Understandably, there was considerable outrage when the sermon quotes from a Chicago church bled into open political discourse on the national stage.
But I have to tell you I had a slightly different view of it all. I looked around at all my fellow political reporters—overwhelmingly white, Ivy League educated, and from big cities in the North—and I just had one question. My goodness, have any of you ever been to a black church?
Black churches in the South—especially in the rural South where I grew up—are pretty genial affairs. But there is still plenty of fire and brimstone and when the preacher gets rolling, he tends to lay it on the line. If you are a white guy sitting in a pew—no matter how joyously you were welcomed at the start of church—you will likely find yourself squirming a little at some of the high points of the sermon.
When I was in Detroit as a reporter for the Detroit News, I worked Sundays. In my search for stories, I logged as much time as I could going to the big churches. Never have I been more welcomed than at those big black churches. But when the preacher got to listing all the injustices in this broken world, he never flinched from putting a fine point on things. It was always the same villain: “the man.” And he was always the same color: white.
After the sermon, everybody—1,500 black congregants and this one white guy—all went back to getting along just fine and hugging and shaking hands and slapping backs. The preacher had his say. Everybody hollered back in approval. And then we all got back to getting along. In all of its awkwardness, it is kind of how Americans have always successfully moved along on our journey to a more perfect union.
Ironically, I thought one of the wisest things about the nature of black churches was something Jeremiah Wright himself said: “Barack Obama’s a politician. I’m a pastor. We speak to two different audiences.”
Still, it was pretty disgusting stuff that Barack Obama’s personal preacher had been spouting for a long time. Even more so since it had all spilled into the political arena. Needless to say, if a white politician’s preacher had made similar comments about blacks or Jews or the conspiracy theories, all hell would have broken loose and the politician would most likely have been drummed from public life. Can you imagine, for instance, if Donald Trump’s personal preacher of thirty years had said such racially incendiary things?
The Obama campaign had worked so hard to craft this positive image of Obama as unthreatening and hopeful and welcoming. He, of course, denounced the comments of his preacher. But then he did something that surprised everyone. The campaign hastily gathered those of us traveling with the press into a small auditorium across from Independence Hall in Philadelphia, the nearly sacred ground known as “the Birthplace of the Nation,” where the Declaration of Independence was adopted on July 4, 1776.
In a speech he titled “A More Perfect Union,” Obama began by quoting the preamble to the U.S. Constitution. He once again denounced many of Wright’s quoted statements. But he also admitted that, indeed, he was well aware that his longtime preacher had delivered the fiery political diatribes, even racially scorched ones, that were the most controversial. More brazenly, Obama also refused to condemn the man himself and told us bluntly:
“I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother—a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.
“These people are a part of me,” Obama said. “And they are a part of America, this country that I love.”
It was, for sure, a brave speech. Not your usual political bromides. I admired it immensely. The speech, I thought, revealed a man who understood all the worrisome complexities of race and our troubled history and yet remained singularly focused on pressing forward toward “a more perfect union.”
I am a white guy who grew up in the rural South. I have always read about families “torn apart” during the Civil War. That was not my family. Every drop of blood that my family shed during that awful conflict fell in the service of the Confederacy. There were no divisions in my family. The stories of their heroism in battle were passed down to all their descendants and remain cherished today.
I feel no need to apologize for my forebears. Nor am I so arrogant as to second-guess their wisdom in deciding to fight for their state of Virginia instead of the Union.
I was also raised by very good parents and grandparents who taught us that all people are equal in God’s eyes, no matter what. And no matter their skin color or anything else, all people better damned be equal in our little eyes. If we ever mistreated anyone for any reason whatsoever, there would be hell to pay. They, too, yearned for “a more perfect union” and bequeathed to us that same profound desire.
But still. A white guy from the South. A son of Virginia, the very capstone of the Confederacy. It can be hard to live like that in a world where everything is a bumper sticker and history gets emotionalized and perverted into some crazy social justice campaign. Your only hope is that somebody—especially those who lead us—understands all the strange complexities of race and our troubled history, yet remains singularly focused on pressing forward toward “a more perfect union.” In this context, those who would use racism to divide us deserve a special place in hell.
When I left Independence Hall that day, I was convinced Barack Obama was a truly rare, honest politician with integrity who was capable of leading this great country with malice toward none and charity for all.
Boy, would I—and so many Americans—be profoundly disappointed.
The wisdom I thought I saw that day in Philadelphia turned out to be cheap glitter. The decency I detected turned out to be a cold shiv in the back. His depth of understanding was as shallow as it was insulting. He would turn out to be nothing more than another craven politician blowing with the wind.
The first clue came a few months later just as he was finally clinching the Democrat nomination. Suddenly all his great principle that had required him to stand with his racist preacher evaporated. He held a press conference in South Dakota to announce that he was ditching Jeremiah Wright and quitting his longtime church.
