Divider-in-Chief (25 page)

Holder referenced the words of Congressman John Lewis, a civil rights leader who in a 2011 speech on the House floor claimed that voting rights were “under attack... [by] a deliberate and systematic attempt to prevent millions of elderly voters, young voters, students, [and] minority and low-income voters from exercising their constitutional right to engage in the democratic process.” Holder said:

Holder's purpose in speaking to the Council of Black Churches was clear. He was there to plead with black pastors to get their parishioners to the polls on Election Day. According to the Census Bureau, black voter registration is down 7 percent across the country.
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By invoking Jim Crow and the specter of civil rights violations, Holder was making his point crystal clear: Get your parishioners to vote for Barack Obama or the gains of the civil rights movement could be revoked.

The laws Holder alluded to as threatening voting rights are voter ID laws that have been passed in various states to make sure people are voting legally. Voter ID laws are enacted to prevent ballot box fraud. Such laws have been found by numerous courts not to be an “undue burden” under the Voting Rights Act and the Constitution. Supporters of the laws argue they will ensure that elections are fair and cut down on the potential for voter fraud.

Some states have seen turnout among minorities rise after voter ID laws were passed. Georgia, for instance, began implementing a Voter ID law in 2007 that required voters to show one of six forms of ID. According to data from Georgia Secretary of State Brian Kemp, the black vote increased by 42 percent, or 366,000 votes, in 2008 over 2004.
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The Hispanic vote grew by 140 percent, or 25,000 votes, in 2008, while the white vote increased by only 8 percent from four years earlier. The black vote in Georgia also increased, by 44.2 percent during the mid-term congressional races of 2010 from 2006. The Hispanic vote rose by 66.5 percent in 2010 from four years earlier.
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These and other data suggest that voter ID laws discriminate only against those for whom it is illegal to vote in the first place. But Holder has made blocking voter ID laws a centerpiece of his tenure at the Department of Justice.

South Carolina passed a law in 2011 that requires voters to display government-issued IDs at polling places. Under the 1965 Voting Rights Act, South Carolina is one of a number of states that are required to receive federal “pre-clearance” on voting changes to ensure that they don't hurt minorities' political power. The Justice Department rejected the law, arguing that it discriminated against minority voters. It was the first time the government had rejected a voter-identification law in nearly twenty years.
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The Obama administration struck again in March 2012, blocking a Texas law requiring voters to show photo identification before they can vote. The administration asserted potential harm to Hispanic voters who don't have the necessary documents.
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The law required voters to show government-issued photo identification, such as a driver's license, passport, military identification card, birth certification with a photo, or concealed handgun permit.

Texas Republican Governor Rick Perry criticized the Obama administration's decision. “The DOJ [Department of Justice] has no valid reason for rejecting this important law, which requires nothing more extensive
than the type of photo identification necessary to receive a library card or board an airplane,”
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he said in a statement.

Texas Senator John Cornyn blasted the political calculation in the lawsuit. He said that the lawsuit “reeks of politics and appears to be an effort by the Department of Justice to carry water for the president's reelection campaign.”
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The Justice Department has also sued Florida, which is suing the federal government right back, over the state's voter ID law. The left characterizes Florida's efforts to make sure all voters are legal as a campaign to purge Latinos from the voting rolls. But as Florida Senator Marco Rubio has said, “I think there's the goal of ensuring that everyone who votes in Florida is qualified to vote. If you're not a citizen of the United States, you shouldn't be voting. That's the law.”
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How does opposition to voter ID laws help President Obama? Not only does it allow the president to pretend that he is standing in defense of the voting rights of minority voters—and to imply the Republicans are trying to take these rights away—but it is apparently the presumption of President Obama and the Democratic Party that votes cast illegally will be overwhelmingly in favor of Democrats, whether they be the votes of illegal immigrants or other groups who can be lined up to vote “early and often” without voter ID.

Public opinion polls show strong support for voter ID laws. A 2011 Rasmussen poll found that 75 percent of likely voters “believe voters should be required to show photo identification, such as a driver's license, before being allowed to vote.”
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Voter ID laws have passed in many states. In 2011, eight states passed voter ID laws, and some states will consider voter ID referenda in 2012. All of this virtually guarantees that the Obama administration will remain preoccupied with battling voter ID laws, and using them to further divide Americans, for the foreseeable future.

I
n December 2006, when Barack Obama was weighing whether or not to run for president, he huddled in Chicago with a few close aides, friends, and family members to make a final decision. In
Confidence Men
, Ron Suskind recounted what happened:

The notion that Obama would bring us together is the narrative that helped him become president of the United States. It was one that America embraced. How different the reality has been.

The conventional wisdom holds that Obama shies away from talking about race and is uncomfortable viewing his presidency in racial terms. But make no mistake: race is at the heart of how Obama defines himself and his presidency.

