Obama Doesn’t Fulfill Martin Luther King’s Dream

Obama’s camp uses race, emphasizing his color to heighten "white guilt" and win support. That's not the colorblindness MLK preached.

Original article
February 14, 2009 - by AWR Hawkins

As we approached the 2008 presidential election, mention was made again and again of how Obama’s election would be “the fulfillment of Martin Luther King Jr.’s ‘I have a Dream’ speech.” Representative John Lewis (D-GA) said just that on FoxNews on August 28, 2008, the 45th anniversary of King’s famous speech. And Obama did his part to bolster this theory by accepting the Democratic nomination on August 28 — the very day on which King gave his speech. He then provided news outlets with photo-op after photo-op on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial just days before his inauguration — the very steps on which King gave his speech. However, Obama’s election doesn’t fulfill King’s speech because it doesn’t fulfill King’s dream.

When King gave that famous speech in 1963 he said: “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.” King looked forward to a day when the first question asked wouldn’t be “What color are you?” but rather “What qualifications do you have?” Yet today, even with the election of Obama, it is obvious that the Democratic Party — the very party that purports to be King’s standard-bearer — has traded this colorblind standard for one rooted in race over substance. And the mainstream media is right there with them. As Bernard Goldberg said in his latest book on the love affair between Obama and the media, “Mainstream journalists always root for the Democrat,” but Obama was especially attractive to them because of “his personal charisma, his liberalism, and of course, the fact that he is black.” Goldberg even summed up the mainstream media’s pre-election position on Obama this way: “We need the black guy to win because he’s black.”

Thus, once Obama was elected, mainstream media outlets of almost every shape and size gleefully reported that we’d elected our “first African-American President.” And while there’s nothing wrong with noticing that Obama is black, there is certainly something wrong with emphasizing his skin color over his qualifications, or at least Martin Luther King Jr. would have thought so. For example, as early as December 7, 2007, Matt Taibbi of Rolling Stone magazine anticipated Obama’s victory and noted that “it would be great to have a black president. It would be great for kids to see. It would be a nice mind shift.”

Am I the only person who asks “why” when they read this? Why would a president of a particular color necessarily be great for kids to see, whether that color is black, yellow, red, or white? And how does electing a black president represent “a nice mind shift” if the shift is from a president who believed in personal liberty (George W. Bush) to one who believes in government control over so many facets of life (Barack Obama)?

I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the emphasis on race is simply a distraction. Obama’s promoters seized upon race as part of a bait and switch tactic during the campaign, knowing full well that emphasizing his color would heighten “white guilt” and render a successful campaign against him all but impossible. And since it worked so well for him in the election, they’re now using it to push his nominees of color through the confirmation process as well. For instance, on January 28, 2009, USA Today carried the news that Eric Holder, Obama’s attorney general nominee, had been “Ok’d” by the Senate Judicial Committee. The publication praised the nomination of Holder because he would be “the first African-American attorney general.” Ironically, USA Today was not as eager to highlight Holder’s judicial philosophy as they were his skin color. Had they been, they would have mentioned Holder’s utter hatred for the Second Amendment and our military’s concern that he will use our court system to prosecute U.S. intelligence operatives for harsh interrogation tactics under Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld.

So it’s all about color, all about race. Democrats and mainstream media pundits alike know that if we look at qualifications without considering race, making the kind of colorblind judgments Martin Luther King Jr. extolled, nominees like Holder wouldn’t have had a prayer of being confirmed. As it now stands, the smoke screen worked and on February 3, 2009, the Washington Post reported that Holder had been confirmed as our “first black attorney general.”

Examples of the Democrats’ use of race to silence opposition to their agenda are so ubiquitous that using such tactics to elect Obama and confirm Holder just seem par for the course. After all, over the past few decades the Democrats have used race to pass everything from welfare policies to school entrance policies to homeowner guidelines and race-based employment quotas. Along the way, these policies have left us with a large segment of the American population living on the government dole. Thus the Democrats are forced to find ways to keep money flowing to these dependents, their dependents, so that the votes keep coming. This entails the continued propagation of the culture of racism by men such as Robert Reich, who not only pushed for the current stimulus package with racial overtones but explicitly stated that monies in the stimulus bill should not go to “white male” workers but to “the long-term unemployed [and] minorities.”

Of course, to point this out is to invite the Reverend Jeremiah Wright to go on one of his rants about the hypocrisy of “white America — U.S. of KKK-A.” But we all know Wright’s words are but another example of a racist, Democratic tactic intended to pump up the home crowd while silencing the opposition. Rush Limbaugh put it this way: “We are being told we have to hope [Obama] succeeds. [Because] his father was black, because he’s the first black president, we’ve got to [go along with the Democratic agenda].” In other words, it doesn’t matter how detrimental Obama, his stimulus package, or his broader socialistic leanings might be to this nation’s well-being, we are simply to rejoice in the fact that he’s black.

It’s quite ironic, isn’t it? The racism against which Martin Luther King Jr. campaigned in the name of American ideals has been resurrected, and is being used by Democrats to war against the very ideals King cherished. All Americans should be outraged, regardless of their skin color.

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AWR Hawkins is a conservative writer who will receive a Ph.D. in U.S. military history in May 2009. You can view more of his articles at www.awrhawkins.com