Obama immediately pounced on Ferraro’s comments. He had spent his entire life learning how to assert a black identity for purposes of advancement, and then blew up when Ferraro had the effrontery to mention it. On the NBC Today Show, Obama accused Ferraro of engaging in “slice-and-dice politics that’s about race and about gender” and “that’s what Americans are tired of because they recognize that when we divide ourselves in that way, we can’t solve problems.” Refusing to give up the mantle of victimhood, Obama suggested, preposterously, that it actually hurt him to be black.
In an interview with the Morning Call of Allentown, Pennsylvania, Obama said: “I don’t think Geraldine Ferraro’s comments have any place in our politics or in the Democratic Party. They are divisive. I think anybody who understands the history of this country knows they are patently absurd. And I would expect that the same way those comments don’t have a place in my campaign, they shouldn’t have a place in Senator Clinton’s either.”20
Obama campaign advisor David Axelrod called Ferraro’s comments “offensive”21 and demanded that she “be denounced and censured by the campaign.”22 Obama senior advisor Susan Rice called the remarks “outrageous and offensive.”23
Even Jesse Jackson hadn’t played the race card when Ferraro said the exact same thing about him during his 1988 run for president. Jackson simply said, “Millions of Americans have a point of view different from Ferraro’s.”24 When you have a faster racial hair-trigger than Jesse Jackson, you might not be the man who is going to move this country past race.
Within days of the Obama campaign’s attack, Ferraro was off the Clinton campaign.
A few months earlier, in December 2007, Obama-supporter Andrew Sullivan had written a much-acclaimed article in the Atlantic, arguing that the “logic” of Obama’s candidacy was not about his policy proposals, political skills, ideology or speaking skills. Rather, it was his ability to be a “transformational” candidate—because he was black.
What does he offer? First and foremost: his face. Think of it as the most effective potential rebranding of the United States since Reagan.…There is simply no other candidate with the potential of Obama to do this. Which is where his face comes in.
Consider this hypothetical. It’s November 2008. A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man—Barack Hussein Obama—is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm. A brown-skinned man whose father was an African, who grew up in Indonesia and Hawaii, who attended a majority-Muslim school as a boy, is now the alleged enemy.25
The young Pakistani Muslim would suddenly realize that we’re soft and loveable! Some Americans might have preferred that the Pakistani Muslim turn on his TV and see that America is strong and resolute, but the point was, Sullivan had cited Obama’s “brown-skin” as a major selling point. We’d finally prove to the world that we weren’t racists!
Isn’t that what Ferraro was saying?
Why was the Obama campaign offended by Ferraro’s comment that it helped him to be black when all his supporters were saying the same thing?
Not a week after the shock and awe campaign against Ferraro, another Obama supporter was droning on and on to the New Bedford Standard-Times about how great it was that Obama was black. The Democrats’ 2004 presidential candidate John Kerry said: “It would be such an affirmation of who we say we are as a people if we can elect an African American president.”
Kerry also said that Obama could have a moderating influence on the Islamic world “because he’s a black man, who has come from a place of oppression and repression through the years in our own country.” (Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961.) Still Kerry continued: “We only broke the back of civil rights, Jim Crow, in the 1960s here. Everybody in the world knows this is a recent journey for America too. And everybody still knows that issues of skin and discrimination still exist.”26
So liberals considered it an advantage that Obama was black. But if anyone else said it was an advantage that Obama was black, it was “absurd,” “offensive” and “divisive.”
The day that Ferraro resigned from the Clinton campaign, also happened to be the day ABC News began revealing sermons of Obama’s pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, who seemed to hate America almost as much as Michelle Obama did.
As Wright’s zesty comments about America and white people became known, Obama had to engage in some quick damage control by giving a speech on race.27
He began his speech by talking about slavery: “And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States.”
All of blue-collar America said, “I wasn’t there, I didn’t hear any of it.”
Reverend Wright and Obama are slavery nostalgics. They have no experience of slavery, lynchings, Jim Crow—anything other than abject white patronization. And yet the further slavery recedes into history, the fresher a memory it becomes!
(Indeed, as the son of a Kenyan Muslim, Obama is more likely descended from slave traders than the average American: For much of its history, the slave trade in Africa was controlled by Arab Muslims28 and a key slave trade port, Mbasa, is located in Kenya.29 On the eve of the Civil War in 1860, only 8 percent of Americans owned slaves.30)
Why was Obama talking about slavery? As liberal blogger Mickey Kaus said: “We know about slavery. We want to know why Obama picked his paranoid pastor!”
In another light touch from his tedious, guilt-inducing speech, Obama compared his raving racist loon of a minister howling “God damn America!” to…poor Geraldine Ferraro. Just as some saw Wright as “a crank or a demagogue,” he said, others saw Ferraro as harboring “some deep-seated racial bias.” This was an outrageous smear, tempered only by its silliness. It was bad enough to score a campaign point by falsely accusing Ferraro of racism. To multiply that by claiming her obviously true remark proceeded from the same rancid racism as Reverend Wright’s tirades was laughable.
