KELO-AM’s chief talker Greg Belfrage asserts that President Barack Obama has caused unprecedented polarization in our country:
Wasn’t President Obama going to be the Great Uniter? He’s polarized Americans in a way never seen in my lifetime. https://t.co/FqS2mqHRFc
— Greg Belfrage (@belfrageshow) August 5, 2015
I have four responses.
First, I would suggest we were more polarized during the Civil War, when we started killing each other en masse over a disagreement on race and politics. We aren’t that polarized today.
Second, since Belfrage cites a new Pew survey on racism, show me what Barack Obama has said to divide people on race.
Third, why does Belfrage give President Obama credit for racial polarization but not for saving America from Depression, cutting unemployment more and faster than Mitt Romney promised, or any of the other good stuff he’s actually done?
Fourth and most importantly, the Pew survey Belfrage Tweets says nothing about racial polarization. It says that after remaining steady through most of President Obama’s administration, the number of Americans recognizing that racism is still a problem and that we need to do more to fight it has increased dramatically in the past year. Heightened awareness of racism and recognition of a need to act is not polarization; it’s actually a logical and encouraging response to major news events that have happened since Pew’s last annual survey on this topic: Staten Island and Eric Garner; Ferguson and Michael Brown; Charleston, Dylann Roof, and the Confederate flag. After such events, it would be more disturbing if Pew had found Americans weren’t more aware of the persistent impact of racism on their lives.
These results show no polarization. Every group surveyed—race, age, education, political party—showed a higher percentage saying America “needs to continue making changes to give blacks equal rights with whites.” (Dang—this survey result makes Democratic U.S. House candidate Paula Hawks’s comment yesterday on the importance of the “Black Lives Matter” movement sound keenly in tune with the zeitgeist.) That’s not polarization; that’s simply dramatic events pulling a lot of heads out of the sand.
Even the issue of the Confederate flag may not be as polarizing as current noise might make us think. The Pew survey found a majority of respondents saying they respond neither positively nor negatively to the flag of America’s arguably worst traitors ever. The only subgroup in the survey among whom a majority reported a negative reaction to the Stars and Bars were us liberal Democrats (yay, us! boo, the rest of you!). The only groups reporting more positive responses than negative responses to the traitor flag were folks without college education and Republicans. Non-collegians and Republicans were also the only groups among whom a majority did not think it was a good decision to remove the Confederate flag from the South Carolina statehouse grounds… and even there, Republicans split 43% for removal, 49% against, while “HS or less” split 44% for, 42% against.
President Barack Obama hasn’t polarized our country on race. All this new Pew research tells us is that events of the past year have persuaded more Americans that we still have a lot of work to do to achieve black-white racial equality.
Belfrage is an entertainer: get over it.
And George Will claims XL, war, jobs, healthcare, etc are not really Democratic issues, all Democrats really want to do is keep the abortion debate going. There is no limit to these retrogrades twisting of facts and logic.
I believe it was dumbass dubya that claimed to be the “uniter” and did pretty much the opposite with his foriegn and domestic policies.
Speaking of Shrub:
http://gazette.com/former-president-george-w.-bush-shows-up-for-jury-duty/article/1556855
If there has been a polarization on Obama’s watch, it’s been caused by episodes like the Ferguson police shooting and the Charleston church massacre. Those were out of his control and I think he handled them in a balanced fashion.
If anyone is causing polarization, it would seem to be borderline racist, knee-jerk Obama-haters who seem to be looking for problems to blame him for.
There is and always will be racial polarization, but did Obama cause an increase in racial hatred? NO!
Our president has been under siege by republicans since before he took office. McConnell, Boehner and the republican leadership still cannot stand be in the same room with the president because of the color of his skin. They served notice on inaugural day about opposing President Obama and have lessened their charge.
republicans emboldened their constituents by allowing them and suggesting to them to attack at the president at every turn.
Those uneducated republicans have been making racial slurs and hide under the protection of the 1st Amendment and often times of late, under the 2nd Amendment.
If HRC gets elected,sexism will jump to the fore,compliments of the war on women party of right wingers.
Cops caught on video murdering black men has made it hard for any educated person to ignore the racism that exists in our nation. Obama just happens to be the president. I think that is called correlation …
What was the first thing the right do after Obama was elected? Ask for his birth certificate. Didn’t matter that he showed as proof. The right said it was fake.
Who was one of the leaders of this assault? Trump.
It wasn’t the President that caused any polarization. It was the right wing crazies.
You betcha, Greg Balfrage is the Sarah Palin of reporting. What a couple of zero’s.
In a survey released just today the Associated Press-Center for Public Affairs Research found that half of blacks stopped by police feel that they have been unfairly treated.
This is testament to the racial polarization we are seeing in this country. If a poll was made asking Native Americans in South Dakota the same AP question, they would find the results would be the same.
Belfrage and the right and racist right is polarized, but I’m not, nor are most Americans. Obama is the best President in my lifetime. He took a conservative Republican plan on health care and enacted it. The fact that Obamacare works seems to polarize those who abandoned their own plan because a black man decided to try to enact it. Most Americans, white or black, however, support every facet of Obamacare, as long as their don’t realize it is part of Obamacare, which the Republicans decided to polarize for political purposes.
