In his State of the Union address last night President Obama ably impersonated the Barack Obama, then a Senate candidate in Illinois, who declared in his well-regarded keynote address to the 2004 Democratic Convention that
there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.
There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America….
We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
That speech fooled some people who should have known better, as well as a much larger and more significant swath of voters into believing that Obama would be “post-racial.” Wrong. As a candidate for president he opposed state initiatives in Colorado and elsewhere that would prohibit discrimination against, or preferential treatment of, individuals based on their race. As president he has staffed the Civil Rights Division of his Justice Dept. with officials who have steadfastly refused to enforce civil rights laws with an even hand, and all of judicial nominees support the state distributing benefits and burdens based on race.
So when this president says, as he did last night, that
We believe that in a country where every race and faith and point of view can be found, we are still bound together as one people; that we share common hopes and a common creed…
justly skeptical citizens should ask, “‘We’? What ‘We’ is that, Mr. President? And what common creed”?
Most Americans do in fact believe in a “common creed,” one of whose foundational principles is that Americans should be treated by their governments “without regard” to race, creed, or color. If the president and any elected members of his party believe in that common creed, they have a most peculiar way of showing it.
