Barack Obama’s most disturbing legacy

Never has America been more assimilated, integrated, and intermarried — as is evident in everything from politics to popular culture, from statistics to anecdotes. Yet from late 2007 to 2012, Barack Obama has been establishing new rules of racial referencing. In general, his utterances follow a disheartening pattern.

Think for a minute of prominent public figures who at one time or another have been accused by the Obama team of either being racist or playing racial politics against them: Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Newt Gingrich, Darrell Issa, John McCain, Sarah Palin, Rick Perry, and Rick Santorum. The list grows in direct proportion to the uncertainty of Obama’s political fortunes.

President Obama and his supporters insist that they deemphasize matters of race, but their record in just the last four years reveals a veritable obsession with it, in a manner that was never true of prior minority members serving in high office — think of Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, or Alberto Gonzales. 

What can we expect in 2012? Race all the time at every venue. In 2008, there were two general themes to the blank-slate candidacy of Barack Obama: (1) America could change history by electing its first African-American president, and (2) a vote for Barack Obama was a repudiation of the then-unpopular George Bush. But four years later there is now an Obama record of dismal economic growth, huge deficits, astronomical new national debt, high unemployment, fresh class and racial divisions, and a failed reset/outreach foreign policy that had promised breakthroughs with Iran, the Palestinians, Russia, Syria, and Venezuela, based on redefining traditional notions of friends and enemies.

Who would wish to run on a record like that?