Obama also compared Wright’s anger to white people concerned about crime and to his grandmother who “once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street.”31
Once again, we turn to Jesse Jackson as the voice of reason on race. In a famous 1993 speech to Operation PUSH, Jackson said: “There is nothing more painful to me at this stage in my life than to walk down the street and hear footsteps and start thinking about robbery, then look around and see somebody white and feel relieved.…After all we have been through, just to think we can’t walk down our own streets, how humiliating.”32
According to Obama, Jackson is a racist.
It was as if the entire 1980s and the OJ verdict had never happened. Liberal racism detectors were turned on high and we were back to Jimmy the Greek–style instant-career executions for dumb remarks.
Liberal racism hunters hit a gold mine with Don Imus, who is a Mount Vesuvius of dumb remarks. In April 2007, he slimed the Rutgers women’s basketball team as “nappy headed hos.” (A year earlier, Imus had made an inane, grandstanding, “Stupid White Men” remark to try to get in with the brothers, telling basketball star Charles Barkley—a black man who grew up in Alabama in the 1960s: “In my view, just as a white man, it doesn’t seem to me that a lot has changed since those marches in Selma.”33 I think Barkley knows the difference.)
Obama not only called for Imus’s firing, but he compared Imus’s stupid, comment to the mass shooting at Virginia Tech by a psychopathic student. In a speech about violence the day after the massacre, Obama said there was “another kind of violence”— the “verbal violence” of Don Imus.34
Al Sharpton has too much dignity to say something like that.
The OJ verdict had ripped the scales from people’s eyes—but Obama put them right back. Indeed, a few years into the Obama administration, Al Sharpton, author of the Tawana Brawley hoax, was given his own show on MSNBC.
&nbs
p; After even our racial watchdogs in the media had stopped leaping on every arrest of a black person as prima facie evidence of racism, Obama tried to turn a disorderly conduct charge against a Harvard professor into an incident of racial profiling.
The reader will recall Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates’s aggressive reaction to police who responded to a neighbor’s call reporting two men jimmying Gates’s front door in July 2009. Gates didn’t have his house keys, so he and his driver had broken in.
Sergeant James Crowley, a white police officer, showed up—along with a black and Hispanic officer—and asked Gates for identification. Anyone would have been annoyed, but Gates seems to have overreacted a tad, going on a tirade against the officer, accusing him of racial bias and saying the officer didn’t know who he was messing with. He followed the officer outside to continue haranguing him, drawing a small crowd. So Crowley arrested the professor for disorderly conduct.
Gates claimed he had been harassed by racist cops, apparently unaware that there are huge areas of the country where people don’t think it’s heroic to bully cops after you break into your own house, for example, 99 percent of the country outside of Cambridge, Massachusetts.
A few weeks later, as the professor was vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard, the black president of the United States accused Crowley of acting “stupidly” for arresting a black Harvard professor, and then going into a long soliloquy about racial profiling. (Also, for the journalists indignant over any passing reference to assassination in connection with Obama, he made a joke about his getting shot by the Secret Service if he tried to break into the White House.)
Now, I don’t know, not having been there and not seeing all the facts, what role race played in that. But I think it’s fair to say, number one, any of us would be pretty angry; number two, that the Cambridge police acted stupidly in arresting somebody when there was already proof that they were in their own home; and, number three, what I think we know separate and apart from this incident is that there’s a long history in this country of African Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately. That’s just a fact.
As you know, when I was in the state legislature in Illinois, we worked on a racial profiling bill because there was indisputable evidence that blacks and Hispanics were being stopped disproportionately.…
And so on.
Obama kept saying that he didn’t know the facts, but he still somehow knew that the incident was an example of racism.
The country exploded in rage at this playing of the race card by the most powerful person in the universe in order to denounce a defenseless white cop, on behalf of a gilded Harvard professor, no less. We finally had a real-life version of the white power structure with all its cruel humiliations—except the power structure was black.
Instead of agreeing with Obama that Crowley had acted “stupidly,” everyone wondered what might have happened to the cop if he hadn’t been a model policeman, who taught diversity classes and once famously gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to a black athlete. They wondered what would have happened if the 911 caller had identified the suspected burglars as black—which it turns out she did not. What if Crowley hadn’t been fully supported by other cops at the scene, including two minority officers? What if, at some point in his life, Crowley had been accused—falsely or not—of racism? His life would have been ruined.
Gates was tired, he was sick, he was cranky. And he was standing in his own house. Him, we understand. What was enraging was seeing the most powerful man in the universe stepping into the middle of an ordinary dust-up to accuse a white person of racism. That ought to be a serious charge in America.
Another state criminal matter Obama injected himself into was the 2012 claimed self-defense shooting of Trayvon Martin by a mixed-race Hispanic, George Zimmerman. During a White House news conference, the president said, “My main message is to the parents of Trayvon Martin: If I had a son, he’d look like Trayvon.”
Obama looks remarkably like Michael LaSane, the kid who killed a white school teacher because he wanted her car, but there’s no point in mentioning it.
