BACK TO THE SIXTIES – AT 7:14 A.M. ET:  Four months ago, was anyone talking about race?  I don't think so.  Now it's all the rage.  Why, don't plan a dinner party, or even a backyard barbecue, unless you're prepared to indulge.  Some sixties folk songs would be nice.

Victor Davis Hanson, who's written some sharp pieces this week, examines what has happened:

...in just 18 months of the Obama administration, racial discord is growing and relations seem to have been set back a generation.

Black voters are galvanizing behind Obama at a time of rapidly falling support. White independents, in contrast, are leaving Obama in droves...

And this is occurring right before a decisive election.

...Why the escalation of racial tension in the supposed postracial age of Obama?

First, Obama's reputation as a racial healer was largely the creation of the media. In fact, Obama had a number of racially polarizing incidents that probably would have disqualified any other presidential candidate of the past 30 years.

His two-decade apprenticeship at Trinity Church under the racist and anti-Semitic Rev. Jeremiah Wright has never been adequately explained. Obama indulged in racial stereotyping himself when he wrote off the white lower-middle class of Pennsylvania as clueless zealots clinging to their guns, religion and xenophobia.

Obama also characterized his grandmother as a "typical white person" when he implied that her supposed fear of young black males symbolizes the prejudices of the entire white community.

And in the White House?

Such campaign trash talk did not stop during the first 18 months of the Obama presidency. The race-baiting Van Jones -- the short-lived presidential advisor on "green jobs" -- should never have been appointed. Then, the president himself criticized Cambridge, Mass., police for acting "stupidly" when they arrested his friend, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates.

It's a much longer list, as Hanson points out.

Yet the country passed the old white/black divide years ago. We are a racially diverse society of Asians, blacks, Hispanics, whites, and mixtures of all that and more. In a world of conservative Cubans and liberal whites, race is no longer necessarily a guide to politics.

Who now, exactly, is the racial "Other" deserving of special consideration in hiring and education? A half-Punjabi immigrant whose father owns 500 acres? A three-quarters Puerto Rican who just arrived in New York? A Korean-American son of an orthodontist? The African-American children of a Cabinet official?

The more the president appeals to his base in racial terms, the more his appointees identify themselves as members of a particular tribe, and the more political issues are framed by racial divisions, so all the more such racial obsession creates a backlash among the racially diverse American people.

America has largely moved beyond race. Tragically, our president and a host of his supportive special interests have not.

COMMENT:  I think the issue goes beyond race, and into the realm of radical politics.  Remember, Obama was largely shaped by advisers and mentors for whom race was not simply a cause, but a weapon, to be employed for political purposes.

That is not to suggest that we still don't have racial prejudice.  Of course we do, although it has been vastly diminished in my lifetime.  But some people live in the past, and would like to go back to the confrontational racial politics of the sixties – in part because it benefits them and brings them newfound glory, in part because they feel more comfortable as combatants than healers.

The president could do a great deal to calm the waters.  So far he hasn't, probably because he, and his political counselors, may see some upside in rousing the ethnic base of the Democratic Party.

July 23,  2010