With The President's Supporters, It's Always About Racism

It's never about his policies, his beliefs, his actions, or his failures. No, for them it's always and only about his skin color. They are the true racists.

Electoral racism in its most naked, egregious and aggressive form is the unwillingness of white Americans to vote for a black candidate regardless of the candidate’s qualifications, ideology or party. This form of racism was a standard feature of American politics for much of the twentieth century. So far, Barack Obama has been involved in two elections that suggest that such racism is no longer operative. His re-election bid, however, may indicate that a more insidious form of racism has come to replace it...

Still, electoral racism cannot be reduced solely to its most egregious, explicit form. It has proved more enduring and baffling than these results can capture. The 2012 election may be a test of another form of electoral racism: the tendency of white liberals to hold African-American leaders to a higher standard than their white counterparts. If old-fashioned electoral racism is the absolute unwillingness to vote for a black candidate, then liberal electoral racism is the willingness to abandon a black candidate when he is just as competent as his white predecessors.

Yes, it's from the Nation, so you expect this kind of tripe, but it's still jarring when confronted with the reality that there are people out there who actually believe this stuff. By what standard is he competent at all? A Washington Post story about Ron Suskind's inside-the-White-House book states, "He asserts that Obama realized a secret truth in the fall of 2008 — that he was not ready to serve as president — and he writes that Obama 'lost ownership of his words and, eventually, his deeds.' " If true, that would be one of Obama's few beliefs that has any semblance of reality.