It was just the encouragement the media needed. Like Captain Ahab searching for the great white whale, journalists are constantly on the hunt for proof that America was a white-supremacist wonderland.
The Hispanic instantly became white. Zimmerman was the villain, so he couldn’t be “Hispanic,” mixed-race or “Lah-TEE-noh.” (We don’t call French people les Français or Germans Deutsche—why are we suddenly speaking Spanish to identify Hispanics?) Liberals seem to imagine black victims heaving a sigh of relief when they’re shot by other black people: Thank heaven I was shot by a black so at least I wasn’t a victim of racism!
Martin’s family behaved with the utmost dignity, despite it being their son who had died. Meanwhile, the media charged off, manufacturing evidence and doctoring tapes to whip up a phony race crime. Reminiscent of the KTLA Rodney King edit, NBC edited Zimmerman’s 911 call about a suspicious character in his neighborhood to make Zimmerman sound like a race-obsessed bigot.
This is the actual exchange Zimmerman had with a police dispatcher during his 911 call:
ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. Or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.
DISPATCHER: OK, and this guy—is he black, white or Hispanic?
ZIMMERMAN: He looks black.
This is the version played on NBC:
ZIMMERMAN: This guy looks like he’s up to no good. He looks black.
The edited version, with Zimmerman reporting nothing more suspicious than a black person in his neighborhood, aired twice on the Today Show, on NBC’s Miami affiliate and on its Web page. The truth about NBC’s deceptive editing came out only when Brent Bozell exposed it on his Newsbusters Web site and Fox News’s Hannity.35
After MSNBC had given the story nonstop coverage for two months, as soon as the murder case against Zimmerman began to collapse, the network buried it at the bottom of the sea, never again discussing the case in its prime-time programming.36
After Obama’s false charges of racism against Ferraro, McCain, Palin, and various police forces around the country; Bill Clinton’s false accusations of racism against the people of Arkansas and Special Forces; Bob Shrum’s sleazy ad in the Maryland gubernatorial race falsely accusing a Republican of racism; Gore’s loony claims of racism against Bush and the founding fathers, we didn’t need a road map to notice that liberals cry “racism” for political advantage.
But we got one anyway, when, in the summer of 2010, the private chats on JournoList, were leaked, exposing the fourth estate plotting to protect Obama and smear conservatives.
The Daily Caller began publishing the once-secret online chats of this members-only e-mail list of liberal journalists, bloggers, activists and professors, that included Time magazine’s Joe Klein, the New Yorker’s Jeffrey Toobin and New York Times columnist Paul Krugman, as well as staffers from Newsweek, Politico, Huffington Post, the New Republic, the Nation, and many others.
As soon as the Reverend Wright scandal broke, there was a flurry of commentary on how to protect Obama. Chris Hayes of the Nation urged members working in the “mainstream media” to ignore the story, complaining that “hand wringing about just how awful and odious Rev. Wright’s remarks are just keeps the hustle going.”
But the poison-tipped arrow in the journalists’ quiver was to randomly call Republicans “racists.” Thus, Spencer Ackerman of the Washington Independent suggested to his fellow journalists (as if Paul Krugman needed to be reminded) that they should make false racism charges:
What is necessary is to raise the cost on the right of going after the left. In other words, find a rightwinger’s [sic] and smash it through a plate-glass window. Take a snapshot of the bleeding mess and send it out in a Christmas card to let the right know that it needs to live in a state of constant fear. Obviously I mean this rhetorically.
[T]ake one of them—Fred Barnes, Karl Rove, who cares—and call them racists. Ask: why do they have such a deep-seated problem with a black politician who unites the country? What lurks behind those problems? This makes *them* sputter with rage, which in turn leads to overreaction and self-destruction.
When some members objected that it would tarnish the Obama campaign to make accusations of racism, Ackerman clarified: “I’m not saying OBAMA should do this. I’m saying WE should do this.”37
And that’s exactly what happened.
CHAPTER 16
THE MEDIA CRY “RACIST” IN A CROWDED THEATER
As Obama played peek-a-boo with accusations of racism, the media searched for the evidence. Unable to find anything, they flung accusations anyway. Suddenly everything was racist. The word “the” was racist.
A partial list of the many, many words or actions proving a racist heart in the era of Obama are:
stating the obvious fact that Obama was helped by his race;
running a campaign commercial against Obama;
mentioning that Obama’s friend is Bill Ayers, a domestic terrorist;
not electing Obama president;
Scott Brown’s pickup truck;
opposing Obamacare;
opposing Obama’s stimulus bill;
opposing Obama’s jobs bill;
joining the Tea Party;
using Obama’s middle name;
demanding to see Obama’s birth certificate;
arresting a black Harvard professor;
being a Republican;
supporting gun rights;
requesting documents from Attorney General Eric Holder in the administration’s Mexican gun-dumping scandal;
voter identification laws;
references to Obama playing basketball;
using the phrase “kitchen cabinet” in relation to a black person.