After Gatesgate: Why Can`t Republicans Start “National Dialogue On Race”?
President Barack Obama`s
Beer Summit has conclusively demonstrated the
cowardly ineptitude of John McCain`s strategy of
running away from race in 2008. Police officer
James Crowley, a
man
who simply had too much self-respect to
allow himself to be racially bullied by the President of
the United States, has done more political damage to Obama
than all the GOP politicians and their myriad consultants
combined.
The
Mainstream Media is finally getting around to admitting that
the farcical Gatesgate brouhaha was as politically
disastrous for Obama as anything that trivial and
self-inflicted could be. Despite the press` overt bias, they
are drawn like moths to the flame of the high ratings that
Stupidlygate generated. For example, Jennifer Loven of the
Associated Press wrote on Saturday:
“The success of
President Barack Obama`s ambitious agenda—from health care
and climate change to education—could depend on how quickly
he recovers from the sharp drop in support among white
voters after criticizing a white policeman`s arrest of a
black Harvard scholar.”
[Analysis:
Obama must regain momentum after Gates By Jennifer
Loven, Associated Press, August 1, 2009]
AP`s
Loven quotes a liberal actually using the D-Word to describe
Obama`s self-inflicted wound:
“Lawrence
Jacobs,
director of the Center for the Study of Politics and
Governance at the University of Minnesota`s
Hubert H.
Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, said he was
stunned at how poorly Obama, normally so controlled, handled
what Jacobs called `the first major personal debacle for the
president.`”
Obama`s self-exposure of his
racial
prejudices raises obvious questions about his drive to
take control of the
health, energy, and
education industries. It raises the central question of
all politics: Is he on
your side?
The reason Obama made a fool of himself at
his news conference about health care reform by
devoting 445 words to implicitly accusing Crowley of
racism
is because … that`s what he`s
good at. His eagerness to jump into a minor race fray
after all the technical tedium about health was palpable.
The two topics that excite Obama are power
and race. He spelled this all out at vast length in his amazon Dreams from My Father, which is
why I wrote a reader`s guide to the President`s memoir,
America`s
Half-Blood Prince: Barack Obama`s “Story of Race and
Inheritance.” (Book $30, PDF download $10, Kindle
download $7.95.)
Do you think Obama became chairman of the
Illinois Senate
Health and Human Services Committee in 2003 because of
his lifelong fascination with
health finance? Did he subtitle his autobiography
Dreams from My Father:
A Story of Health and
Finance?
Let`s be
frank. Mr. and Mrs. Obama got involved in the health care
game for the same reason their good friend Tony Rezko did:
because, these days, that`s where the money is.
Why didn`t Obama reveal his racial biases
in interviews before? Because
almost
nobody asked him any tough questions about race during
his entire 20 month campaign.
If there are any Republicans out there
unwilling to throw the next election the way McCain threw
the last one, they should take up the invitation of Obama
and his Attorney General
Eric Holder: stop being
“a nation of cowards”
and engage the President and his friends in his
“national dialogue on
race”.
For
example, ask the President questions like these, over and
over, until he can`t avoid answering them:
-
How can the majority
afford to
continue to provide racial preferences to minorities as it
stops being a
majority? -
You`ve
said that you don`t think it would be fair for your
daughters
to benefit from racial preferences. What have you done
as President to make sure they don`t? -
The Fire Department of New York lost 343 men on 9/11. Last
month, a federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton ruled that
the Fire Department of New York
racially
discriminated on its 1999 hiring exam by asking
questions about firefighting that blacks and Hispanics found
hard to answer. In case of an appeal, will your
Administration side
with the Fire Department of New York or
against it?
It might also be
amusing to extend the national conversation to the First
Lady, who is not as heavily nicotined as the President, and
thus is more prone to reveal her
insecurities and
racial resentments:
-
If, as you repeatedly claimed during the campaign, your
highest priority has always been the care of your children,
how could you have
earned
$317,000 in 2005 at the U. of Chicago Hospitals as the
community outreach and diversity coordinator? -
The medical center eliminated your old position when you
left it to become First Lady. Was this because the chief
duty for which you earned $317,000 was
being the spouse of a U.S. Senator?
