Divider-in-Chief (26 page)

The Cambridge incident established a pattern that Obama and the left have followed at certain times throughout his presidency. They have been willing to thrust race into the forefront of political and social controversies. They've alleged racism without sufficient knowledge of the facts and sometimes in contradiction with the clear facts.

“If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon.”
¹⁰

Those were Barack Obama's words when asked by a reporter to comment on Trayvon Martin, a black 17-year-old, who was shot dead in February 2012. He was killed by 28-year-old George Zimmerman, a community watchman, in Sanford, Florida. Zimmerman was not initially arrested or
charged, and because his father is white and his mother is Hispanic, the growing controversy over the case quickly became racially supercharged.

A few days after the incident began to make headlines, Obama weighed in, making the “If I had a son . . . ” remark, calling Martin's death a “tragedy,” and saying, “When I think about this boy, I think about my own kids. And every parent in America should be able to understand why it is absolutely imperative that we investigate every aspect of this.”
¹¹

Michelle Obama also commented. She told NPR, “My heart goes out to the parents, because we all as parents understand the tragedy of that kind of loss, and I think that's really the thing that most people connect to. And it's important for us not to lose sight of the fact that this is a family that's grieving and there's been a tremendous loss. And we all have to rally around that piece of it.”
¹²

By invoking their own family and creating solidarity with Martin, the Obamas, instead of encouraging calm and restraint, reinforced the racial aspect of the case, and appeared to cast Zimmerman in the role of villain.

Martin's parents attended a Capitol Hill briefing on racial profiling and hate crimes organized by members of the House Judiciary Committee. The twenty-one Democratic congressmen assembled denounced the death as a hate crime. “You have friends in the Congressional Black Caucus,” Democratic congressman Andre Carson told Martin's parents. “We have your back.”
¹³

Jesse Jackson, as usual, took to the incident as an opportunity to advance the idea that “blacks are under attack.”
¹⁴
That statement had no basis in fact; any racial targeting would appear to be in the other direction. A Justice Department report found that 93 percent of black murder victims are killed by other black people.
¹⁵
According to the FBI statistics, whites are more than twice as likely to be killed by blacks as vice versa.
¹⁶

Then there were instances of media malpractice that played into the race-baiting. NBC's
Today
show broadcast a doctored version of Zimmerman's conversation with a police dispatcher moments before the shooting to make it sound as if Zimmerman targeted Martin because he was black.
NBC was forced to apologize for its outrageous behavior.
¹⁷
Some instances of media prejudice were subtler, with mainstream media outlets consistently using younger, more innocent-looking pictures of Trayvon Martin rather than more recent photos that reflected a very different youth. The media rarely reported that he had in fact been expelled from school and at a minimum dabbled in illegal drugs.

Still, marches and demonstrations were held, and sweatshirts with hoods—hoodies like the one Martin was wearing at the time he was killed—became a symbol of solidarity for all those who felt justice had not been served.

Zimmerman claimed the shooting death was self-defense, a notion later corroborated by police video and witness testimony. In April, a Special Prosecutor was appointed to take over the investigation. She filed charges of second degree murder against Zimmerman. According to Zimmerman's father, George Zimmerman received death threats after the shooting and was forced to move out of his home. Filmmaker Spike Lee re-tweeted to his 200,000 followers an erroneous address for Zimmerman.
¹⁸
Mike Tyson said about Zimmerman, “It's a disgrace he hasn't been shot yet.”
¹⁹

The New Black Panther Party offered a $10,000 reward for the “capture” of Zimmerman, and incidents of vandalism and assault were alleged to be acts of revenge for the shooting of Martin.
²⁰
A white man in Mobile, Alabama, was beaten almost to death by a mob of twenty black men. One of them reportedly said as he left the crime scene, “Now that's justice for Trayvon.”
²¹

Never once did Obama step in to calm the tension or call for restraint. Never once did he call on Americans to rise above racial differences and embrace what brings us together as Americans. No, he talked about how if he had a son, he would look like Trayvon.

No matter how the Trayvon Martin case is resolved, one thing is clear: anyone who thought Barack Obama would usher in post-racial harmony was sorely mistaken.

Obama and his allies are often quick to attribute bad faith to their opponents when it comes to race. And they are quite open about it. On the 2008 campaign trail, Obama told a crowd of supporters, “We know what kind of campaign they're going to run... they're going to try to make you afraid of me. ‘He's young and inexperienced and he's got a funny name. And did I mention he's black?'”
²²

In the age of Obama, race is a convenient cudgel with which to strike anyone who opposes the president's agenda. The Tea Party movement arose early in Obama's term in response to the new president's out-of-control spending and proposals for the government to take over major industries and vast swaths of the economy. The movement was immediately labeled as racist.

