My name is Chris L. Robinson and today, as Part 2 of our three-part series on how you can win over the black community (that I know you won’t heed), I want to talk about something that you should cease doing immediately. You should, right now, stop wasting precious time, energy, and money attacking President Barack Hussein Obama on anything but the issues. And let me tell you why.
In 2008, a black man was elected the President of the United States. He was the son of a single mother, raised largely by his grandparents.
He went on to graduate from Harvard Law School where he was the President of the Law Review. After graduation, he went to Chicago where he was a community organizer in some of the poorest neighborhoods in the city. While there, he met and married a black woman, also a Harvard lawyer, from the city’s South Side.
He was elected state senator. Then, U.S. Senator. Then, after a bitter primary against one of the most popular and respected people in America--one Hillary Rodham Clinton--and a general election against a war hero and elder statesman named John McCain, he went to the White House. In 2012, he was re-elected, by a clear majority of the American people, and with a ton of electoral votes.
Every time you attack this man--by claiming he’s not black enough or doubting his birth certificate or by calling him a Muslim or a Communist or a Marxist or a socialist or traitor--none of which you have absolutely any reason to believe is true-- you expose the truth of your own deception. The truth is that for all of the decades of Republicans arguing that, in America, if a person worked hard, if they stayed in school and stayed focused and positive, anyone could become anything in America--EVEN President, you never really thought it was true.
Clearly, President Obama is proof of the American dream. And you still just cannot believe your lying eyes. How did this happen?? It’s as though you know you said it, and maybe even sometimes, after a few cocktails at the bar hosting the Republican National Convention, you almost believed it. But not really.
Yet here he is, the proof of all you claimed and you refuse to accept him for even one second. After the first election in 2008, I expected to be sick of the number of times I heard Republicans insist that Obama was proof that those that don’t succeed simply don’t want it badly enough, "I mean, look at the President!"
Instead, I heard that the American dream isn’t really an American. Or just got lucky. Or stole the election. Or simply fooled a majority of Americans, across a broad swath of demographics, into voting for him. Republicans, every time you badmouth the President, you badmouth not just the people that voted for him, you badmouth America, and the potential of Americans.
Maybe that’s why you haven’t been able to win these last two elections, you don’t believe in what America is all about, but Americans do.
Attacking the President on the issues is fine. Attacking him personally has been, and will continue to be, a fruitless deal-killer. And it will reverberate into future elections.
P.S. Stop attacking Michelle Obama, too--she’s more popular than he is!