100 Not So Black Days

Despite the deserved early focus on Barack Obama's barrier-shattering achievement, the economic calamities of the first 100 days quickly took his race off the table.

By: Terence Samuel

The torrent of analysis and appraisal, hagiography and scorn leveled at Barack Obama’s first 100 days will be relatively quiet on the issue of race. That’s shocking when you consider how all-consuming the issue was during his campaign for the White House.

There is a perfectly obvious explanation: The Obama presidency, which so far has been a whirlwind of policymaking and legislation, crisis management and confidence-building, international diplomacy and domestic firefights, has been relatively quiet on the issue of race.

Consider the landscape. Obama has had to take steps to help bail out the world banking system; save the world’s largest insurer; rescue the American auto industry and an American sea captain held captive by pirates; pass a stimulus package and a budget and explain how, together, they were going to be the salvation of the sickly U.S. economy. And, these last couple of weeks, he’s had to walk the damn dog.

Under these circumstances, it’s only reasonable to expect mediations on racial progress and the “historic nature of this presidency” to slip down the priority list. To hear him tell it: “That lasted about a day.”

Obama’s response to the race question is of a piece with his overall message to the American people: “We’ve been busy.” But underlying the on-message nature of that answer, there is also a what-did-you-expect quality to the entire debate about how race would affect the tenure of the first black president. I have said that American presidents tend to look more like each other than they look like anything or anyone else. When he started to deal with Iraq and Afghanistan and the French and the North Koreans, Obama was going to look more like George W. Bush, whatever their differences, than he did candidate Obama.

100 Not So Black Days....