TuTu Monroe
A Realist
Gotta admit, there's a lot of truth to what he says.
Friday, July 31, 2009
There Is a Pattern Here . . . [Victor Davis Hanson] The Corner
Perhaps the beer summit will stop the president's slide in the polls, but I am not so sure, since the public is beginning to catch on that there is a pattern here. On matters racial, the public thought that in Obama they were getting an updated version of Martin Luther King gravitas, but they are learning it may be a more eloquent form of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton bathos.
When Obama was first asked about the Gates incident — and we know he was prepped beforehand about the question — he did not suggest a beer summit, but instead used the adverb "stupidly" to describe the police action and then went into a disquisition on racial profiling as part of his preferred "teachable moment."
The beer thing came only afterwards, when the polls went south; had they gone north, then no beer summit. Ditto with Reverend Wright. Obama's natural instinct was to praise the Right Reverend, and he did so in his infamous grandmother-profiling speech. The later correction and disavowal came not immediately after Reverend Wright's National Press Club outburst, but only when polls suggested that he was beginning really to hurt Obama. Ditto again the corrections to Michelle Obama's "not previously proud of the United States" asides.
The point here is that the public is starting to sense two things: One, Obama's first impulse when speaking out on race is his most genuine and most disturbing; and two, his statesmanlike disavowals always come not out of genuine embarrassment over his initial remark (such as praising the racist Wright), but out of real concern that he is going to be hurt politically without such a "correction" — an awareness that in turn seems to engender only more anger, and leads to the next incident in the series.
By now, the public senses that the beer thing was simply insincere damage control (was gaffe-prone Joe Biden's presence a gambit to provide "balance" at the table?) and that it will be followed by other racially teachable moments — but only if the polls dictate that Obama's initial and more authentic editorializing continues to turn too many people off.
At some point, even the media is going to start tallying up these teachable moments, like "typical white person" and the Pennsylvania stereotyping quip, and see that the post-racial president is one or two such "gaffes" away from being the most racially polarizing figure in recent memory, as a majority of African-Americans seems to respond with approval to his racial-identity politicking that so terribly disturbs most others.
The Corner
Friday, July 31, 2009
There Is a Pattern Here . . . [Victor Davis Hanson] The Corner
Perhaps the beer summit will stop the president's slide in the polls, but I am not so sure, since the public is beginning to catch on that there is a pattern here. On matters racial, the public thought that in Obama they were getting an updated version of Martin Luther King gravitas, but they are learning it may be a more eloquent form of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton bathos.
When Obama was first asked about the Gates incident — and we know he was prepped beforehand about the question — he did not suggest a beer summit, but instead used the adverb "stupidly" to describe the police action and then went into a disquisition on racial profiling as part of his preferred "teachable moment."
The beer thing came only afterwards, when the polls went south; had they gone north, then no beer summit. Ditto with Reverend Wright. Obama's natural instinct was to praise the Right Reverend, and he did so in his infamous grandmother-profiling speech. The later correction and disavowal came not immediately after Reverend Wright's National Press Club outburst, but only when polls suggested that he was beginning really to hurt Obama. Ditto again the corrections to Michelle Obama's "not previously proud of the United States" asides.
The point here is that the public is starting to sense two things: One, Obama's first impulse when speaking out on race is his most genuine and most disturbing; and two, his statesmanlike disavowals always come not out of genuine embarrassment over his initial remark (such as praising the racist Wright), but out of real concern that he is going to be hurt politically without such a "correction" — an awareness that in turn seems to engender only more anger, and leads to the next incident in the series.
By now, the public senses that the beer thing was simply insincere damage control (was gaffe-prone Joe Biden's presence a gambit to provide "balance" at the table?) and that it will be followed by other racially teachable moments — but only if the polls dictate that Obama's initial and more authentic editorializing continues to turn too many people off.
At some point, even the media is going to start tallying up these teachable moments, like "typical white person" and the Pennsylvania stereotyping quip, and see that the post-racial president is one or two such "gaffes" away from being the most racially polarizing figure in recent memory, as a majority of African-Americans seems to respond with approval to his racial-identity politicking that so terribly disturbs most others.
The Corner
Last edited: