Ed Rogers is a political pro. Started in Alabama Republican politics in the 1970s when that state was still a Democratic stronghold, worked on Ronald Reagan’s presidential campaigns and in the H. W. Bush White House, current chairman of the board of powerhouse lobbying firm, the BRG Group (which he founded with Haley Barbour over 20 years ago). He’s not the kind of guy you’d expect to get caught up in today’s Republican echo chamber.
And his pre-debate advice—primarily to Mitt Romney but also to Pres. Obama—is generally on target. (To Romney, “be the scrappy underdog…consistent and sharp…make Obama defend his record“. To Obama, “(don’t) look smug and arrogant“.)
But Rogers goes badly off track at the end of this post in his ongoing inside-the-Beltway conversation with Carter Eskew about the presidential campaign—and does so in such a way that makes you question exactly how far out of touch today’s Republican party truly is. According to Rogers, if Romney has a good debate, then “Obama might need to do something he has never done in his political career: break a sweat.“
It takes a special kind of all-but-invincible ignorance to look at the political career of Barack Hussein Obama, the first black president of these United States, and (smirkingly?) conclude he’s never broken a sweat.
Maybe Ed Rogers doesn’t see it, but that’s because Obama—like pretty much every African-American professional—has spent his entire adult life constantly measuring and calibrating how to be “twice as good and half as black“.
In typically blunt, powerful and compassionate languge, Ta-Nehisi Coates teaches a lesson that Rogers—stunningly—apparently has never absorbed. “Somebody was saying yesterday on the radio, “Well, you know, Jackie Robinson did this.” And I told him, “You got to remember Jackie Robinson died young. Don’t ever forget that, every time you say that. Remember that.” You know, it wasn’t just a matter of being better. This actually costs. It costs.“
For Ed Rogers to have grown up in Alabama, spent his entire career in politics, and stillnot recognize the sweat that goes into every word, gesture and expression Pres. Obama makes in public, suggests (among other things) that it may be many years before Republicans become the majority party again.
Crossposted at: http://masscommons.wordpress.com/