Let’s talk about Iran and the difference between two presidents. I was far more polarized by the Reagan administration. Reagan secretly negotiated with Iran to keep the American hostages until he beat Jimmy Carter. The second Reagan was sworn in Iran released the hostages. Then Reagan’s Administration illegally traded arms to the Ayatollah’s Revolutionary Guard.
Obama, on the other hand, got the international community to enforce the toughest sanction on Iran in order to get them to the negotiating table over their nuclear weapons program. That was so successful that Obama was able to negotiate a stunning reversal of Iran’s nuclear program.
One president gave aid and comfort to Iran, the other forced Iran to dial back its nuclear program. It’s clear: Obama is one of the best Presidents ever, while Reagan was a polarizer.
Owen, don’t forget that the GOP also held a top level meeting to strategize how to obstruct and impede President Obama’s administration. Basically trying to nullify the will of the people who elected him.
Add in the extremist voices, hyper partisanship, deliberate falsehoods that pass for entertainment taken blindly as real news and of course racism is also a big part of the cocktail as many just can’t accept that a black man could be the President of These United States.
Think it’s Obama? Check out the approval level of Congress.
For a more academic and thoughtful look at the polarization of America, read congressional scholars Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein.
“The first is the serious mismatch between our political parties, which have become as vehemently adversarial as parliamentary parties, and a governing system that, unlike a parliamentary democracy, makes it extremely difficult for majorities to act. Second, while both parties participate in tribal warfare, both sides are not equally culpable. The political system faces what the authors call “asymmetric polarization,” with the Republican Party implacably refusing to allow anything that might help the Democrats politically, no matter the cost.”
Well said, Cory.
Belfrage is doing nothing more than following republican talking points, I have heard countless republicans make the same claim.
It is that right wing Christian thing of calling a minority a racist for calling out racism.
Don, you raise an interesting comparison between Reagan and Obama on Iran. Reagan said one thing and did another, keeping his engagement with Iran secret lest it belie his Hollywood-gunslinger talk (the same kind of talk Senator Tom Cotton is now using and that Ehran John Thune endorsed with his signature on Cotton’s letter back in March). President Obama said he would talk to Iran, he has talked to Iran, and he has secured a diplomatic deal on Iran’s nuclear weapons. What do we Americans want, a cardboard cowboy cutout or a President who does what he says?
Well said Don. Spot on!
Raygun armed Iran and Iraq to the extent he hoped both would destroy each other so neither became the dominant Mid-East power. Then along came doofus and proceeded to hand the reins to Iran-our sworn enemy by taking out the only stabilizing force in Iraq who just happened to be a puppet of American foreign policy. Saddam was our right wing monster to his own people,but kept the country together.
Roger, your last sentence gets me thinking…
When I was at SDSU taking my ed classes, I rebelled against our multiculturalism training, in part because I thought that talking about race only led to more racism. I advocated colorblindness, perhaps something like what Happy Camper was talking about back on the Lawrence Diggs/Back to Africa post, perhaps something like what you hear the white right-wingers saying when they complain about minorities bringing up race. I wish we didn’t have to talk about racism; I wish we had the problem licked. But it only comforts the privileged majority to stifle discussion of the ongoing racism that harms our minority neighbors. We can’t stifle that awareness and discussion. We have to have that discussion to de-polarize our national mindset, to change from having two very different Americas (look at the bottom half of that chart above from Pew again) where white folks think racism isn’t a problem but black folks think it is to one America where we all realize the social ills that are holding some Americans back.
(And Chris, thanks!)
well said jayson!
and Roger and Cory, that sentence is of course the very definition of white privilege (“the dreaded P word”);
and happy’s whole line i am pretty sure, is mularkey coming from him after googling wiki, anthropology and race. anthropologists get their wires mixed up big time every 50 years or so and then change horses in the middle of the stream. please don’t encourage camper with anything positive based on that little bit of happy analysis of such weighty complexities as race, ethnicity, genomics, and semantics.
Wonder where the acrimony comes from? Two top candidates for President (Walker & Christie) have likened labor unions to ISIS and the other said he would “Punch the National Teachers Union in the face.”
Seriously, we’re the most powerful country on the planet and this is what passes for political discourse…and Obama is the one polarizing the country?
Cory, perfect. When a knucklehead second lieutenant, I thought ‘all I see is green’. Slowly saw and realized that was a fools errand which perpetuated problems. Changed that tune vastly improving my leadership and my units’ performances. Under the green existed real people with real aspirations, backgrounds, and abilities to contribute. Same for under the skin, or under the ethnic background.
John, do I hear a call for even more complicated understanding and empathy? We can’t be colorblind, but we also can’t be blinded by color. Our characters and needs are shaped but not fully defined by our race. We have to recognize that our African and Lakota neighbors are harmed by racism, and we need to craft social policy with an eye toward stopping further harm, but in our neighborly personal interactions, we also need to view our different-looking neighbors as human beings with a variety of experiences that we must understand beyond race.
Well said by each one of you. Bravo!
When Obama made a statement about the Trayvon Martin shooting Conservatives said, “He’s dividing the country. If he would just ignore the issue of race, it wouldn’t be a problem in America.”
Any time Obama meets with Al Sharpton or other black activists, Conservatives say, “He’s dividing the country. If he would just ignore the issue of race, it wouldn’t be a problem in America.”
When Tump said Mexicans are rapists and criminals and when he refused to denounce the KKK, Conservatives said, “Meh. It’s no big deal.”