When America elected Barack Obama to the world's most powerful office – twice – many thought that naming the “first black this” or the “first black that” would become moot.
Misguided Republicans even voted for Obama, thinking: “Finally, this will show the world that America has turned the chapter on its racist past.” The country was already living that reality, but they saw the symbolism in electing the country’s first black president, wrongly, as a greater good.
For sure, Obama was “clean” and “articulate,” but he had done nothing in his professional life to qualify him for the job, and everyone knew it. Steve Croft of CBS's "60 Minutes," knew it: “You’ve never run anything," he said to Senator Obama in 2008. “And now, all of sudden, you’re in charge of running the United States.”
His own team knew it and picked Joe Biden as vice president – a creature of the system who could create the illusion of experience and competence to put meat on the bones of Obama’s vague but repetitive “hope and change” mantra. So Obama won.
The man with an unspoken mandate to put skin color behind us, mistook it for a mandate to “fundamentally transform the United States of America.” He pushed a massive stimulus (green) plan, proposed cap-and-trade, pushed for Obamacare, raised taxes, increased regulations, pushed for same-sex marriage, and bent over backwards to apologize for American dominance in the world. He even coined a term in 2011 to describe his Libya policy, which ended up encapsulating his foreign policy strategy: leading from behind.
Rocketing the country into a leftist orbit is what created the massive backlash against the very likable Barack Obama. It was not his race; it was his policies. He said so himself in that "60 Minutes" interview when Croft asked him how he deals with that fact that some would never vote for him because he was black.
“… the American people are good,” Obama said. “ …. they are judging me on my ideas and my vision, my values, and not my skin color. Now are there gonna be some people who don't vote for me because I'm black? Of course. There are probably some African-Americans who are voting for me because I'm black. Or maybe others who are just inspired by the idea of breaking new ground. And so I think all that's a wash.”
Extremely reasonable, but given his lack of experience at the time whites, too, voted for Obama because of his skin color.
It was his ideas, vision and values that not only earned him a “shellacking” in the 2010 midterms but matched his historic shift to the left with historic criticism for all of his eight years.
As politically tempting as it must’ve been for Obama to surrender to the likes of Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, and Eric Dyson, he had an unspoken mandate – a near sacred duty – to resist. He didn’t.
Even today, with no office left to run for, Obama never misses a chance to reinforce the black victimhood narrative, even though it never squared with his own lived experience.
He told Bruce Springsteen last year that he would’ve pursued reparations for slavery but it was a “non-starter” because of the “politics of white resistance.”
So it’s no wonder why Joe Biden still believes that naming the “first black” this and the “first black” that is still “a big effing deal.” In the case of filling the impending Supreme Court vacancy, his speechwriters included the poll-tested requirement for experience and competency.
“The person I will nominate will be someone of extraordinary qualifications, character, experience, and integrity,” Biden told reporters. “And that person will be the first black woman ever nominated to the United States Supreme Court. It’s long overdue, in my opinion.”
Obama, Biden, and the country’s entire leftist cabal lives in a La-La Land where they’re convinced that large swaths of imaginary people still think this kind of stuff matters. It doesn’t. If this was purely about the nominee’s race, then why wouldn’t a conservative black woman do? Why wasn’t Clarence Thomas celebrated?
And speaking of Clarence Thomas’s nasty hearing, it was Joe Biden who hyper-politicized Senate Judiciary hearings with Robert Bork’s nomination in 1987. Before Biden chaired the committee, Antonin Scalia got 98-0 Senate approval. Presidents were given deference for their nominees, no matter what committee members assumed their policies to be.
Under Biden’s chairmanship, the eminently qualified Bork was publicly defamed and excoriated so much that his name became a verb. It wasn’t about his color; it was about his judicial philosophy.
“Robert Bork’s America,” said Sen. Ted Kennedy, “is a land in which women would be forced into back-alley abortions, blacks would sit at segregated lunch counters, rogue police could break down citizens’ doors in midnight raids.”
Republican nominees have been getting “Borked” ever since.
“This is a circus,” Thomas told the committee during his hearing. “It's a national disgrace. And from my standpoint as a black American, as far as I’m concerned, it is a high-tech lynching for uppity blacks, who in any way deign to think for themselves. And it is a message that unless you kowtow to an old order, this is what will happen to you. You will be lynched, destroyed, caricatured, by a committee of the U.S. Senate rather than hung from a tree.”
Like Obama’s presidential race, leftist policies are always cocooned inside the symbolism of race. And the greatest tragedy is that while liberals, leftists and progressives have become so addicted to using race as a way to get and keep power, they are willfully blind to the way their policies are devastating the very people they pretend to support.
We now have black mayors, black police chiefs, black sheriffs, black attorneys general, black senators and congresspeople, black lawyers, highly paid black actors, singers and entertainers, black millionaires by the millions, prominent black sports figures; and we have 13 percent of the population – blacks – in 90 percent of commercial advertising.
It’s not working. The crime, poverty, and brokenness in troubled black communities across America – overwhelmingly in Democrat-run cities – have only gotten worse. And it’s all being blamed on a racist America.
No single person in centuries was more positioned to help put all this race division behind us than Barack Obama. With the presidency being the pinnacle of achievement for people of any color across the entire globe, he could’ve made it crystal clear that there is nothing in life that a black person, like all people, could not achieve.
That is, after all, the reality. It was Obama’s reality. Instead, he clung to politics. He still does.
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