Inside this fearful collective is a burgeoning debate about what to do about the Trump effect — a debate amassing intensity now that Trump’s bigotry appears to be headed straight for the Republican nomination. Who, if anyone, should counter Trump’s bigotry this spring? Hillary Clinton? Bernie Sanders?
What about President Barack Obama? Louisiana Gov. Bobby Jindal recently blamed Obama for creating Trump. Polls are showing Obama will leave office as one of the most polarizing presidents in history — a polarization that paved the way for Trump’s candidacy.
One South Carolinian columnist recently urged Obama to save America from Trump’s angry Whites. President Obama was urged to dedicate some time during his final year in office to go “on a listening tour of White America — to connect, in person, with Americans he has either been unable or unwilling to reach during his seven years in office.”
If you feel like you’ve heard this or hoped this before, then you probably have. Seven long years ago, Sen. Obama sailed into the oval office on a wave of hope and change. He was supposed to be the Great Unifier. Large swaths of his multiracial ocean of voters were hopeful that their newly elected president had the heritage, temperament and talent to transform the divided racial states of America into the United States of America. For some, the ultimate task of President Obama was reaching and calming down those angry Whites. President Obama’s task of bringing the races together was bigger than politics, more consequential for his presidential legacy than ending the Great Recession or War on Terror.
Senator Obama and Candidate Obama and first-term President Obama were all conjuring “there is no blue America/red America,” imagining a “more perfect union,” and envisioning the march of racial progress. But over the course of his presidency, angry Whites have seemingly awoken President Obama from his audacious hope of reaching them, just as angry Whites awoke Martin Luther King Jr. from his audacious dream a year before he died in 1968. As Obama admitted during his last State of the Union Address, “It’s one of the few regrets of my presidency — that the rancor and suspicion between the parties has gotten worse instead of better.”
Through it all, some pundits are still urging the outgoing president to step forward, defy the odds and become the Great Unifier. They are refusing to recognize the reality of why President Obama’s early outreach efforts toward angry Whites failed. Why did President Obama lose out to Sarah Palin, FOX News, the Tea Party, evangelical pastors, Rush Limbaugh, the Ku Klux Klan, and now Ted Cruz and Donald Trump?
