As a recent reader of most everything VDH in this medium, I am a bit surprised to hear you judge Obama as many would want him to be judged. I usually look to you to give me a deeper insight into the historical precedents for things we observe on the contemporary scene. Alas in your latest pronouncement on the failure of Obama, you have failed to even investigate the history of the man's church. It thus seems to me that you are thus suggesting Obama is a phenomenon existing outside of history, a freak of nature with no deep connections to anything but the present and his own ambition. You default.
I have heard many arguments denigrating him as an empty suit. He's more than that but we can all see he is prone to semiotic slickness. At bottom, it's clear from his record that he is firmly in the MoveOn Left, or as I've written, Barbara Boxer in a black man suit. If indeed Obama is something of a fraud, we should keep in mind that nobody can cheat an honest man. The flimflammer succeeds because he promises something that sounds too good to be true, and his pigeons buy into that confidence because they want that thing to be true. But no honest and thoughtful voter should assess the qualities of that new black man suit and judge that Obama's campaign is a referendum on American race relations. Similarly, no honest and thoughtful critic should upbraid him on the basis of race relations. The office of the President of the United States has no such Constitutional responsibility - that is on us as individuals to overcome the eternal threat that tribalism poses to liberty.
I've never heard the phrase 'post-racial' so much in my life until Obama proved himself to be something other than that. But post-racial is the fantasy of people who look towards messianic figures to do their moral thinking for them, to give them a yellow brick road to paradise, to be their Oz and demiurge of utopian post-racial dreams. Nobody has ever been that and nobody ever will be. We each have to recognize our own brains, heart and courage to do so, then we will find our way home.
Instead we have let guilt by association lead us to a character assassination that demonstrates the shallowness of those false expectations. People who decried multiculturalism two weeks ago are now straining to tell us how this gaffe has permanently alienated white male working class voters. There's racial realism for you. The absolute rejection of any comparison between a white grandmother and a black minister shows how phony certain age, gender and colorblind protestations have been.
For Americans who truly understand and support the premises and promises of equality, no such demographic prompting is necessary. We should see a policy and a candidacy for what it is, not for what identity suit it wears. And while the common wisdom now says that Obama harbors racists much in the way that Saddam harbored terrorists the "who knew what and when" boilerplate goes on - well one degree to Wright. But the investigation goes nowhere to the substance of the Christian faith of Obama and dares not ask why someone who was destined to be Muslim became Christian instead or exactly what kind of Christian he is. The Christian commonality evidently was not enough, and so the politics and identity politics of difference prevailed. Those investigators reveal that they actually believed that a good racial reconciliation was indeed too good to be true, for certainly this black man should not be judged according to the strength of his character to resist and reject racism. Not that anyone besides the McCain campaign has been chartiable on this particular debacle, but I would consider it appropriate to assume that the millions of Obama supporters had already accepted the premise that he was a decent enough man who raised no probable cause to suggest he was a racist or race hustler. Indeed how many of us did not really have some racial burden of proof for the man? How many of us truly accept and support the premises and promises of equality? Where has the benefit of that doubt gone? Now what becomes the burden of proof? I think it has now descended to the Don Imus standard. Offensive rhetoric is as far as investigations go, not to religious or philosophical principles. Rapper Kanye West famously said 'George Bush doesn't care about black people.' Now we know by that same standard 'Barack Obama doesn't care about white people', and to hell with deeper analysis.
Obama in his chastened state has made what some are calling the most honest assessment of race relations of any major candidate. That's not a very high standard either. But he did get one thing right, his campaign is not going to make the difference of how we Americans perceive each other. Indeed we are the people that we need to be, and we should stop waiting for someone else to tell us so. Isn't it interesting what we have shown ourselves to be with Obama as, finally and tragically perhaps, the American Rorschach test on race? I think we have been less than honest and have cheated ourselves.
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