President Barack Obama was marketed to America as the magic cure for its racial divisions. But in my book America’s Half-Blood Prince Barack Obama’s "Story Of Race And Inheritance", based on a close study of Obama’s own much-purchased, little-read autobiography Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance, I argued that Obama was in fact fundamentally motivated by race and that some people, probably his credulous white supporters, were in for a big surprise.
This is exactly what has happened. Obama has proved racially divisive both for implicit and explicit reasons. Eighteen months into his Presidency, the races are farther apart in their views of him than when he came to office.
Here are Obama’s Gallup Poll approval ratings every week since his Inauguration:
White disenchantment with Obama appears to have set in during the warm weather months of 2009—about the time of Obama’s nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court (May 26, 2009); the Supreme Court’s rebuke of Sotomayor’s ruling in the Ricci case (June 29, 2009); and the ludicrous damage-controlling “Beer Summit” featuring Professor Henry Louis Gates and an Obama-dissed Cambridge, MA police officer, James Crowley (July 22-30, 2009).
Since the end of summer 2009, Obama’s staffers, such as the cynical Chicagoan Rahm Emanuel, have worked diligently to keep their boss from alarming whites with obvious racial gaffes—as when he responded frankly to the Henry Louis Gates question at one of his rare press conferences. Obama’s rating among whites has continued to trickle downward, but at a less catastrophic rate.
