Noemie Emery: Now the Left plays the race card for Obama
By: Noemie Emery
Examiner Columnist
August 12, 2009
America's golden age of race relations, which began when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 with a seven-point lead over Republican Sen. John McCain, came to a tragic end in July 2009.
The end came, according to the Left, when the country that had elected him awoke from its state of denial or stupor and realized, to its unrelieved horror, that the man it had chosen was black. How else to explain what occurred when his poll numbers slipped from astronomical to just about 50 percent, his approval ratings for his pet projects fell even further, and his golden-tongued eloquence failed to persuade?
To the saner among us, these developments were because of one of three things, or perhaps all three together: 1) the inevitable end of the honeymoon period; 2) that fact that hopes for him were so overblown that the souffle was bound to sink sometime; and 3) that the large bloc of people seduced by his temperate manner came to believe there was nothing temperate at all about his agenda, which was far more extreme than they cared to accept.
On the Left, however, it seems all this is a facade, and these issues a channel through which racial fears are diverted. "They're probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing ... than to who he is," as New York Times columnist Paul Krugman assures us. John Dingell compares health care protesters with KKK members; Atlanta Journal editorial page editor Cynthia Tucker says on MSNBC that 45 to 65 percent of protesters are racists, while Sen. Dick Durbin, D-Ill., informs us that "birthers and the health care protesters are one and the same."
If protesters and birthers are racists together, this goes a long way toward explaining why liberals never go in for weird or ugly behaviors themselves. They never insist that mothers didn't give birth to their children, never nurse plans to secede from the Union, never compare conservatives with demonic mass murderers, never obsess that Diebold voting machines have been rigged to steal millions of votes from their party, never hang people in effigy (Sarah Palin, Halloween, 2008), never insist that elected officials lie to start wars for no reason, never know in advance of plots to attack and to damage their country, and just let them happen, for fun.
Krugman says the American Right is consumed by "racial anxiety," and, as the American Prospect assures us, "the mainstream Right's 'Americanism' ... implicitly rejects people who aren't white." So that's why the Right raised such unholy hell when George W. Bush made Colin Powell and Condi Rice secretaries of state in succession, and tried to put Janice Rogers Brown and Miguel Estrada on the fast track to Supreme Court nominations, and why GOPers made Michael Steele their new party chairman, and why some of them begged Powell to please run for president in 1996 on their ticket, and encouraged brief Condi for President boomlets in 2006!
But Obama's deep slide isn't the work of these terrible bigots, who were for McCain anyhow. It's the fault of the wide swath of swing voters, independents, soft Republicans and more centrist Democrats, who boosted him in the summer, swung to McCain in the first weeks of September, and swung back to the rookie when the stock market crashed.
They voted for him in some cases because he is black and have no problems with that part of the package. It's the far Left-wing part, the spending and deficits, to which they object. Polls show that Obama himself is far more popular than the things he's been doing, and that if he'd only gone with a somewhat more moderate program, he'd still be just fine.
So the Left is left with the problem of trying to explain how the enlightened and race-neutral country of last November became the tragically race-obsessed nation of today. One story is that the November enlightenment was a lie and faade that could hold up only so long before cracking; the other is that millions of voters thought Obama had a really great sun tan, and realized only last month that the color is permanent.
Sadly, these two are their only real options. And neither one of these turkeys will fly.
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