PrintOctober 12, 2010
Obama: Our First Post-Racial Failure
Barack Obama has become the nation's first post-racial failure...and we are all the stronger for it. After almost two years in office, he is living proof that America has managed to safely cross the racial divide. Failure is no longer the sole preserve of white presidents and Caucasian New York Times publishers. Obama has fashioned what Harvard historians would call a watershed in modern American history, right up there with the creation of MSNBC and the 1978 Star Wars Christmas television special, Happy Life Day. He has failed.
Indeed, Obama has failed so obviously and on such a grand scale that historians will look back in awe from an exceptionally American future and say that his presidency inarguably established as truism that failure knows no color, and fecklessness transcends all races and religions. Generations of schoolchildren will learn that obtuseness is not the sole preserve of the DNA strands that weave their way toward a pale John Kerry or inextricably combine to produce a lighter-shade-of-pale Jimmy Carter.
Barack Obama has failed not because he is black, but, as one PajamasMedia reader put it, because "everything he has done or wants to do is a disaster!" For the country, that is -- Democrat leadership, the faculty lounge, and the Upper West Side of Manhattan view Obama's governance and our misery as success...but that's another story for another day. The rest of the nation, however, sees a decimated free market, out-of-control regulation, shrinking liberty, and historic deficits fueling a descent into what Thomas Lifson terms "progressive feudalism," in which "even the most mundane tasks" will be regulated by government. And we don't like it.
The inimitable Rush Limbaugh, asked what is "sinking" the Democrats, put it this way: "It's Obama's Jackassian Policies." Leave it to the Maha Rushie to get to the heart of the matter. He put it in such a way that even the simplest of the simple (MSNBC's Ed Schultz, for example, or a New York Times columnist) can understand: an African-American can be every bit of a "jackass" as a dunderhead of the white persuasion. And, extending the logic, ignorance may now also be associated with brown and yellow skin, with females as well as males, with gays and lesbians...why, the possibilities are endless.
"Stupid is as stupid does" is no longer just white and Forest Gump; it is black and Barack Obama (three months into his presidency, the Philadelphia Bulletin, a mainstream newspaper that also doubles as the Democratic house organ in Philadelphia, whined that he is setting "a record for incompetence"), or brown and New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson (a Latino whose latest achievement is making the "America's Worst Governor" list, having already achieved fame as one of the nation's worst cabinet members during the Clinton era). Washington has shown us the way, colorblind and brain-dead from the top down. What a wonderful country!
Traditional media (a.k.a. dying media) helped give us the nation's first black president. A recurring theme in elite insider coverage was that the election of Barack Obama would usher in a new era of harmony, a "post-racial" United States. A defeat would be due solely to "the color of his skin," was the way the Washington Post's Slate put it in 2008. But the nation's voters came through, and on Election Day, "the rise of the oceans began to slow and the planet began to heal" as American entered its post-racial era -- or so declared Barack Obama and a worshipful media. This is what you get when God occupies the oval office, crowed Newsweek. Chris Matthews' leg tingled, while New York Times columnists saw a cleaned-up Jesus with a "perfectly creased pant leg." The British press hailed "the rise of a new JFK," signaling the end of racism in its former colonies across the pond.
They were right. Barack Obama has shown that the American dream is both accessible and, depending upon the totality of one's work, inaccessible. In a nation which remains largely free, where competence and savvy are prized and appreciated, Obama has shown that, despite the categories and quotas of a half-century of regressive Democrat policies, a black in a position of responsibility can fail as gloriously and ignominiously as a person of the white or brown persuasion.
This is, indeed, good news. In fact, it is worthy of at least a few graduate theses at, perhaps, some of those second-rate state and religious-affiliated universities busily churning out Tea Party members and shapely-but-dead-from-the-neck-up citizen-politicians. Or throw in a few anti-Semitic call-outs and you have a doctoral dissertation at Harvard or Berkeley. America has moved into the post-racial era, and the failure of Barack Obama makes it official: American exceptionalism rides again.
Obama has shown that blacks are like everyone else. Arrogance, ignorance of history, inability to reason, lack of savvy, and self-absorption -- all are ingredients for post-racial failure. You don't have to be white to exhibit what American Thinker publisher Thomas Lifson calls the "shallowness ... of intellect and ... lack of rigor" displayed by the current president. Even actress Janeane Garofalo (a favorite of leftist cable hosts for her reasoned discourses on politics that begin with "you white pig" and end with a Columbia University debating favorite, "shut the **** up") laments, "I have to say I was surprised how disappointing the Obama administration has turned out to be."
Except for the usual suspects (the New York Times, Washington Post, etc.), few are blaming the dismal record of Obama's Washington on racism. Indeed, this has become an even more wonderful country thanks to the post-racial failures of Barack Obama. Up until now, the greatest presidential failure of the modern age has been Jimmy Carter, who was so spectacularly poor a president that even the reliably leftist San Francisco Chronicle called his years in the White House a "legacy of failure." But a post-racial America has given even respected academics the freedom to ask, "Is Obama the new Carter?" with little fear of the racist label. Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal last month noted that "comparisons between the Obama White House and the failed presidency of Jimmy Carter are increasingly being made...by Democrats."
The consensus is growing that the greatest failure of the modern presidency is no longer a self-absorbed, mean-spirited white guy who embraces dictators and tyrants, can't manage his way out of a paper bag, and blames everything from earthquakes in Pakistan to bedbugs at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on Israel. Rather, it is a self-absorbed, mean-spirited black guy who embraces dictators and tyrants, can't manage his way out of a paper bag, and blames everything from earthquakes in Pakistan to bed bugs at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on Israel.
Indeed. Barack Obama has transcended race. He has led America into the post-racial era by failing on his merits -- not his skin color. We are, once again, a wonderful country -- of which even Michelle Obama can be proud!
Stuart Schwartz, formerly a media and retail executive, is on the faculty at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia.