Obama and his allies view most issues through the prism of race. Very often their cries of racism aren't fundamentally about race, however, but rather about exploiting society's most divisive issue to pander to narrow constituencies, smear opponents, or shut down debate. By framing many issues in racial terms, liberals like Obama avoid having to engage their opponents on the substance of debates they can't win.

Race dominated Obama's early life. His first autobiography,
Dreams from My Father
, is subtitled
A Story of Race and Inheritance
. It describes Obama's inner struggle to reconcile the white and black worlds into which he was born and raised. The Obama of
Dreams
is hypersensitive to race and sees an unbridgeable gulf between whites and blacks, a perception that forces him to choose between his white and black identities.

The memoir makes clear that, after a period of uncertainty about his mixed racial identity, Obama decided to craft a black identity for himself.

But Obama never seems to be able to fully reconcile his understanding of race with his circumstances. As the pseudonymous Michael Gledhill has written in National Review Online, “The reader of
Dreams
cannot help being struck by the unexplained contrast between the circumstances of Obama's life—an opportunity to attend a fine school, white grandparents who love him—and his great anger at white society.”
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In
The Bridge
, David Remnick suggests that Obama exaggerated his racial issues in his early years in Hawaii. He writes:

That wasn't the only time Obama may have distorted his experiences with race. Obama has talked about coming across a photograph in
Life
magazine of a black man who had used a chemical treatment to whiten his complexion—an experience that Obama wrote was like an “ambush” on his sensibilities and innocence, but this might have been another dream from his father rather than an actual event. As Remnick wrote: “During the presidential campaign, a journalist from the
Chicago Tribune
searched for the article. No such article ran. Obama responded feebly, ‘It might have been
Ebony
or it might have been.... Who knows what it was?' Archivists at
Ebony
could not find anything, either.”
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In high school, according to his autobiography, Obama became preoccupied with black literature with themes of anger and alienation. In college, he eschewed interracial student groups to identify with black students. In
From Promise to Power
, former
Chicago Tribune
reporter David Mendell writes that as a student, “[Obama] consciously chose politically active black students as his friends because he feared being labeled a ‘sellout.' In trying to convey an image of being a true black, he would sometimes overreach to gain acceptance among his black peers.”
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Years later, Mendell wrote, Obama “still had a tendency to overreach in order to fit in with some urban blacks.”
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Obama's tendency to overreach may explain why he joined the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's church. Wright subscribed to black liberation
theology, which is the belief that Jesus came to liberate people of color from the bondage and injustice of a white-dominated world. He preached that the United States was founded on racism and that the U.S. government introduced AIDS into the black community.

Running for president, Obama said that he was shocked when he heard Wright's outrageous remarks about the racism that pervaded American society. But Obama had been a member of Wright's church for over a decade. And Obama's memoir makes it clear he was fully aware that Wright's views were not uncommon in some parts of the black community. In fact, Wright's sermons seem to reinforce some of what Obama wrote in
Dreams
—that America is unsafe for black people and that white people are greedy and exploitative.

The election of our first black president was supposed to signal a milestone in America's pursuit of a post-racial society. Part of the hope and change millions of voters expected involved racial reconciliation. After all, Obama sprang from nowhere with that thrilling 2004 convention speech proclaiming that there is “not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America.”
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Interviewed in the wake of Obama's 2008 victory, Martin Luther King III predicted, “Race relations clearly will be advanced... because of President-elect Obama.” But instead of marking a new beginning in race relations, Obama's presidency has given new life to the old politics of racial grievance.

Two incidents highlight Obama and his allies' willingness to stir the racial pot. On July 16, 2009, Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates Jr. was arrested in his home in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Gates had returned from an overseas trip to find his front door jammed shut. He and his driver were able to force it open, but a passerby called 911, reporting what looked like a potential burglary in progress. When police arrived, they
found Gates (who is black) in his home. Sergeant James Crowley (who is white) of the Cambridge Police Department asked for Gates's identification ; Gates refused and became belligerent; Crowley arrested him for disorderly conduct.

The charges were later dropped, but the incident generated a national debate about whether it constituted racial profiling. It was hardly a presidential issue, but Obama weighed in on the case at a news conference. While admitting that he did not know all the facts, Obama declared that Cambridge policemen had “acted stupidly.” “There's a long history in this country of African-Americans and Latinos being stopped by law enforcement disproportionately,” he added. “That's just a fact.”
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Obama was criticized by law enforcement groups and many others for wading into a topic he knew little about. Some felt Obama spoke up to appease professional race-baiters like Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, both of whom had criticized Obama for not speaking up soon enough or loudly enough in the wake of the 2007 Jena 6 case in Jena, Louisiana. That incident involved what some black leaders and others felt was the unjust punishment of six black teenagers who beat up a white teenage boy. Jackson lashed into Obama for “acting like he's white.”
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