At its annual conference, the NAACP adopted a resolution condemning the allegedly “racist elements” of the Tea Party.
²³
Comedian Janeane Garofalo called the Tea Partiers “racist rednecks.”
²⁴
Of course, had the Tea Partiers been pushing a liberal policy agenda, no one on the left would have noticed that most of them were white. Very few people of color attend Earth Day rallies, for instance, which are filled with liberals. And there was a conspicuous lack of color at the Occupy Wall Street protests in 2011.

Plus, there
were
black Americans at the Tea Party rallies, including some who were Tea Party leaders and speakers. Black Republican presidential candidate Herman Cain called accusations of racism against the Tea Party “ridiculous,” and said, referring to his victories in Tea Party straw polls ahead of the GOP presidential nomination campaign, “If the Tea Party organization is racist, why does the black guy keep winning all these straw polls?”
²⁵

Black people have always been given a hard time in the conservative movement—not from other conservatives but from liberals aghast that blacks could choose conservatism over liberalism's grievance politics. Black Republican politicians have been called Uncle Toms, traitors, and Oreos. Black conservative students on college campuses—those brave enough to
admit being conservative—are sometimes mocked and belittled for their beliefs.

Cain also said that a lot of Obama's supporters “use race selectively to try to cover up some of his failures, to try to cover up some of his failed policies.”
²⁶
And he suggested that Obama's surrogates “try to play the race card, because there's supposed to be something wrong with criticizing him . . . . Some people have tried to use [race] to try to give the president a pass on failed policies, bad decisions and the fact that this economy is not doing what it's supposed to do.”
²⁷

Conservatives are often cowed on matters of race. They get so worried about being labeled racists that they shy away from talking about anything that might have racial overtones. Running for president against Obama in 2008, Senator John McCain refused to raise, or allow campaign surrogates to raise, Obama's relationship with Jeremiah Wright because any mention of Wright or the black church would have elicited cries of racism. McCain's silence might have cost him the election. Regarding the Wright situation in 2008, Obama's campaign manager, David Plouffe, wrote, “I felt like the wheels could spin off our whole venture.”
²⁸
But Republican reticence ensured that didn't occur.

On college campuses in 2008, conservative students were at a loss for how to mount effective opposition to the first serious black presidential candidate. When they attempted to criticize his leftist ideology, they were labeled racists. It worked. Obama secured the overwhelming support of college students with little opposition.

Something similar happened in 2009 when President Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor to replace retiring justice David Souter on the U.S. Supreme Court. Given the Democrats' record of attacking Republican presidents' court nominees, it would have been reasonable for Republicans to scrutinize closely Sotomayor's history as a jurist. But, as one press report put it, “The nomination . . . of Sonia Sotomayor to the high court brought a surprisingly muted response from the Republican senators who will actually vote on it.”
²⁹

Sotomayor was the first Latina Supreme Court nominee. And some liberals and media commentators warned that tough questioning during her confirmation hearings would risk being viewed as ethnically insensitive and would thus risk alienating Hispanic voters. Aside from some principled opposition from a few conservative stalwarts, Sotomayor's hearings became a virtual love-fest, and she won confirmation easily.

What explains the liberal argument that any opposition to Obama is rooted in racism? In some cases, liberals simply equate correlation (conservatives oppose Obama, who happens to be black) with causation (conservatives oppose Obama
because
he's black). But there is often something more sinister at play. As black conservative Ward Connerly has written:

But in the current economic climate, even race-baiters are beginning to concede that some opposition to Obama might not be linked to racism. In a June 2012 interview with
GQ
magazine, Spike Lee said, “I can't say to all the people that are unhappy with him that they're racist people. People ain't got jobs, people are hurting. So I don't care what color you are, if people are out of work, it's tough.”
³¹

President Obama talks a lot about empathy, but he seems to employ it very selectively.

In his writing and in his speeches Obama makes it clear that he feels and understands deeply the experiences of black Americans. Unfortunately, Obama often uses empathy to exploit the suspicions of black Americans. He aims to create solidarity with them through hollow gestures and enhancing, not transcending, the racial divide. In the meantime, he has pursued policies that have made the economic circumstances of black America worse rather than better.

Obama is quick to talk about violence when it allows him to pander to segments of the black community who feel the justice system is fundamentally biased against blacks or those who see hate crimes as pervasive. But when it comes to addressing the real problems black Americans face in forming stable families and gaining work experience and jobs, Obama is too often silent and ineffective.

This was not always the case. In
The Audacity of Hope
, Obama wrote candidly about problems in the black community:

He even conceded that government doesn't have all the answers.

Obama is clearly reluctant to say these sorts of things in public these days. In the rare instances when he does, he is often slapped down by professional race-baiters. When Obama gave a 2008 Father's Day speech exhorting black fathers to be more engaged with their children, he was scolded by Jesse Jackson for “talking down to black people.” Jackson added, “I want to cut his nuts out.”
³⁴

Obama appears to take the support of black Americans for granted. His public support of same-sex marriage, for example, was clearly meant to attract the support and campaign contributions of homosexual groups. But it was at odds with the majority of black Americans who oppose same-sex marriage.