As Race Debate Grows, Obama Steers Clear of It
WASHINGTON — President Obama has long suggested that he would like to move beyond race. The question now is whether the country will let him.
Last week’s outburst by Representative Joe Wilson, right, was motivated by racism, former President Jimmy Carter says.
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He woke up on Wednesday to a rapidly intensifying debate about how his race factors into the broader discussion of civility in politics, a question prompted in part by former President Jimmy Carter’s assertion Tuesday that racism was behind a Republican lawmaker’s outburst against Mr. Obama last week as the president addressed a joint session of Congress.
Even before that, several conservatives had accused their liberal counterparts of unfairly tainting them as racists for engaging in legitimate criticism of the White House.
Mr. Obama’s response to all this, aides say, has been to tell his staff not to be distracted by the charges and to focus on health care and the rest of his policy agenda.
“He could probably give a very powerful speech on race, just as he did in the course of the campaign,” said Valerie Jarrett, a senior adviser to Mr. Obama. “But right now his top domestic priority is health care reform. It’s difficult, challenging and complicated. And if he leads by example, our country will be far better off.”
During the presidential campaign, when he disavowed the incendiary remarks of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., he took the opportunity to explain his views on race in America and invite reconciliation. And after he stumbled in July in accusing the police of “acting stupidly” by arresting the Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr., he used the occasion for what he called a teachable moment.
But this time the White House has made clear that it does not want to engage on the topic, which beyond threatening to distract attention from the health care push could also put further strain on Mr. Obama’s broad but tenuous electoral coalition of liberals and moderates, Democrats and independents.
Signaling that he had no intention of lending his voice to Mr. Carter’s accusation, the president declined to answer a reporter’s question on the subject in the Oval Office on Wednesday.
And his press secretary, Robert Gibbs, told reporters again and again at the daily White House briefing that Mr. Obama did not share Mr. Carter’s views on the motivations of Representative Joe Wilson, the South Carolina Republican who shouted “You lie!” during Mr. Obama’s address.
Even as several leading Congressional Democrats distanced themselves from Mr. Carter’s comments, some liberals pointed Wednesday to what they describe as an increasing number of racially tinged attacks. At last weekend’s conservative protest in Washington, there were Confederate flags, references on placards to sending Mr. Obama to Africa and pictures of him in whiteface, as the Joker in the last “Batman” movie. There are also, of course, the continuing questions from some on the right about his United States citizenship.
But a number of prominent conservatives say critics have been smeared by many of the president’s supporters.
On his radio program this week, Rush Limbaugh said, “Today, it’s all based in racism — the criticism of Obama’s health care plan or whatever.” On Fox News, former Speaker Newt Gingrich added, “I think it’s very destructive for America to suggest that we can’t criticize a president without it being a racial act.”
It is difficult to gauge the extent to which the vitriol that has come Mr. Obama’s way is racially motivated and the extent to which it is simply akin to that directed at his white predecessors.
Former officials who served under President George W. Bush have been quick to recall this week that protesters frequently compared him to Hitler and that the Senate majority leader, Harry Reid of Nevada, called him a “loser” and a “liar.”
In an interview Wednesday shortly after meeting privately with Mr. Obama in the Oval Office, Colin L. Powell, secretary of state under Mr. Bush, said: “You can find pictures where Bush was called all kinds of names, with all sorts of banners being held up and burned in effigy. I’ve seen it in every presidency.”
Mr. Powell said he believed that Mr. Obama might be facing even more apparent hostility but that the blame lay not necessarily in racial bias, but instead with the partisan culture of the Internet and cable news and the way they amplify the more extreme voices.
“The issue there is not race, it’s civility,” Mr. Powell said. “This is not to say that we are suddenly racially pure, but constantly talking about it and reducing everything to black versus white is not helpful to the cause of restoring civility to our public dialogue.”
Other supporters of Mr. Obama, however, say they cannot help seeing overt racism in some of the conservative attacks.
“You cannot act like you don’t have several hundred years of racial context here, where a painted face has a racial context to it in this country,” said Cornell Belcher, a Democratic pollster who helped on Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign and has studied race extensively.
Mr. Belcher and other Obama allies said that some race-based discomfort was inevitable, especially among very conservative white voters who see Mr. Obama’s rise as reflecting a shift in the social order that comes at their expense.
Representative Elijah E. Cummings, Democrat of Maryland and former chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, said: “It’s difficult, because people haven’t seen this before. They’ve never seen a black president wanting to talk to their children, a black man saying, ‘We can do better.’ ”
Mr. Obama has many top aides who are white and have spent years dealing with race in the context of politics. He also has a close group of African-American advisers and friends for whom a racial conversation like the one bubbling up this week is not an abstract issue but a way of life. There have been occasional tensions between the two groups in the past, but on Wednesday, at least, there were no obvious signs of disagreement.
His goal, Mr. Obama has told both camps, is to be seen as a president who happens to be black rather than the nation’s first black president.
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