August 14, 2008
Obama the Racialist
by Victor Davis Hanson
NRO’s The Corner

Why is Obama foolishly evoking race time after time?

Obama's problems with race have nothing to do with his half-African ancestry or his own experience with racism and unfairness, but boil down to his deftly wanting it both ways: reminding the Germans he is a different sort of American from what they're used to (false, they knew Rice and Powell well enough), while preempting by suggesting others will evoke race, but in a negative context. But his polls, I wager, will begin to slip from all this, because all this sophisticated triangulation is about to blow up in the public mind.

1) The voter is starting to hear serially from Obama about race; they were promised a racially transcendent candidate, but so far Obama seems obsessed with identity, either accusing others of racism, or using heritage himself for political advantage. This is a tragic blunder.

2) He has the same want-it-both-ways with odious racists: Rev. Wright is a former spiritual advisor, and "brilliant" scholar who nevertheless serially slurs America, whites, Italians, Jews, etc. Ludacris is "a great talent" and "talented" to such an extent Obama wants him in his iPod menu, and has met with him — but also a racist to be shunned. Ditto Pfleger. A pattern is emerging: Obama associates with or tolerates racists when such quasi-intimacy cements street-cred as an authentic minority or someone cool in the anti-Bush mode; but then when they inevitably revert to form, he not merely casts them off, but is "shocked" at their usual expression, and so like speed bumps they litter the roadway as he barrels ahead.

3). The "typical white person", grandma-under-the-bus riff, Pennsylvania-"clingers" rant etc., 'no more disown Rev, Wright/but now leaving Trinity Church', etc. themselves are immaterial, but in toto provide a thin margin of tolerance when something like Ludacris or Obama's latest accusation of racism surfaces.

4) Right now Obama does not need to solidify his 90% African-American base or the Moveon.org white liberal adherents; but instead he must remember why he lost all those primaries to Hillary and to what degree his campaign since then has addressed those concerns that lost him those electorates. When a West Virginian hears that Obama is accusing others of racism, or hears him promise that racial reparations will now be a matter of government deeds not words, or a rapper brags he is a favorite of Obama and then slurs Clinton, McCain, Bush in thinly disguised racist terms, it starts to create an image of someone who is not bringing people together, but precisely the opposite.

Why all this? Inexperience and hubris — the same overconfidence that makes him say we need a Pentagon-sized new civilian aid department, to inflate our tires to avoid drilling, and must stop merely talking about reparations and starting doing something about them. His handlers need to return to the teleprompter, since all these incidents have in common the impromptu moment.

Postmodern Architecture

It's getting loony, but then who is to say that the Leaning Tower of Pisa might not really be the Victory Column?

What was stunning about the New York Times' Bob Herbert's charge that the McCain campaign, in its satire on Obama's messianic sense of self, had deliberately inserted clips of the phallic Leaning Tower of Pisa and Washington Monument to drive home a racist trope about black men and white women was not just his embarrassing ignorance of architecture, or his infantile pop-Freudianism, or even his preemptory efforts to tie all criticism of Obama to racism and thereby stifle dissent. It was the sheer arrogance in the manner in which he persisted in his false points: "An image right there... of the Leaning Tower of Pisa and ... the Washington Monument.... You tell me why those two phallic symbols are placed there...".

If one listens to the clip, he asks rhetorical questions, and then in condescending fashion chides his bewildered panelists about their inability to fathom his own pseudo-charges: "You remember that! Alright!...Look at the beginning of that ad again! You tell me!...Pow! ...I really wish someone would answer the question!...Run the ad again and take a look at it!"

There is never any sense of humility or self-doubt that he might just not know anything about the Victory Column or campaign ads. Instead, there is a very strong sense that all he has to do is evoke the charge of racism and, presto, all facts, details, and truth thereby simply are to disappear and skeptics are to cower.

So here we are this summer: a messianic candidate, rebuked in his efforts to use the Brandenburg Gate as a campaign backdrop, then settles for the garish Victory Column, the 19th-century monument to Prussian militarism and conquest over its neighbors, and thereby provides fodder for his supporters to allege that when others use clips of his silly stagecraft they are really inserting phallic symbols in racist fashion. Orwell couldn't have thought all this up.

Affirmative Action in the News

Maureen Dowd recently preened that Obama "didn’t even tell Harvard Law School that he was black on his application." To the extent that her own research led her to believe this, or she would know accurately, one should still wonder why in the world Barack Obama, the child of a white woman and African father, would check the affirmative action box? When he applied to law school, there was nothing in the circumstances of his birth or even his upbringing up to then that located him in the African-American experience.

Obama's recent evocation of some sort of reparations, the resurgence in talk about affirmative action, current ballot measures, etc. should remind us of how unworkable a system it has become. As a veteran of two decades on hiring committees in the CSU system, I can attest that the rules and regulations of affirmative action were Byzantine, and not always based on the presumption of a past American history of racist oppression.

Hispanic elites from Chile and Argentina often qualified, whether officially or not. Meanwhile, Mexican-Americans felt that foreigners with work visas were accenting their names and simply piling on, despite their prior privileged lives back home in Santiago or Buenos Aires. Despite Hispanic-sounding last names, no one knew what to do with the Portuguese and the Basques; both groups were usually seen as more affluent than the so-called 'white' minority. A student called Joe Smith could be the son a Mexican illegal alien and still seem far less a minority than Jose Castillo, a fifth-generation Chilean alien who was schooled in the U.S. and decided to stay on.

