President Obama is a black man--and, as such, has unique cause to be wary of the adjective "angry."
[...]
Even when Obama has been at his cucumber-coolest--and has earned abuse from the left and center for it--figures on the right have aggressively tried to hang the "angry black man" label on him. A June editorial in The Washington Times (entitled, bluntly enough, "Angry Man Obama") cited his "tough guy" persona and "bullying undercurrent" and tied him to Spike Lee. A year ago, Rush Limbaugh described the school-bus beating of a white student by black students as typical of "Obama's America"; in the run-up to the midterms, Glenn Beck accused the president of "inciting people." The idea that Obama is driven by fury is prevalent enough on the right that Dinesh D'Souza could take it as a given in the title of his Amazon bestseller The Roots of Obama's Rage. Idiotic though it may be, this is not a narrative the president wants to fuel.
As Ta-Nehisi Coates astutely summarizes: "Frankly, I would not bet on the consistent returns of any black man who regularly employed anger in a room full of white people."
2 comments:
Instead of Democrats beating themselves up and hinting at racism which is not the source of the problem, Democrats will still be in a rut in two years and, even if Democrats win, they will not be able to advance their agenda without undermining their ability to rule - the same problem for Obama as it was for Clinton.
Again: the problem is that there is a lack of ideas coming from our side. There is no way to convince the nation that liberal policies work in practice unless and until such policies stop dividing the working class (and every other group) into those who benefit from those policies and those who pay for them.
And, with Obama in particular, the issue is not race but the fact that he is divisive. In my view, he is the most devisive president since Nixon and maybe even worse than Nixon. That is not due to race. That is due to Obama dividing people instead of finding ways to keep people together.
Delete my first paragraph. I meant to write as follows:
If Democrats continue beating themselves up and hinting at racism which is not the source of the problem, Democrats will still be in a rut in two years and, even if Democrats win, they will not be able to advance their agenda without undermining their ability to rule - the same problem for Obama as it was for Clinton.
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