Obama's Legacy

I remember the day that President Obama was sworn into office.  I was doing a "Realtor's Open" - sitting in the kitchen of a client, watching the event on television.  Although I knew that a great deal of what the president believed would be good for the nation I did not, I still had some hope.  I hoped that having a (real) first black president would help to end views that there was a ceiling on what any black person could achieve.  I hoped that the lofty goals of working together and of uniting the nation would come to be true.

If only.

Unfortunately, as we know know, way too often this president crafts a speech that sounds like a billion bucks with its passionate outlook and smooth-as-silk delivery.  The reality, however, is not even close.

And racial unity?  Heh heh heh.  Let Victor Davis Hanson explain.

Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried — 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.

In a recent speech before a Latino audience, President Obama, in blasting congressional Republicans, recalled that he had run for office because “America 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.” The obvious conclusion from his increasingly frequent “look like” 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 “look like.”

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 New York Times reporter. She suggested that the book’s criticism was unfair because “That’s been an image that people have tried to paint of me since, you know, the day Barack announced, that I’m some angry black woman.”

Oddly, the first lady did not cite anyone who, in fact, had tried to stereotype her as an “angry black woman.” To be sure, “people” have characterized her as “angry,” given her prominent role in the 2008 campaign, during which she repeatedly found herself in dramas of her own rhetorical making (saying Americans were “just downright mean”; 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 “black” or a “woman.”

Quite sadly, Hanson's last statement is surely proving to be true:

There will be many legacies of Barack Obama. Racial divisiveness is proving the most disturbing.