We had a variety of recent immigrants from the Caribbean as professors and students, almost all from affluent families. One can imagine the problems of others supposedly with 3/4, 1/2, 1/8 black or Hispanic ancestry. What qualifies as a minority, and who ascertains it in the post-Ward Churchill era? Many of our white students with parents from the Oklahoma diaspora rightly claimed American-Indian heritage, albeit in the 1/16th to 1/8th range. The Asian problem was even weirder — 3rd-generation affluent Japanese, no? But the Hmong immigrant of 10 years, yes? The recent Taiwanese arrival, no? More likely, there were de facto Asian quotas — given the ability of such minorities in many fields to outperform almost everyone else and thereby become "overrepresented" in the UC system.

Bumper-sticker identification was unfortunate. The half-Hispanic student with Wilson as his surname never could obtain the authenticity that his counterpart with a Hispanic father received. Accented and hyphenated names, and renaming, were common, in addition to occasional ethnic dress. By the 2004, I think any original justification that groups whose ancestors had suffered historical discrimination qualified for redress was dropped, and informally it became a spoils system based on faulty perceptions of race — sort of a counterpart to the legacy system of the Ivy League that helps the offspring of wealthy alumni (which oddly, or rather logically, became a 'they do it too' argument by affirmative action's desperate adherents).

The corollary argument that someone of African or Caribbean ancestry, without ancestral claim to America's purported racist past, deserves some sort of compensation in the here and now on the basis of present public racism and discrimination fails utterly. There is a variety of other "people of color" — Arabs or Punjabis for example — who may, in fact, be more readily identifiable in the public domain as non-white and yet qualify for no such exemptions. One could go on, but here we are again in another racial absurdity of suggesting that Obama at some point in his career nobly chose not to suggest he was deserving of affirmative action, when in fact there would be no logical or ethical reason why he should.

In short, the entire Affirmative Action industry, however well-intended its origins, has gone the way of the Soviet bureaucracy as a sort of arbitrary racial nomenclatura that benefits mostly elites — self-contradictory, hypocritical, illogical, and finally unworkable.

"Issues" or "Reparations"?

If the press insists on hinging on every word of Obama, can't they at least ask for clarifications and details about his sweeping proclamations? Most are still waiting for the particulars of his idea to create a shadow Pentagon of civilian aid and civil support workers funded to the same tune of $500 billion a year. That seems a big deal that the electorate should ponder? How would it function? Where would the funding come from? What would be the relationship with the Pentagon?

And now what does the following mean from Obama:

I personally would want to see our tragic history, or the tragic elements of our history, acknowledged. I consistently believe that when it comes to whether it's Native Americans or African-American issues or reparations, the most important thing for the U.S. government to do is not just offer words, but offer deeds.

Again more details: Does this mean an expansion of affirmative action, more of WWII taught as mostly Rosie the Riveter, Hiroshima, and the Japanese internment, or cash grants for past sins? Does the explicit reference to reparations mean they are here at last — which were on the front burner pre-9/11? Anyone in any government-supported university the last thirty years knows that admission policies, graduate and professional school recruitment, assigned readings, curriculum, minority hiring and promotion, and university policies do not "just offer words, but offer deeds". It would seem that the Obamas' own careers, in retrospect, have been helped a lot by "deeds" rather than mere rhetoric of the government.

Two themes seem to reoccur: one, sweeping rhetorical promises that either are not or cannot be backed by detailed proposals; two, a certain sort of resentment that after trillions of dollars invested in affirmative action, war on poverty programs, and government assistance targeted to the poor and minorities they can be summed up with a mere "not just offer words."

The messianic language, presumption that the election to come is a mere formality, and royal campaign style are worrisome. But far more importantly, these eerie promises of brave new programs go virtually unquestioned.

Is Obama the Hannah Montana Candidate?

I think Obamania and the youth craze may be wearing off, as voters are starting to see that there is no there there...

Consider the latest 70 million barrels ploy.

AP reports: "In a reversal, Barack Obama proposed Monday that the government sell 70 million barrels of oil from its strategic petroleum stockpile to help reduce gasoline prices."

But wait — we have heard nothing from Obama the last six months other than a few million additional barrels per day would not make any difference at all. In contrast, 70 million taken out of the reserve equals less than 4 days consumption by Americans, so how can that suddenly matter when a million per day from ANWR or off the coasts and the shelf supposedly would not? Aside from the bad precedent of tapping into a reserve that may some day be necessary — given the prairie-fire nature of the Middle East— how can this short-short term fix (10 weeks of ANWR) be of any value other than to deflect charges Obama's remedies will do nothing to lower gas prices?

What we are seeing is a sad sort of desperation brought on by prior sanctimonious assurances for months that 'wind, solar, and green' would get us out of this mess — not a transitional period to alternate energies based on more domestic production of clean coal, nuclear, and domestic natural gas and oil to avoid giving ever more trillions to suspect regimes.

Think of it — in less than a week we are told the answer to high gas prices is to fill our tires with more air and thereby avoid all new drilling, and now to tap into the reserve to get four-days worth of additional oil. Examine the crazy logic: for months we were not supposed to drill inside the U.S. or its waters to get new supplies, but now we are supposed to pump from limited, finite supplies.

Like the Congressional idea to sue OPEC or beg the Saudis to pump an additional 300,000 barrels a day, this try-anything-that-comes-to-mind approach to energy is not just silly, but downright scary — and it too, along with Obama's race-card preemptive strikes, will ultimately contribute to a further erosion to his stature in the polls.

At some point very soon, millions of Democrats are going to wake up from their hypnoses and realize that they have spurned a veteran Hillary who would have waged a tough, professional campaign in a sure-win Democratic year for a rookie Senator without any record or experience. Again, McCain is the only Republican candidate this strange year who could have won, and a green Obama may be the only Democratic who could have lost.