Obama’s Revealing Attack on Minority Republicans

By Noah Rothman

Friday, June 16, 2023

 

The notion that, through persistence, personal agency, and dedication, the remaining vestiges of institutional racial discrimination in America are obstacles that its minority citizens can overcome is one to which the nation’s first black president objects.

 

“There’s a long history of African-American or other minority candidates within the Republican Party who will validate America and say, ‘Everything’s great, and we can make it,’” said Barack Obama, in an interview with his 2008 campaign manager and CNN personality David Axelrod. The former president of the United States singled out Senator Tim Scott and, to a lesser degree, Nikki Haley for failing to qualify their sanguine assessment of the opportunity America provides its ethnic minorities with “an honest accounting of our past and our present.”

 

It’s worth dwelling on Obama’s objection to sentiments that, perish the thought, “validate America.” In his apparent estimation, such sentiments represent an ugly untruth. This slip is revealing of a disposition to which Obama was inclined during his years in the spotlight — one his critics often highlighted and his defenders insisted was a figment of their overactive and racially suspect imaginations. To wit: Obama’s casual disdain for the nation that twice elected him to its highest office.

 

In Barack Obama’s telling, America’s story is a morality play in which he assumes a central role. The 44th president’s ascension represented the crest of the country’s redemptive arc — a deliverance the nation then rejected as it descended back into irredeemable iniquity with his departure from the national stage. His patriotism seems only ever to have been conditional, and those conditions were rather personal.

 

When a majority of its citizens ratify his will, the country of his birth is “generous,” “compassionate,” “tolerant,” and “great.” When it suits his interests, America’s history of racial animus is surmountable, and “anger” over that history “distracts attention from solving real problems.” When he’s feeling less politically constrained, Americans are selfish and bitter. Their country is arrogant and dismissive. Its minorities should consider distinct demographics within the national tapestry as “enemies.”

 

The former president has a habit of accusing his opponents of being “unpatriotic” and “un-American,” but his highly contingent patriotism is suggestive of deep discomfort with the nation as it exists. It is telling that these two Republican presidential aspirants, in particular, have induced the reemergence of one of his most unlovely traits. It’s even more revealing that Obama feels compelled to distort their records and views to make the point that only those who share his skepticism can objectively assess the nation’s racial past and present.

 

“If that candidate is not willing to acknowledge that, again and again, we’ve seen discrimination in everything,” Obama continued, from “getting a job to buying a house to how the criminal justice system operates,” that somehow represents a rejection of the idea that “we need to do something about” the consequences of “hundreds of years of racism in this society.”

 

Tim Scott objected to Obama’s cheap strawman — one that perhaps reflected the former president’s admitted ignorance of Scott’s actual views. After all, the former president hadn’t “spent a lot of time studying Tim Scott’s speeches.”

 

“The truth of my life disproves the lies of the radical left,” Scott replied. That is consistent with the message Scott articulates in the speeches Obama couldn’t be bothered to peruse before critiquing them. The senator has not shied away from acknowledging the racism he and his family experienced in the deep South, noting that his family “went from cotton to Congress” in the space of his grandfather’s lifetime. Haley, too, rejected Obama’s effort to single out minorities as “victims instead of empowering them.”

 

The former U.N. ambassador and South Carolina governor has also described her ascent from the “isolation” she experienced as a dark-skinned girl in the birthplace of the Confederacy to the state’s highest office. Neither candidate has said, “Everything’s great.” They have said their experience attests that American minorities can navigate the nation’s casteless ranks without having their hands held by benevolent liberal sherpas. That reality — not some contemptuous caricature of their view that racial impediments do not exist — threatens Obama and the New York Times alike.

 

“I’m not being cynical about Tim Scott individually, but I am maybe suggesting the rhetoric of ‘Can’t we all get along,’” Obama concluded, while modifying some of his own hopeful rhetoric about the country. “That has to be undergirded with an honest accounting of our past and our present.” But Obama is not seeking honesty. If he were, he wouldn’t be attacking the experience of these — and, by reasonable extension, all — Republicans of minority extraction as unwitting victims of the false consciousness to which Obama seems to believe those who don’t subscribe to a persecution complex are prone.

 

Barack Obama once described the “promise of America” in collectivist terms. It was to him “the fundamental belief that I am my brother’s keeper; I am my sister’s keeper.” The conservative rejoinder to this infantilizing conception of the American compact promotes individual excellence: the unfettered talents of the mind and soul, the full expression of which invariably benefits all. Neither Obama nor the targets of his criticism reject that idea per se, but Obama emphasizes the obstacles and languishes in fatalism, while the objects of his criticism emphasize resiliency and celebrate optimism. That’s a profound distinction and an illuminating one.