“I don’t understand how we got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter,” former President Barack Obama lamented at a campaign event last week in a display of pretend innocence so shameless that it may provoke an instant chuckle.
It was you, Mr. President. You did this to us.
It’s worth a quick review of the record. The case is easy to make, but don’t take the word of a conservative writer. Both Pew Research and Gallup tracked how people felt about race relations before Obama’s presidency, during, and after. Both polling firms affirm that Obama took us from a peak of good feeling into a nadir.
In the case of Pew, it demonstrated that a peak of 66% of Americans viewed relations between the races as good the day Obama took office in January 2009, which tumbled to 38% in December 2017. Gallup showed Obama had this effect on both black and white people.
This was clear enough in October 2015, when I wrote a column precisely titled “How Obama Has Divided America for Political Gains.” Obama was our divider in chief long before Donald Trump ever set foot on that escalator.
And the worst part is that Obama did it for cynical, political reasons. He saw electoral advantage in dividing the country by stoking racial grievances and took the opportunity.
He did it in 2010, in another election, when he told Hispanic people to punish their Republican “enemies” and reward their Democratic “friends.”
“If Latinos sit out the election instead of saying, ‘We’re gonna punish our enemies, and we’re gonna reward our friends who stand with us on issues that are important to us,’ if they don’t see that kind of upsurge in voting in this election, then I think it’s going to be harder,” Obama said. “And that’s why I think it’s so important that people focus on voting on Nov. 2.”
That type of rancor-raising, which went unremarked upon by the media types running around with their hair on fire when Trump talks about “enemies,” did not work 14 years ago, as the Democratic Party received what you call a “shellacking.”
But he did it again with Hispanics at the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Institute Awards Gala in October 2015 when he recounted in excruciating detail how caucus founder Ed Roybal, a congressman from California, had been humiliated by a white officer — 75 years earlier.
Roybal had just proposed to the woman he would marry. But, as Obama reminded those in attendance, “things took a wrong turn”:
Authorities suddenly pulled up, lined them up, patted them down, demanded to see their IDs — just because they were Mexican American. And when the young man handed over his wallet, the officer pulled the cards out of it and just dropped them on the sidewalk, and then he said, “Now you pick them up.”
Obama then remarked to the audience, “We can imagine his fear and his humiliation. What had been a beautiful day had suddenly become an example of occurrences that were happening far too often,” having accomplished two goals in one swoop: grievance-mongering and blaming the police.
For just as Obama now feigns irreproachability and wrings his hands in faux anguish, he has always blamed racial animus on the country that elected him twice.
In 2014, just as Black Lives Matter riots were still lingering in Ferguson, Missouri, after weeks of mayhem, Obama blamed not BLM’s Marxist founders but America. Racism, he averred, “is something that’s deeply rooted in our society, deeply rooted in our history.”
And when a man shot and killed five white and Hispanic police officers in Dallas during a BLM protest in 2016, saying he wanted “to kill white people,” Obama had the incredible chutzpah to say in his memorial address:
America, we know that bias remains. We know it. Whether you are black or white or Hispanic or Asian or Native American or of Middle Eastern descent, we have all seen this bigotry in our own lives at some point. We’ve heard it at times in our own homes. If we’re honest, perhaps we’ve heard prejudice in our own heads and felt it in our own hearts.
So Obama may like decrying Trump’s oratorical style, something he and the rest of the Left have been doing for nearly a decade now, as when Obama complained in 2016 that “we have heard vulgar and divisive rhetoric,” but we ought to check Obama’s own record first.
It was Obama who said at a Philadelphia rally in 2008, “If they bring a knife to the fight, we bring a gun,” and then later told a Las Vegas rally that the way to treat neighbors and relatives was “to argue with them and get in their face.”
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So if Obama now finds the country “toxic, divided, and bitter,” remember that he did all this in the search for power, as when he reminded the Congressional Hispanic Caucus audience that “we are stronger together than we can ever be alone” after regaling them with a story from the 1950s.
We don’t need to search far for who did this. Mr. President, find a mirror somewhere, and there you may discover the culprit.
Mike Gonzalez is the Angeles T. Arredondo senior fellow on E Pluribus Unum at the Heritage Foundation and author of NextGen Marxism: What It Is and How to Combat It. Heritage is listed for identification purposes only. The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not reflect any institutional position for Heritage or its Board of Trustees.