon and the racist Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the national consciousness. The mythography of the 2008 campaign was that Barack Obama overcame the burdens of racism; the reality was that racial intemperance during that long year came principally from Barack Obama himself or his personal pastor \u2014 and, in our disturbed culture, even to acknowledge that fact earns the charge of \u201cRacist!\u201d<\/p>\n Obama has mainstreamed the practice of profiling friends and enemies on this reactionary basis of racial identity. In a Democratic National Committee video in April 2010, Obama called on \u201cyoung people, African-Americans, Latinos, and women . . . to stand together once again.\u201d Are those not included in his categories, then,\u00a0not<\/em>\u00a0to stand \u201ctogether\u201d again? Shortly before the November 2010 congressional elections, Obama told a huge audience in Philadelphia that Republicans \u201care counting on black folks staying home.\u201d In one of his most surreal speeches before the Congressional Black Caucus, Obama in affected fashion adopted the supposed patois of Black America in defining collective interests by shared race: \u201cStop grumblin\u2019. Stop cryin\u2019. We are going to press on. We\u2019ve got work to do.\u201d Separately, he appealed to Latino voters not to stay home from the 2010 election, but instead to \u201cpunish our enemies\u201d \u2014 and not to fall prey to the Republicans\u2019 \u201ccynical attempt to discourage Latinos from voting.\u201d I don\u2019t think a president of the United States has ever, at least since the pre\u2013Civil War era, openly called on a racial group to join with him to punish political adversaries.<\/p>\n Obama stereotyped the Cambridge police department as having \u201cacted stupidly\u201d for detaining his friend Henry Louis Gates, an African-American Studies professor at Harvard. He allegedly complained to political supporters that racial bias explains much of the Tea Party\u2019s opposition to his administration. The wonder is not only that the president of the United States constantly refers to race, but that his serial obsession now earns snores rather than surprise.<\/p>\n Indeed, President Obama\u2019s example has radically brought the politics of race into almost every conceivable forum. Members of the Black Caucus now routinely either allege outright racism or exhibit racist attitudes themselves if opposition arises to the Obama agenda. That is a serious charge, but it is one supported by numerous examples. For Rep. Emanuel Cleaver (D., Mo.), white presidents must be \u201cpushed a great deal more\u201d to address black unemployment than would a black president. For Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee (D., Tex.), argument over the debt ceiling is proof of racial animosity toward Barack Obama; for Rep. Barbara Lee (D., Calif.), Republicans are trying to deny blacks the vote; for Rep. Andr\u00e9 Carson (D., Ind.), the Tea Party wishes to lynch blacks and hang them from trees; for Rep. Charles Rangel (D., N.Y.), Rick Perry\u2019s job creation in Texas is \u201cone stage away from slavery,\u201d and on and on and on. Icons of popular culture \u2014 whether a Morgan Freeman (\u201cIt\u2019s a racist thing\u201d) or a Whoopi Goldberg (\u201cI\u2019m playing the damn [race] card\u201d) \u2014 routinely accuse Americans of racism for their growing unhappiness over the record of the Obama administration.<\/p>\n What can we expect in 2012? Race all the time at every venue. In 2008, there were two general themes to the blank-slate candidacy of Barack Obama: (1) America could change history by electing its first African-American president, and (2) a vote for Barack Obama was a repudiation of the then-unpopular George Bush. But four years later there is now an Obama record of dismal economic growth, huge deficits, astronomical new national debt, high unemployment, fresh class and racial divisions, and a failed reset\/outreach foreign policy that had promised breakthroughs with Iran, the Palestinians, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela, based on redefining traditional notions of friends and enemies.<\/p>\n Who would wish to run on a record like that?<\/p>\n But the alternative? In 2012, unlike 2008, there is less novelty in Barack Obama as our first black president. And George Bush is now four years into the past. For Obama, then, we are left with a demonized \u201cthem.\u201d<\/p>\n Sometimes \u201cthey\u201d are the suspect \u201c1 percent\u201d who enjoy their privileges through ill-gotten gains. Sometimes they are reactionary enemies of big government. And sometimes they are veritable racists \u2014 the sorts who stereotype minorities, who are cowards, who turn away voters from the polls, who do not like Americans who look different from them, who object to record debt largely as a way to disguise their own racial bias \u2014 and who surely need to be punished.<\/p>\n This is going to be an ugly campaign. The Obama team will revert to race unceasingly, in cry-wolf fashion, and thus cheapen the currency with every charge. In turn, the more we will hear allegations of \u201cracism,\u201d the less people will pay attention to them. And so all the more frequently will such discounted slurs have to be repeated \u2014 sort of like pushing about wheelbarrows of Depression-era inflated German marks to purchase ever fewer commodities.