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Tom Maguire of a tidbit buried in MoDo’s crude, racially reductive attempt to blame l’affaire Sherrod on the “overprotective white guys” who surround The One.
Great catch by Tom Maguire of a tidbit buried in MoDo’s crude, racially reductive attempt to blame l’affaire Sherrod on the “overprotective white guys” who surround The One. It’s unclear from what she writes whether anyone called the White House before Sherrod was forced to resign or only later that day after it happened, but I’d sure like to know the timeline. Was it Vilsack’s decision to let her go and, even if it was, if the White House had reason to believe that the initial clip was fishy before he canned her, why didn’t they reach out and tell him to exercise caution?
The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Google, they weren’t familiar enough with civil rights history to recognize the name Sherrod. And they didn’t return the calls and e-mail of prominent blacks who tried to alert them that something was wrong…
“I’ve known these two individuals — the husband for more than 50 years and the wife for at least 35, 40 — and there’s not a racist hair on their heads or anyplace else on their bodies,” [Rep. John] Lewis said…
“The president’s getting hurt real bad,” Clyburn told me. “He needs some black people around him.” He said Obama’s inner circle keeps “screwing up” on race: “Some people over there are not sensitive at all about race. They really feel that the extent to which he allows himself to talk about race would tend to pigeonhole him or cost him support, when a lot of people saw his election as a way to get the issue behind us. I don’t think people elected him to disengage on race. Just the opposite.”
For a shrewder take on why Obama dropped the ball in the Sherrod case, try this piece by David Ignatius. The teleprompter president doesn’t like venturing off-script, so when he gets surprised by some volatile, unpredictable media clusterfark, his instinct naturally is to make it go away as quickly as possible.
I asked another administration insider to describe how Obama deals with sensitive national security issues. This official generally had high praise for Obama's intellect and analytical precision. The odd thing, he said, was that Obama doesn't often ask "presidential questions." By this, he meant that Obama rarely steps out of the scripted briefing points to ask: "Why are we doing this?"
So yeah, it doesn’t seem to be a personal choice; he was prepped for a destiny that couldn’t be fulfilled under the circumstances. Which is why you see the blatant contrast between what he promised and what he’s doing.
Originally posted by baddmove
well, he was out of work and needed a job,