One of the most remarkable aspects of the reaction to the Ferguson, Missouri controversy is the manner in which President Obama has become a marginal figure in the discussion about race in America. To say this is not to discount the fact that the president’s various statements on the case—including his entirely appropriate response to the grand jury’s decision not to indict Officer Darren Wilson for shooting Michael Brown and his condemnations of the violent riots that ensued—have been given wide notice. But one of the most significant elements of this debate is the one that few are discussing: how is it that the man who was elected president in no small measure to heal the country’s historic racial divide has not only failed to advance that cause but has found himself sidelined by race baiters. As with so much else that has happened in this failed presidency, Obama’s inability to act decisively or courageously caused him to miss opportunities to help a nation that looked to him for leadership.
To recall Barack Obama’s rise to prominence and then to the presidency is to think of a figure who attempted to both embody the progress the country had made in resolving its historic racial issues and to rise above the issue. Both his 2004 Democratic National Convention speech and his 2008 Philadelphia speech about race were, despite the anodyne nature of their texts, considered watershed events because of the president’s ability to articulate the nation’s aspirations for both post-partisan and post-racial healing.
But once in the presidency, Obama not only embarked on a rabidly ideological agenda that further divided an already polarized country but also used his bully pulpit to sermonize on race in ways that only made things worse. His dubious extra-legal intervention in the controversy over Harvard Professor Henry Louis Gates showed how unsure his instincts were on the one topic that most Americans would have looked to him for guidance. Instead of challenging both blacks and whites to acknowledge past problems while moving forward in productive ways, his periodic return to the issue has made him more the kibitzer-in-chief on race rather than a healer. Though his Ferguson comments this year have shown him to be chastened by both the Gates fiasco and his similarly maladroit intervention in the Trayvon Martin killing, the man with the magic rhetorical touch has found himself curiously unable to summon his voice in a manner that would bring the country together rather than merely playing to his party’s base.
Far worse than that, the Obama White House and the Democratic Party spent most of the last six years becoming heavily invested in the proposition that all opposition to the president and his agenda was primarily rooted in race. That this was preposterous was always clear. As Bill and Hillary Clinton could have told him, attempting to impose government control on a sixth of the American economy was bound to inspire spirited opposition, but the Obama crowd and their media cheerleaders weren’t content with merely answering his critics. They had to demonize them all as racists turning every discussion of ObamaCare into a proxy for a race battle that should have been treated as definitively over once the country elected an African-American president.
Indeed, the notion that criticism of Obama was thinly veiled racism became a staple of American politics in the last few years. Though it was transparently disingenuous, it was nevertheless effective, both in terms of the effort to marginalize conservative opposition to Obama’s big-government agenda as well as in reminding Americans that they needed to support the president in order to maintain their standing as decent, non-racist citizens.
That may have helped reelect the president but I think liberals and Democrats who have either employed this despicable talking point or tolerated it as a necessary evil in order to hold onto the White House have underestimated how much this effort has helped poison the well of American society.
Instead of being the man who would, as he promised, lead us into a new chapter of history in which race would not be used as an excuse to further divide the country, Obama actually became the vehicle for a meme that allowed the left to use it as an all-purpose political weapon regardless of the cost to national harmony.
Thus, it is little surprise that not only has the president made no impact on issues where blacks and whites view the same events differently, he now finds himself caught between an electorate that is rightly skeptical of anything he and his supporters say on race and race hucksters who are unsatisfied with his attempt to chart a middle course. Michael Eric Dyson wrote yesterday in the New York Times that Obama is a guilty of a “treacherous” balancing act for not seeking to lead Americans to the barricades on behalf of the dubious notion that white America is to blame for the death of Michael Brown rather than his own misbehavior. This is ironic, but entirely predictable since the president’s characteristic indecision has gotten him into trouble here as in every other problem he has faced.
By spending so much of his presidency posing as a victim, Obama helped create a reality in which most blacks believe the country is less free of bias than it was when he was elected. Instead of a healer, Obama has become a passenger in a bus driven by men like Dyson or White House friend Al Sharpton. That is a shame for a presidency that began with such promise. But it is an even bigger tragedy for a country that could well have used Obama’s leadership on race but instead received cynical exploitations of the issue that have made it harder than ever to bring Americans together on race.