Since we’re now into the final year of his presidency, I might as well admit it: I may have been wrong about Barack Obama.
I still remember the joy of Election Night 2008 and watching the elated crowd in Chicago’s Grant Park, which included some of the nation’s most famous African Americans joined by whites and a diverse range of other hues, many with tears in their eyes over the presidential election a lot of us never expected to see in our lifetimes.
I really thought that in addition to representing an enormous leap forward from America’s ugly racial past, Obama’s election would change America positively in ways we could not then imagine.
I know. Now just the opposite appears to be happening with Republicans about to nominate a crude, hate-mongering bigot as its choice to succeed Obama.
But let me explain my thinking and why I still believe it could turn out to be right, just slightly off schedule.
One of the things I felt strongly was that seeing a beautiful black family in the White House, one any family in America would want to emulate, could have a profound effect.
Many white Americans, living in nearly all-white small towns like the one where I grew up, had never known such a black family. Bill Cosby’s TV family maybe, but we now know that was pure fiction.
Even in urban areas like Milwaukee, where whites and blacks can work together and gain respect for each other, extreme residential segregation reduces personal familiarity with other races.
The other reason there was a real possibility of Obama’s election changing America politically was that our country desperately needed that to happen to save all of us from the second worst economic disaster in history.
We needed every serious national leader working together to end the national crisis throwing millions out of work, rapidly destroying the nation’s corrupted financial system and leaving entire American industries teetering on the crumbling edge of an abyss.
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Fortunately, we’d just elected a Democratic president who envisioned the two parties working together in Washington to solve problems affecting everyone. Unfortunately, Republicans had other ideas.
GOP’s Priority Was Destroying Obama
In fact, the top priority for Republicans wasn’t to help the nation recover from the disastrous recession created under President George W. Bush. As crudely articulated by Senate Leader Mitch McConnell, the top Republican priority was to make sure Obama wasn’t re-elected to a second term.
The Republican calculation was simple. If American economic misery continued for four more years, voters would be so enraged they’d throw out Obama and vote Republican.
That’s why Republicans began their cynical, anti-American program of voting against every Obama effort to create jobs and eviscerating the government’s economic safety net when it was needed most, making it even harder for struggling families to survive.
It’s difficult to say how much of the Republican opposition to Obama was rooted in racism. But the sheer contempt shown the first African American president was furious and unrelenting.
It led directly to 2010’s tea party backlash election that elected Gov. Scott Walker and other hard-core, right-wing politicians across America.
The haters hadn’t expected to see an African American president in their lifetimes either and they were outraged by it. In the beginning, they didn’t even bother to hide their racist posters of Obama dressed up as a witch doctor at their rallies.
The total disrespect for Obama as president continues right up to currently refusing to even hold hearings or vote on the president’s highly qualified nominee to the U.S. Supreme Court, Merrick Garland.
At this point in the column, you can already hear the Republican response. There he goes again, playing the race card.
Republicans throw out that cliché to shut down debate whenever someone attempts to discuss race in America. That’s unfortunate, since we all need to talk about how to reduce the racial divisions that have poisoned this country throughout its history.
Republicans claim it’s not Obama’s race they hate. It’s his extreme left-wing policies. Except that President Obama doesn’t really have any radical left-wing policies. He’s a moderate Democrat, which is still a mainstream political philosophy in this country.
The Obama accomplishment Republicans despise most and vow to destroy is providing health care for millions of previously uninsured people. It’s modeled after the conservative Massachusetts health care program created by Mitt Romney, the last Republican presidential nominee.
It’s Republicans who have left the mainstream. Now intelligent Republicans are watching in horror as racists destroy their party by nominating an unelectable, know-nothing demagogue.
To survive in a racially diverse America, decent Republicans are beginning to talk about creating a new third party based on legitimate conservative principles without any of the racial hatred. That’s how Lincoln’s abolitionist Republicans began.
When that happens, the election of Barack Obama will have changed America permanently and racism will be out on the ugly fringes where it belongs.
