VIA WASHINGTON POST:
By Courtland Milloy
On several occasions this year, President Obama has expressed with certain bravado a threat to “call out” anyone who would undermine his reform efforts. The problem is that the Ivy League gentleman from Hawaii appears not to have mastered this coarsened art of the streetwise rebuke and, as a result, he tends to come off as bluffing.
“If you misrepresent what’s in this [health care] plan, we will call you out,” Obama told a joint session of Congress last week. Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.) apparently knew better. He not only misrepresented the plan but also interrupted Obama’s speech to call the president a liar.
Sure enough, Obama did not call him out.
Let’s face it: Our articulate and mild-mannered president doesn’t have the stomach for the kind of merciless ridicule that one uses to expose and embarrass political hypocrites and scoundrels. But if Obama is going to keep threatening to call people out — as if he were from the streets and not just someone who used to work in the streets — the least he can do is learn the fundamentals.
Otherwise, he’s just selling wolf tickets — writing macho bad checks with his mouth and leaving others to cover the racial overdraft.
Some people don’t believe Wilson’s outburst had anything to do with race. They’ll tell you it’s democracy in action. But tell that to the many African Americans who know first-hand the subtlety of post-racial slights. What had been our excitement over Obama’s election is rapidly becoming consternation at a marked increase in racism and attendant racial disparities — in health, income, jobs and housing — to say nothing of Obama’s abject refusal to even broach the subject of race.
