Earlier in the week, former President Jimmy Carter said the angry outbursts at town hall meetings and in Congress about health care reforms are racially motivated. When Jimmy Cater made the statement that “I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man," well he was not off the mark. I have seen too many right wing political cartoons showing our current President within racial stereotypes. One example being the President portrayed as a monkey eating watermelon at a state dinner. Yea, Ha Ha real funny assholes.
Although President Obama said on Friday the angry criticism about his health care agenda is not driven by racism, but is instead motivated by an intense concern about the proper role of government. Where this is true as an aspect on health care, you cannot deny that for many on the extreme right also have the racial interjection aspect too.
President Obama has long suggested that he would like to move beyond race and he is right to say so but the pertinent question is whether the country will let him.
The president said the things that are being said about him are similar to what was said about President Franklin Delano Roosevelt - that he is a "communist" and a "socialist, etc."
I think that President Obama is right to calm down or deny the racial aspect of his Presidency because it would be a great political move by the Republican’s to get every issue bogged down by diverting the arguments into a constant debate on whether it is racially motivated or not. By diverting any debate or argument to this aspect, they split and divide the population on a diverted argument causing a derailment on any progress of programs that the President is trying to move forward.
So those of us who are supporting the President and his programs, let us all not fall into the opposition’s trap of making everything related to the President racially motivated. Bottom line it is not about race but about getting his programs passed.