This shouldn't be:
But Obama's book highlights several "Sister Souljah moments" of his own--calculated attacks on his own supporters to establish his mainstream credentials. "I've proposed experimenting with merit pay for teachers, for example," he writes, acknowledging that he's angered the teachers' unions.
Obama takes the same approach his chapter titled "Race," in which he blames right-wing talk show hosts for race-baiting and opposition to affirmative action, deplores the persistence of racial inequality, and calls for job training for Black youth. But his focus on the alleged breakdown of the Black family drifts into Bill Cosby territory, although Obama avoids the rhetoric he used at a Chicago church in 2005, when he declared that too many Black men are poor fathers. "It's not clear to me that they're full-grown men," he said.
On immigration, Obama tries to split the difference in the political debate, backing a guest-worker program that he admits is a "sop to big business." Recently, however, Obama joined other Senate Democrats in a sop to the anti-immigrant right, backing the construction of a 700-mile border wall that he had previously vowed to oppose without "comprehensive" immigration reform.
As Obama makes clear in The Audacity of Hope, we can expect more such moves to the right. He may seek to revive liberalism, but only within the framework of the rightward shift in U.S. politics over the past 30 years.
Yet the morons who support him are often the same ones who condemn Joe Lieberman for being a Republican. Hell, this guy is much worse, and he doesn't have Lieberman's great sense of humor.
