The Crime of Being President While Black
RightWatch: It's not his origins or grades that are at issue -- so
Obama can never satisfy Donald Trump and the other race-baiters
The Root
Jack White
April 30, 2011
Given all that yakkety-yak about the emergence of a new era of postracial
politics, you might have hoped that by now, even the looniest of
ultraconservatives might have figured out a way to criticize Barack Obama
without sounding like howling race-baiters. Keep hoping.
Conservative dependency on racial resentments is so deeply ingrained that
even phony members of the lunatic fringe, such as Donald Trump, can't
resist the temptation. Like junkies, they're hooked.
Trump -- who has thrown far more campaign contributions to Democrats
than to Republicans over the years -- is only pretending to be a right-wing
Republican aspirant for the presidency. The fact that he has risen to the
top of the polls among GOP voters by playing the race card reminds us that
we're still stuck in the muck.
The racial subtext of Trump's much ballyhooed investigation of Obama's
birth certificate (on which I'd wager he never actually spent a dime) was
obvious from the start. His subsequent smear of Obama's supposedly
substandard academic performance in college and at Harvard Law School is
equally low.
Trump, who boasts about his good relations with "the blacks" as he boasts
about everything else, is trying to insinuate that Obama is a product of
affirmative action -- or, to put it more bluntly, that Obama is a stupid Negro
who took the place of a better-qualified white person like himself.
In reaction, even straitlaced white newsmen like CBS's Bob Schieffer have
thrown aside their objectivity to publicly denounce the "ugly strain of
racism" in Trump's campaign.
Republicans, of course, don't have a complete monopoly on this noxious
habit. But since 1964 -- when Barry Goldwater urged Republicans to "go
hunting where the ducks are" by opposing civil rights legislation -- the GOP
has been cornering the market on race-baiting. Every successful Republican
nominee since then, with the sole exception of George W. Bush, has sailed
into the White House on a tide of racial resentment. It has become such a
habit that Republicans just can't kick it, even when their wiliest strategists,
like Karl Rove, try to persuade them to go cold turkey.
Rove's motives have more to do with pragmatism than with morality. He
knows that in an increasingly black, brown and beige America, the politics
of white resentment will soon start to pay diminishing returns.
Conservatives could get over their dependence on race-baiting if they
wanted to by taking a page out of Michael Corleone's playbook and drawing
distinctions between disagreements that are business and those that are
purely personal.
In this approach, attacks on Obama's policies and conduct in office would
be fair game, while attacks on his identity would be out of bounds. It would
require the president's foes to make a case for the policies they advocate
instead of branding him as an alien. In short, to go after him for what he
does, not what they falsely claim he is.
Trump could have chosen to go that route instead of descending into the
gutter. But he, like Nixon, Reagan and Bush the elder, chose the easy way
out. In Trump's case, that's because his goal is publicity, not a serious
debate. But for the larger conservative movement, there's the fact that
when they actually spell out the appalling policies that they stand for, much
of the public reacts in shock and horror. That is what has happened to the
conservatives' favorite budget guru, Wisconsin Rep. Paul Ryan, since he
trotted out his plan for dismantling Medicare for future recipients a few
weeks ago.
<SPAN style="BACKGROUND-COLOR: #ffff00">So even if Obama releases his college transcripts and they show that he
got straight As, Trump will not be satisfied. He'll soon be demanding to know
what books Obama checked out of the library, or what movies he watches
on Netflix, or his golf scores, or whether he sleeps in the nude. The crime
Trump is charging Obama with is BPWB -- being president while black.</span>
http://www.theroot.com/views/being-president-while-black?page=0,1
A man who wants to be a serious candidate would not curse during speeches, like Trump did the other day.