<\/p>\n There will be many legacies of Barack Obama. Racial divisiveness is proving the most disturbing.<\/p>\n \u00a92012 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried \u2014 as is evident in everything from politics to popular culture, from statistics to anecdotes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[120,383,271,135],"tags":[12,487,1026,321,370,371,1042,93,242],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-hd","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":830,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/campaigning-on-grievances\/","url_meta":{"origin":1067,"position":0},"title":"Campaigning on Grievances","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 17, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services In 2008, a mostly unknown Barack Obama ran for president on an inclusive agenda of \u201chope and change.\u201d That upbeat message was supposed to translate into millions of green jobs, fiscal sobriety, universal healthcare, a resetting of Bush foreign policy, and racial unity.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Campaign 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Campaign 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/campaign-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":516,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/white-on-the-brain\/","url_meta":{"origin":1067,"position":1},"title":"‘White’ on the Brain","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 17, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The election of the biracial Barack Obama was supposed to usher in a new era of racial harmony. Instead, that dream is becoming a tribally polarized nightmare \u2014 by design, and intended to assist in the reelection of Barack Obama. Consider the increasing\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1484,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-racial-mess\/","url_meta":{"origin":1067,"position":2},"title":"The New Racial Mess","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 26, 2010","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services Weren't we supposed to enter a new age of tolerance with the election of President Barack Obama? His half-black, half-white ancestry and broad support across racial lines suggested that at last Americans judged each other on the content of our characters \u2014 not\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "July 2010"","block_context":{"text":"July 2010","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2010\/july-2010\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":687,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/obamas-they-did-it-campaign\/","url_meta":{"origin":1067,"position":3},"title":"Obama’s ‘They’-Did-It Campaign","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 24, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online The next five months should be interesting \u2014 given that Barack Obama is now experiencing something entirely unique in his heretofore stellar career: widespread criticism of his performance and increasing weariness with his boilerplate and his teleprompted eloquence. Starting with his Occidental days,\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Election 2012"","block_context":{"text":"Election 2012","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/obama-administration\/election-2012\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":151,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-racial-derangement-syndrome\/","url_meta":{"origin":1067,"position":4},"title":"The New Racial Derangement Syndrome","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 27, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services There is a different sort of racialist derangement spreading in the country \u2014 and it is getting ugly. Here is actor Jamie Foxx joking recently about his new movie role: \"I kill all the white people in the movie. How great is that?\"\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Political Culture"","block_context":{"text":"Political Culture","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/american-culture\/political-culture\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":602,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-medias-racial-prison\/","url_meta":{"origin":1067,"position":5},"title":"The Media’s Racial Prison","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 31, 2012","format":false,"excerpt":"by Bruce Thornton Frontpage Magazine Two incidents last week suggest once more that our confused, hypocritical, and politicized notions of race and relations will play a huge role in the presidential election. In the first, Virginia state senator L. Louise Lucas, part of Obama\u2019s \u201cTruth Team\u201d campaigning for the president\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1067"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1067"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1067\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5853,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1067\/revisions\/5853"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1067"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1067"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1067"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}