Obama`s handler
David Axelrod will likely try to keep the President and
First Lady as tightly muzzled as he had poor Sonia Sotomayor
on
clampdown during her Senate testimony. But, hey, they`re
only human.
Moreover, there`s a substitute for the
Obamas readily at hand: Obama`s
“friend” Prof.
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., the great scholar. As Gates has
demonstrated in his non-stop interviews since
throwing his hissy fit, Gates is a
professional motormouth who never met a microphone he
didn`t like. He always has another
PBS
documentary on race to promote, so he`s always selling.
Yet
Gates` lacks the Machiavellianism that Obama aspires to.
Because Obama has anointed Gates, anything Gates says is now
fair game to ask Obama about.
It would be
particularly fruitful to get Gates talking about one
particular interest of his, which has all sorts of
ramifications.
In 2004, Gates and
Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School
pointed
out that only about one-third of blacks admitted to
Harvard College “were
from families in which all four grandparents were born in
this country, descendants of slaves”.
In
other words, most of the beneficiaries of
affirmative action for African-Americans at Harvard are
either
not American at all, or are the children of
non-Americans, or have recent white parents or grandparents,
or some combination.
Gates told the New
York Times, “This is about the kids of recent
arrivals beating out the black indigenous middle-class
kids“.
[Top
Colleges Take More Blacks, but Which Ones? By Sara
Rimer and Karen W. Arenson, June 24, 2004]
Some questions for Dr. Gates suggest themselves:
-
Is the First Lady an example of the kind of descendent of
slaves whom most people assume affirmative action at Harvard
is intended to help? -
But, did you find that that racial preferences at Harvard
instead seem to mostly help people like, say, the President? -
Is it fair for the son of a
foreigner and
a white person, somebody who no doubt has ancestors,
both black
and
white, who were slaveowners, but who doesn`t have any
ancestors who were slaves in America, to benefit from racial
preferences intended for the descendants of slaves? -
Yet, the First Lady says she
wasn`t a beneficiary of affirmative action at
Harvard
Law School, while the President says he
was.
Which one is telling the truth? -
Wouldn`t it be fairest to provide affirmative action to the
descendants of slaves and
American Indians, but not to those whose ancestors
chose to come to America? -
If there is something dubious about the fairness of black
immigrants and their children enjoying racial preferences in
the U.S., isn`t that at least as true for Hispanic
immigrants and their children?
I think
you can see now why Gates`s logic is TNT for Obama`s
coalition.
The
worst nightmare of
Hispanic
politicians is something that is almost never talked
about, but that makes a fair amount of sense: that whites
and blacks would cut a deal at the expense of the
Latino
elite by agreeing to cut down on immigration and
restrict affirmative action and disparate impact laws to
just blacks and American Indians.
This would make racial preferences demographically
sustainable for much longer than under the current system
where new arrivals, even illegal immigrants, immediately
qualify for preferences.
There
was a chance that Congresswoman
Barbara Jordan would have used her position as chair of
Clinton`s immigration reform commission to midwife a
compromise like this in the 1990s if she hadn`t died
prematurely.
Unfortunately, at present, there are no black politicians as
statesmanlike as Jordan. Still, the point of getting Gates
talking is not to drive a Grand Bargain between blacks and
whites right away, but to put it on the table, to air it in
public, and thus set the diverse elements of Obama`s
diversity brigade,
black and Latino, to battling amongst themselves.
Of
course, there`s always the alternative: the Republicans
could once again choose to lose.
With the modern GOP, failure is always an option.
[Steve Sailer (email
him) is
movie critic for
The American Conservative.
His website
www.iSteve.blogspot.com
features his daily blog. His new book,
AMERICA`S HALF-BLOOD PRINCE: BARACK OBAMA`S
"STORY OF RACE AND INHERITANCE", is
available
here.]


