Ah, out of the mouths of babes — and, sometimes, 9-year-olds.
Terrence Scott is a fourth-grader who lives in New Orleans. He recently got his 15 minutes of fame — actually, it was a lot closer to 15 seconds — when he asked President Obama a “tough” question during the chief executive’s visit to the Crescent City.
“Why people hate you?” Terrence asked. “They supposed to love you, and God is love.”
In my never-ending quest to prove that, while I was born at night, it wasn’t last night, I have to ‘fess up that the kid sounded like a plant. But even if he was, Obama gave a fairly good answer.
“Well now, first of all, I did get elected president, so not everybody hates me,” Obama told Terrence. “If you were watching TV lately, it seems like everybody’s just getting mad all the time. I think you’ve got to take it with a grain of salt.”
Obama’s absolutely right: He DID get elected president. So a much better, and more probing, question would have been this one: What kind of an electorate puts a man with your weak presidential qualifications in the White House?
Plants don’t ask such questions, especially 9-year-old plants. Obama did what he always does and what he does best; he took the high road in his public speaking, unlike the low road he takes when making presidential appointments.
Showing that he’s not totally unaware of the system of checks and balances in a constitutional republic, Obama told Terrence that when you’re a chief executive, “the other party pokes you a little bit to keep you on your toes.” And the so-called hatred from some people, Obama informed Terrence, comes with the job.
As I said, not a bad answer, but not the most informative one either. Here’s what Obama should have told young Terrence Scott.
“Hatred of me is all part of a very bad political climate these days, and I’m sorry to say that my party has contributed to it. So has the race of people with whom I identify, although technically I’m biracial.
“You were only 5 when Hurricane Katrina ripped through New Orleans and other parts of the Gulf Coast, Terrence, so you may not remember what rapper Kanye West said about then-President Bush. West said that ‘George Bush doesn’t care about black people.’ That was a lie. But then again, I recently had to call West a jackass for his conduct at MTV’s Video Music Awards. It appears he was a jackass back in 2005.
“West’s lie soon morphed into another one: ‘George Bush doesn’t like black people.’ Many black people hated Bush with the same fervor — if not more — than people hate me. Many whites who hold political views similar to mine hated him too. So this ‘hating the president’ business didn’t start when I took office. The nasty political climate didn’t start when I took office, either.”
If Obama needed concrete examples to give Terrence, he’d have needed to look no further than the state that borders his new city of residence: Maryland. It’s run by Democrats, bluer than Papa Smurf and darned near bluer than Massachusetts. And Democratic leaders there have more than contributed to the climate of hatred.
Item: Republican Ellen Sauerbrey ran for governor of Maryland in 1998. Democrats accused her of being a racist. Only three Democrats in the entire state — former state Sen. Clarence Mitchell III, former Baltimore Mayor Kurt Schmoke and former Prince George’s County Executive Wayne Curry — spoke up and called this slander the lie that it was.
Item: Mike Miller, the president of the Maryland Senate, called former Lt. Gov. Michael Steele, the first black Marylander to hold that office, an “Uncle Tom.” And we all know that the term “Uncle Tom” is nothing but the N word for liberals.
Item: The late Howard “Pete” Rawlings, a black Baltimore member of Maryland’s House of Delegates, played the race card against a white liberal incumbent senator named Barbara Hoffman. The ploy worked. And Hoffman is a Democrat.
To his credit, Obama gave Terrence a decent answer. To the president’s discredit, he had a chance to condemn the unreasoning hatred his predecessor was subjected to and elected to pass.
Examiner Columnist Gregory Kane is a Pulitzer-nominated news and opinion journalist who has covered people and politics from Baltimore to the Sudan.
