Obama's post-racial promise
politics, racism, racist, elections, pandering, propaganda
November 5 2008, by Shelby Steele
Barack Obama seduced whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation.
Obama's special charisma -- since his famous 2004 convention speech -- always came much more from the racial idealism he embodied than from his political ideas. In fact, this was his only true political originality. On the level of public policy, he was quite unremarkable. His economics were the redistributive axioms of old-fashioned Keynesianism; his social thought was recycled Great Society. But all this policy boilerplate was freshened up -- given an air of "change" -- by the dreamy post-racial and post-ideological kitsch he dressed it in.