Barack the Healer

[Geee]

National Review:

Barack Obama, both substantively and symbolically, ran in 2008 as a much-needed healer. He was to bring the nation together as never before — a vow taken to heart by millions of voters of all backgrounds who ensured Obama’s 2008 victory. His biracial background and his uncanny ability to navigate through both Harvard Law School and the politics of Chicago community organizing seemed to make him ideally suited to usher in a postracial era — as was acknowledged, albeit quite crudely and insensitively, by both Harry Reid and Joe Biden in the 2008 campaign.

Yet quite the opposite development tragically has followed from Obama’s election. From the beginning of the 2008 campaign — evident in the exasperation of Bill Clinton (“they played the race card on me”) during the Democratic primaries — racial tensions have heightened, rather than lessened. We get a glimpse of the new strains in popular culture from the widely different reactions to the Trayvon Martin case: Black leaders point to racism in the treatment of “white Hispanic” George Zimmerman; whites cite rush-to-judgment bias against Zimmerman, as, in comparison, the wholesale carnage among black. youth in Chicago is hardly discussed.

When the president announced that the son he never had might have resembled Trayvon, one wondered what would have been the reaction had Bill Clinton weighed in right in the midst of the O.J trial, lamenting that the second daughter he never had might have looked like the slain Nicole. Are the daily accounts of black-on-white violence and flash-mobbing that splash across, say, the Drudge Report racist in their emphases, or are the mainstream media’s efforts to ignore the incidents completely more likely to be racially illiberal?

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Again, these apparently rising tensions should be unlikely. Obama’s cabinet — like Bush’s and Clinton’s — is multiracial. The country at large has never been more intermarried, assimilated, and integrated. Popular culture is truly meritocratic, as the minority status of cultural icons has become irrelevant or perhaps even advantageous. Oprah Winfrey, Sean Combs, and Michael Jordan are among the wealthiest celebrities in the world. We have not had a white male secretary of state — the world’s second-most-influential position — in more than 15 years, since the tenure of the late Warren Christopher. Herman Cain — until media disclosures about his allegedly problematic past — once led all conservative presidential candidates in primary polls. Condoleezza Rice is mentioned prominently among possible Republican VP choices. Representative Alan West is a rock star of the Tea Party. Michael Steele headed the Republican National Committee.