Obama’s Legacy

I know, I know. Obama’s not gone yet, and predictions of his political demise are premature. Thus I may be among the first to discuss his legacy, but I believe the outlines of that legacy are beginning to emerge.

“By now,” the Washington Times editorialized yesterday,

the default judgment about the Barack Obama-Eric H. Holder Jr. Justice Department is that it discriminates intentionally on the basis of race. By the precise definition used in the American Heritage dictionary, the department is racialist.

The Justice Department hasn’t seriously contested the accusation of racialism. Recently resigned whistleblowing attorney J. Christian Adams has made credible charges, backed by at least five former colleagues, that the department’s Civil Rights Division has adopted a policy of refusing to enforce civil rights laws on behalf of whites victimized by minority perpetrators. [See here and here for reports of that support for Adams.]

Quoting that editorial, Glenn Reynolds wrote this morning on InstaPundit that

[t]he Justice Department’s behavior here runs the risk of delegitimizing the entire civil rights and voting apparatus, which would be a disaster. But if “civil rights” becomes a synonym for “helping Democratic constituencies only” then disaster is what it will be.

This disaster would be (is already?) so toxic that it threatens to pollute far more than Obama’s reputation and the civil rights apparatus of the Justice Dept.

I am tempted to say that the rapidly increasing evidence under Obama’s leadership that “civil rights” has sunk to mean only whatever is good for blacks and Democrats stains the very idea of civil rights, but the fact is that the “civil rights” organizations began to foul themselves long before Obama, when they abandoned the “without regard” principle of colorblind equality to which they owed both their success and reputation in favor of demanding preferential treatment based on race. They turned themselves into a special interest group based on a racialist principle that most Americans find repugnant. (For latest evidence of public opinion on racial preference, go here.)

With the widespread realization that the promise of Obama’s post-racialism has been replaced by what David Limbaugh calls (citing chapter and verse) our “‘Most’ Racial President,” I suspect that Obama’s saddest, most depressing legacy will turn out to be the opposite of what nearly all regarded as his most magnificent triumph: breaking at long last the color barrier to the highest office. After Obama’s unabashed racialism in office, who will believe the next black politician who proclaims that he will take us beyond race, that, as Obama said in presenting himself to the nation in his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Convention,

there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.

(APPLAUSE)

The pundits, the pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue States: red states for Republicans, blue States for Democrats. But I’ve got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states.

From that soaring early promise, Obama has descended into presidency that is both black and blue, and that will probably poison the well for future black candidates trying, or claiming to try, to move beyond race and for liberals who promise to move beyond partisanship.

How sad that Obama, whom so many congratulated (and congratulated themselves for voting for him) for moving us beyond race now seems certain to have sunk us even further into it, widening rather than narrowing the racial divide.

But lest you despair, there is one silver lining to this generally gloomy cloud, and that is what Obama’s experiment in unrestrained liberal government — huge increases in government regulation, in spending and hence in debt and deficit, favoritism to unions, bows to our antagonists overseas and cold shoulders to our allies — has done to the reputation of liberalism as a governing philosophy and the Democrats as a party ready and able to govern.

As a result of Obama, I suspect it will take longer to clean up the reputation of liberalism and the Democrats than it will to clean up the Gulf and its beaches.