This is my first diary on this great blog. Usually, I just lurk around and make the odd comment but I wanted to say something about Obama and race that was prompted by Rachel Maddow’s show last night. Rachel made the point that as candidate Obama and his team had a sophisticated fight the smears operation and that that seems to have gone by the wayside during his Presidency.
As I’ve said elsewhere, the reason why these race baiting stories even exist is because they work. It’s because a substantial part of the population is always on the lookout for Obama “doing favours for black people” and will latch onto anything that appears to suggest that the Obama administration is a black takeover of America. Of course, this is absurd but it plays to people’s very real underlying prejudices.
The conventional wisdom about Sherrod is that Obama and his political team are shit scared of Fox News and don’t touch anything to do with race. While I think that, of course, Vilsack and perhaps the political team at the WH acted to quickly in the Sherrod case, this conventional wisdom falls prey to the usual problem of lack of nuance.
This White House has, in fact, been quite strong in pushing back against media triviality ever since inauguration. When people say that Obama is afraid of Fox News, does anyone remember the concerted effort to discredit Fox News as an organisation? Unfortunately, that enterprise was not given any support from the population at large or from the media. People like to point to Van Jones and his resignation as the administration caving in, but if you actually look at what happened there, the administration defended Jones from all the spurious allegations and resisted calls for his resignation until it became clear that Van Jones had signed onto a truther petition.
Sonia Sotomayor is another example – a massive race flap was on foot due to the wise Latina remarks. Did the administration back down and withdraw her nomination? No.
Has the justice departement backed down in respect of the new black panther case simply because it’s been rotating on fox news for the past few weeks?
On healthcare, did the administration back down from implementing it because it was described as ‘reparations’ by Rush Limbaugh? No.
Another thing that has gotten lost in the USDA flap around Sherrod is that Tom Vilsak and the President had recently agreed a massive (over $1 billion) additional payment to black farmers who had suffered discrimination at the hands of prior USDA’s. Congress has yet to vote on that. However, think about how difficult it would be to get that through if there really was a black employee at the USDA that had discriminated against white farmers?
In big picture terms, Obama has and is moving the needle against discrimination and historic unfairness. Yes, they made a mistake but I appreciated the way it was quickly cleared up with honesty, integrity and dignity. That’s exactly how I would want leaders to respond. What shouldn’t get lost in this debate is how courageous and strong the White House has actually been in the face of the worst type of scandalous and outrageous attacks.