A cynical person might question the timing.
Did Barack Obama stick with his nasty old black preacher while he was still wooing black voters in the Democrat primary? Did he ditch the black preacher once he began to turn his attention to the general election, where the fiery preacher would be less politically beneficial—perhaps even a liability?
I can’t be certain, but it sure seemed like page one out of the playbook the Clintons and the Democrat Party have used for decades. And we would not have to wait for Barack Obama to become president to see the race card played again.
A few months later, in August, Republican nominee John McCain aired an ad attacking Barack Obama’s celebrity status among the dewy-eyed media. Though the ad was considered “innocuous” by some for slamming Obama as “famous for being famous; he’s more flash than substance,” others were ready and waiting to pounce, with race card in hand.
The New York Times, always eager to do Obama’s dirty work, issued an editorial charging the McCain campaign of running a “racially-tinged attack.” Why? Because the ad compared Barack Obama—a black man—to Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, two white women.
You cannot make this stuff up. But these are the people who have ordained themselves the arbiters of all that is racist in America today. The New York Times sparked a brush fire. An online blogger popular on the left accused McCain of running “crypto-racist ads.” Another TV wag shilling for the Obama campaign at the time said McCain’s ad was “deliberately and deceptively racist.”
Another Obama toady named Josh Marshall wrote on the Internet that the McCain campaign was pushing “the caricature of Obama as an uppity young black ma
n whose presumptuousness is displayed not only in taking on airs above his station but also in a taste for young white women.”
What? I am not sure which is worse: Marshall’s obsession with finding racism where it does not exist or his bizarre fantasizing about Barack Obama and his “taste for young white women.” Either way, he probably should stick to lurking around his favorite peep houses instead of attempting political commentary—even if it is only on the Internet.
The occasion of Obama’s election as America’s first actual black president triggered a media orgy of navel-gazing introspection about matters of race in this country nearly 150 years after the Civil War. Most of it was ridiculous and over-the-top. For the Great White Media, Obama really had become the messiah.
And speaking of Obama as the messiah, I was reminded of my travels with the Obama campaign in 2008, when various fellow travelers regularly referred to the 757 that ferried us around the country as “Messiah One.”
Who needs the U.S. Air Force when you are a deity?
As meteoric as Obama’s political rise was, he was remarkably bad at retail politics. He exuded a certain disdain for other people and never seemed to particularly enjoy being around them. For a politician, he was an odd duck.
Returning from his world tour aimed at burnishing his nonexistent foreign policy record, I pestered the campaign to grant me an interview with him. Eventually, they did, and somewhere over the Atlantic between Berlin and the United States, I was ushered through the Secret Service section to the front of the plane, where Obama’s private cabin was.
I do not recall much of the interview and I don’t think I got anything particularly earth-shattering out of it.
But I was struck by how unpleasant and unmannerly Obama was. He and Robert Gibbs were seated across from each other at a table when I entered the room. Neither budged.
“Okay,” I thought. “So I will stand here.”
When I offered my hand to shake, Obama paused, as if he was not going to shake my hand. After a few beats too long, he finally lifted his hand—still seated, of course—and gave me a limp, dead-fish handshake without even looking in my eyes.
Now, I couldn’t care less, of course. But I could not help but register Obama’s small, petulant little gesture. Later, after I got kicked off the campaign plane, I was hardly surprised by the thin-skinned sensitivity.
Still, the historic milestone of his election was certainly cause for celebration. And it marked a pretty good point to stop and reflect on our rough history and how we got to that moment—even for those of us who were not particularly enthusiastic about Obama’s politics.
Slavery, racist Jim Crow laws, and segregation had all passed away long before. We survived the civil rights movement. It was a mighty struggle but, thankfully, we got there together. Even more remarkable were the waves and waves of changes in people’s personal attitudes over the generations. I am not talking about petty prejudices that inform—rightly or wrongly—every living, thinking human being on the planet. I am talking about actual, ugly, back-of-the-bus racism.
Well before America elected her first black president, racism had been hounded to the farthest fringes of American society. Anyone in a position of power who ever demonstrated racist prejudices would not remain in power long. Think about it. What is the worst thing that can be said about anybody today? What is the one thing that will end your political career in an instant? Destroy you in Hollywood overnight? Cause you to lose your job tomorrow? Being labeled a racist. That is a testament to the soaring success of people like Martin Luther King and so many others.
By the time Barack Obama arrived on the political scene, America had never been more unified in her rejection of racism.
Of course, this success does not come without problems. When devious actors in the media or politics redefine “racism” to mean whatever they want it to mean, they can then use that powerful weapon to destroy any enemy they pick. So toxic is the mere notion of being tarred as a racist that many good people—myself not included, obviously—go to great lengths to avoid even discussing race, in public or in private. The risk is just too great that one stupid comment or unintentional slip-up could ruin you.
