I watched a little Fox News tonight. It was the first time I’ve had that channel on in months. It really does remind me of the Deepwater Horizon well. It spews poison into the atmosphere every day, and no one knows how to shut it off. In any case, I watched the first ten or twelve minutes of the Bill O’Reilly show and I could talk about O’Reilly a bit, but I won’t. His first guest was the infamous Clinton political adviser, Dick Morris. I wish they had instant transcripts of these shows, but I’ll have to paraphrase from memory. Morris was giving his analysis on the controversy surrounding Ms. Sherrod. And he was explaining the myriad ways in which this episode has caused harm to the administration. The main point he made was that it damaged Obama’s ‘brand.’ And it damaged his ‘brand’ because it forced him to acknowledge race. Simply pushing race into the national conversation to a point that the administration has to respond to it in any way is a victory for the right. At least, that’s how Dick Morris sees things. Morris mentioned the other obvious problems created in this mess, including questions of competency and spine. But those were minor victories. The main accomplishment, as he saw it, was that it tarnished Obama’s post-racial brand and hurt him with white voters who still make up the majority of the electorate.
And this analysis, which I don’t agree with 100%, kind of drove home a point I’ve made or have played around with since during the campaign. (Not to bring up a sore issue, but) the Clintons, usually through surrogates, pushed race into the discussion whenever they could, even when it did them tremendous harm. And the right-wing has continued this strategy with much more gusto ever since Obama was sworn in as president. It appears that the political pros believe that the way to harm the president is to make him defend black people, or make his administration complain about racism, or simply to continually remind people that he is black.
In thinking about this, it isn’t easy to say whether the strategy works or backfires. I think it does harm him, but never enough to accomplish its main purpose, which is to defeat him. As Te-Nehisi Coates says, the president has handled issues of race with deftness and nuance, but also with incredible caution and much strategic retreat.
The argument has been made that this isn’t Obama, just the people working under him. That theory elides the responsibility of leaders to set a tone. The tone that Obama has set, in regards to race, is to retreat with great velocity in the face of anything that can be defined as “racial.” Granted, this has been politically smart. Also granted, Obama has done it with nuance. But it can not be expected that the president’s subordinates will share that nuance.
I think Obama knows that traps are being laid for him. He is literally being baited. And he’s wise enough to avoid the snares. But it comes with a cost.
But words, too, have power and a strategy of falling back from the rhetoric of racists, while sometimes correct, is not definitive. There has to be some amount of courage, some understanding of the moment, to accompany the quiet strategy. I do not expect Barack Obama to condemn the Tea Party’s racist elements, any more than I expect Ben Jealous to lead the war in Afghanistan. But I do not expect him, or his administration, to make the work of the NAACP harder, to contradict them for doing that which the administration can not. I do not expect them to minimize those elements, thus minimizing the NAACP’s fight, and then accede, to people who are pulling from the darkest, vilest reaches of the American psyche.
In the end, Coates isn’t clear in what he expects. But that doesn’t surprise me because the problem defies easy resolution. Coates is critical of vice-president Biden for showing an unwillingness to paint the entire Tea Party as racist and an ambivalence about examining the nuance in the NAACP’s condemnation of the Tea Party. Yet, he doesn’t expect Obama to do that, and doesn’t even think it would be wise for him to do that. Coates, too, knows that traps are being laid.
It’s obvious that the administration got snookered in this episode, just as the NAACP was snookered. In fact, the firing of Ms. Sherrod may have been influenced by the NAACP’s condemnation of her. It wasn’t only pressure on the right that influenced them. Regardless, they made a mistake. They are trying to correct it. There are more important issues here than the mistakes. For example, one side of this story didn’t make any mistakes. They accomplished what they wanted to accomplish. They got a conversation going about race.
I think it’s possible that the brains behind these strategies aren’t even genuinely racist beyond the degree to which they’re indifferent to its existence. They’re just cynical to a breathtaking degree. They aren’t riling up racial animosity for its own sake or to achieve any racial priority. It’s just a tool they use because their analytical calculus is that it will work for them politically. They don’t care that all decent people think they are despicable. They’re looking at differential turnout models. They like it when some Tea Partier shows up with a newsworthy racist placard, not because they agree with the sentiment, but because it makes us all talk about race again. We talk about race, and they call us race-baiters and accuse us of just looking out for the black man.
I think they’re trying to provoke the president into responding, and they see that as the greatest possible victory. The president is so determined not to take the bait that he becomes a poor steward of people’s rights.
They’ve exposed a weakness. There’s no doubt about it. They’re good at that.
