Black Like Him: Obama's Narrow Path to Reelection
Sorry for all the snips. This article is good; recommended reading.
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/black-like-him-0912
Black Like Him: Obama's Narrow Path to Reelection
By Charles P. Pierce
at 9:05AM
Are you sitting down? Because this might come as a shock. Yes, it's true: Barack Obama is black. But the more shocking thing is that we have fooled ourselves into believing it doesn't matter.
These are some things the president of the United States cannot say but that I can say about him. Because he is a black man, he has an obligation to be grateful to the white people who voted him into office. Because he is a black man, he has an obligation not to use the full powers of his office in such a way as to alienate any of the white people who so graciously voted him into office. Because he is a black man, he has an obligation not to use the full advantages of his office in his effort to get those white people to reelect him as their president for another four years. Because those white people voted him into office, his primary job as president is to make sure his entire presidency is a demonstration of how far we've come as a nation on race, and that means he is not allowed to do anything or say anything that the white people who elected him can perceive to be divisive, because his primary function is to make them feel good about themselves. In theory, at least, all presidents are servants of the people who elected them. In the case of Barack Obama, it has seemed from the start that the idea as applied to him was more than mere metaphor. He is the first president in my lifetime whom the country felt obligated to remind that he know his place.
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It's not the naked racism that's so disturbing — the witch-doctor signs and the postcards featuring watermelons on the White House lawn — or even the carefully coded language of opposition by which some woman from Alabama goes on TV and, weeping, says, "I want my America back," and everybody knows what she means. None of that could surprise anyone who lived through the two campaigns Jesse Jackson ran for president in the 1980s, when it was all out in the open to the point where the artist David Hammons produced a portrait of Jackson as a blond, blue-eyed Nordic and titled it How Ya Like Me Now? (The answer was not very much. The original artwork was destroyed by vandals.) What's made Obama's presidency so difficult, and what has been used against him to considerable effect by those people who are much too civilized to depict him with a bone through his nose, is the tyranny of other people's sanctimony.
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It has been hard not to notice that he is the first president in my lifetime who is treated as though he has been given permission by the country to lead it, a permission that can be rescinded at any time, for whatever reason, fair or foul. Ordinarily, I would not find this to be a bad thing at all. Deference to the president — or, as the political scientists and pundits prefer to call it, "respect for the office" — has gotten the country into some terrible trouble over the past fifty-odd years. It is the presiding dynamic by which the war powers have been leached into the executive branch from their true constitutional home in the national legislature. Watergate dragged on for a year longer than it should have because people lined up not necessarily to defend Richard Nixon, although that was bad enough, but to defend the presidency. Iran-Contra was barely punished at all. The previous administration used the atrocities of September 11, 2001, to cement in place what already was there and, even by the end of things, when George W. Bush had committed all the misfeasance and malfeasance and nonfeasance for which his eight years are now rightly reviled, "respect for the office" remained undiminished.
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In May, Florida senator Marco Rubio called the president the most "divisive figure in modern American history," which, even if "modern American history" for Rubio is whatever popped up on his BlackBerry in the last fifteen minutes, is plainly preposterous. Rubio was reacting to the president's decision to use an executive order to allow the children of undocumented immigrants to come out of the shadows. This was a good and decent thing to do, but it was also damned fine politics and Rubio knew it. And, according to the people who dearly would love to throw him out of office, Barack Obama was elected to be "above politics." He wasn't elected to be president, after all. He was elected as an avatar of American tolerance. His attempts to get himself reelected imply a certain, well, ingratitude.
The event of him is still remarkable. The idea that America elected a black man to be its president forty years after it declined to allow Martin Luther King Jr. to stand on a balcony without getting shot still maintains its power to awe and inspire. Of course, he can't make full use of that, either, because as we know by virtue of his very election, race is no longer an issue in this country. But the rest of us can make of it what we will. Even in this, his second cautious, no-drama campaign, there remains a sense that you could get in on the making of history again. It's time for Barack Obama to be as bold as he wants the rest of the country to be. If the path is narrow, you might as well run as walk.
(Published in the September 2012 issue of Esquire, on sale now)
= new reply since forum marked as read
welcome to DU! 
I also believe in taking collective responsibility and speaking out against these new voting suppression moves, some of which appear aimed against black folk, in the early voting periods that allow church groups to assist in taking "souls to the polls". Besides not having the correct identification required under new onerous procedures ("poll taxes"
, many elderly people are unable to get around on the poor public transportation systems both in the urban centers and the rural areas, where they may be non existent. Remember that such buses and the like may not even be available on Election Day, or run on greatly reduced "holiday" schedules. We all need now to plan accordingly to encourage people to get out and vote.
These are not simply tactics, they're really being legislated into American law and therefore lay claim to the lame defense of "states' rights". But that's precisely what the Civil Rights Act of 1965 and it's subsequent extensions of Section 5 is designed to protect us from.
It now appears that we need the protection more than ever before, and in more states than originally intended, which is so sad, with the Republican party trying to drag us back to pre-Civil Rights Movement times, and even to earlier centuries in terms of women's reproductive rights. You can also intuitively feel that this is the real reason why the Republicans were clumsily going after our Attorney General Holder in a transparently false witch hunt, resulting in the congressional equivalent of a legal lynching holding him in contempt. It's no accident that he was picked to be made an example of the showing of Teapublican legislative power in an attempt to intimidate all those who oppose them.
It's also hauntingly ironic that AG Holder's sister in law Vivian Malone Jones was one of two African American women who were initially blocked from enrolling in the University of Alabama even when accompanied by Deputy AG Katzenbach with Governor Wallace standing in the doorway like some mad pit bull. Gov. Wallace then made a speech about States' sovereignty on the steps of that institution of learning, but had to stand aside when the Federalized Alabama National Guard escorted her back to the school, where she completed her degree, and again ironically enough became employed by the DOJ Division of Civil Rights. AG Holder also began his legal career at the DOJ.
Further irony that infuriates me is that AG Eric Holder, like General Colin Powell, is also from the Bronx, and of West Indian heritage. That's just me, having been a resident of that borough as well as all the others including right on the street where the West Indian Festival is held in Brooklyn. We should be celebrating these figures as role models, not censuring them time after time.
I will not quote Santayana again, but my import is similar.