This is certainly not a healthy way for a big, diverse, and rowdy family of 325 million to get along in any honest way.
Anyone in America hoping for a healing respite from the racial demagoguery of politics, once President Obama got elected, would soon be disappointed. It would not take Obama long to put away his sunny rhetoric about hope, his fake Greek columns and pablum about racial unity, once he was inaugurated.
Early in his first term, Obama went on a global apology tour, visiting places like the Middle East to apologize for America. It was ironic that he was in a place riven by intractable racial and religious discord, yet he was apologizing for a great nation built upon principled ideals of liberty and dedicated to all people being equal, regardless of race or religion. He told an audience in Cairo that it was “part of my responsibility as president of the United States to fight against negative stereotypes of Islam wherever they appear.” This was the tone Obama set.
Back home, things were no better. The month after Obama’s apology tour, police in Cambridge, Massachusetts, arrested a man who was breaking into a home after neighbors called 9-1-1. It turned out the subject who got arrested was a black Harvard professor, Henry Gates Jr. He was breaking into his own home after the front door got jammed shut. And neighbors, suspecting someone was breaking into Gates’s home, called police.
Inexplicably, America’s first black president, only months into his first term, decided to jump into the middle of the controversy—a hot mess already being spun by the media as racially motivated.
“I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that,” Obama told reporters, before launching into the whole fiasco displaying all of his ignorance and accusing the cop of being a racist.
“I think it’s fair to say, number one: any of us would be pretty angry. Number two: the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home. And number three: I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately.”
As Obama’s term progressed, his fixation with race became more evident and more politically divisive. Over at the Department of Justice, he installed Eric Holder, who later boasted that he operated as the president’s “wing man,” as opposed to being an independent attorney general for the United States. In many ways, Holder was the tip of the sword for President Obama’s racializing political agenda.
One of Holder’s first moves as AG was to quash a major voter intimidation case that career prosecutors had put together against members of the so-called New Black Panther Party. In this case, two members of the New Black Panther Party—one of whom was a certified poll worker—stood guard outside a polling station. One was carrying a billy stick and both were hurling racial epithets at white voters.
Much of this was caught on video and the case was fairly clear-cut. Democrats have long claimed to be the party willing to fight tooth and nail against voter suppression. But Holder and Obama killed the case. Apparently they were concerned about the suppression of certain voters, but not others—if you know what I mean. The indefensible decision sent a startling message to career staff inside the Department of Justice—as well as the country as a whole. At Justice, Holder and Obama aimed to keep their thumbs on the scale.
Scrapping the case against the New Black Panthers was only the beginning of an eight-year campaign by Holder and the Obama administration to position the Department of Justice against the very men and women helping enforce the laws: cops. This was especially true when anything came up with cops involving race. As with the Cambridge police officer, it was always the cops who were said to be at fault.
The Justice Department also took
sides against Immigration and Customs Enforcement at a time when Democrats were desperate to curry political favor with Hispanic voters. As Democrat political machines in big cities around the country declared themselves “sanctuaries” for illegal aliens to hide from federal immigration authorities, Holder had their back.
To be fair, it wasn’t just in matters of racial politics that Obama’s Justice Department sought to tip the scales. Holder also refused to prosecute IRS officials for targeting political enemies. He became the first attorney general in history to be held in contempt of Congress for his strenuous efforts to cover up numerous scandals inside the Department of Justice.
Even after Holder left, the department would continue to be weaponized by refusing to prosecute Hillary Clinton for her email scandal and, we would later learn, launching a major spying operation into a political opponent’s campaign at the height of a presidential campaign.
Back at the White House, President Obama kept the fires of racial injustice stoked. Among the more frequent guests to the White House was none other than Al Sharpton, perhaps the most shameless race hustler in America. He is breathlessly celebrated in the media despite his lifelong efforts at sowing racial division and his key role in the heinous case of Tawana Brawley’s rape hoax allegations against four white men, including a prosecutor and two cops.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, “post-racial” America after Obama is pretty ugly. That is because it is anything but “post-racial.” In fact, it is far more racial and divided than at any time in a generation. Widespread polling revealed a steep decline in racial harmony during Obama’s presidency.
“Our latest poll suggests that far from healing America’s racial wounds, the first black president has reopened them,” Investor’s Business Daily reported in 2014. “Obama the uniter is actually the great divider.”
By a three-to-one margin, Americans said race relations deteriorated under Obama, according to the poll. Nearly one in four said relations have gotten “much worse.” Who could have possibly imagined such a development with Al Sharpton on the scene?
Still Winning : Our Last Hope to Be Great Again (9781546085287) Page 7