The Race Card

I’m surprised I haven’t written on this yet.  It seems like such an obvious topic, and it is very much relevant whenever talking about Barack Obama:  How does race figure in the race?  How does race figure in everything he does?

Answer:  It figures in everything.  Race is something that Obama has to shoulder in his presidency which no other President has ever had to.  Obama does a pretty graceful job at navigating this, basically ignoring most racial issues and refusing to stoke too many fires – with the exception of that thing with the officer, the professor, and the beers at the White House, which was clumsily handled at best.

Frankly, Obama’s best quality is his universality, and the fact that whites feel comfortable about him as do blacks.  And this starts getting into uncomfortable ground:  during the 2008 election, you’ll remember Jesse Jackson saying he wasn’t “black enough,” and, frankly, this is probably the reason we elected him.  I don’t mean this to be racist, but the undeniable truth is that if Obama talked and acted a little more “black,” to say it really crudely, he probably wouldn’t have appealed to as wide a swathe of the American public.

Now the question, really, is how much of a role race will play in the 2012 election.  And it’s a hard question to answer.  I think less so.  The lines are more clearly drawn now, and I think Obama has lost a lot of the messianic aura that made the masses flock to him in 2008, and people are starting to see him as human, which is probably a good thing.  But here’s how I think it will play on both sides:

First off, in 2012, racism will play a major part in the opposition.  It is both ignorant and dismissive to say that the Tea Party is a racist movement – it’s not racist to oppose Obama’s policies – but it’s equally ignorant and dismissive to say it plays no role.  There’s a reason the vast majority of the Tea Party is white, and there’s a reason racial slurs were shouted at John Lewis during the health care fiasco.  It DOES play a part.  There were historically Democratic poor regions of Appalachia that voted with the Republicans for the first time ever in 2008, and there’s plenty of reason to suspect it had, in large part, to do with his race.

And Obama has a NUMBER of races working against him.  I mean, my god, look at his name:  Barack Hussein Obama.  An African/Arabic First Name, an Arabic Middle Name (cough cough) and a last name that rhymes with Osama.  Dear God.  No wonder the ignorant masses think he’s Muslim.  And here’s where Obama has to shoot himself in the foot:  in order to appeal to the middle, he has to distance himself from his black and Muslim heritage (he DOES have Muslim heritage, though he’s not a Muslim), which alienates his black and Muslim constituency, blocs which overwhelmingly supported him.

He has to distance himself so much from the issue of race that there’s a decent chance the first black President actually won’t get that much done with race relations aside from getting elected.  Which is a bummer.  So really, Obama does a lot of what he does IN SPITE of his race.

The race card seems to work against Obama, because it’s becoming clear that racism is alive and well in America today.  The idea that he’s less American because of his immigrant heritage and his name is, frankly, an idiotic one (kick yourself out, you’re an immigrant too), and the fact that it’s still being pressed a year into his presidency is despicable.

Hopefully, one of two things will happen:

1) The Republican Candidate will have the class to decry any attacks on Obama’s race or heritage, and, like Obama did in ‘08 and will in ‘12, simply accepts his patriotism as a given.

2) If it is overtly used, it backfires.  There are plenty of moderates, conservatives, and libertarians who aren’t at all racist, who simply have conservative beliefs, and I think they’ll ultimately be turned off by this rhetoric and won’t support it.  When politicians think they have to pander to the lunatic fringe – well, that’s when they lose elections.

Likewise, the Democrats can’t dismiss every criticism of Obama as racism.  It’s not.  And that’ll backfire on them too.