It seems as if all President Barack Obama has to do is chuckle, and he’s quick to be criticized. Whether it is criticizing his own bowling skills (or lack thereof) or defending his embattled treasury secretary, Obama gets slammed for everything.
It seems as if all President Barack Obama has to do is chuckle, and he’s quick to be criticized. Whether it is criticizing his own bowling skills (or lack thereof) or defending his embattled treasury secretary, Obama gets slammed for everything.
He hasn’t been in office 100 days yet, so it’s tough to fathom how he is getting blamed for conditions that existed all the way back to the first Bush presidency. The market started falling during the election, and George Bush and Henry Paulson fiddled while Wall Street burned. But Obama is taking the heat because it has been left to him to clean up the mess.
I don’t know the president well, but he seems like the kind of person who can take the heat. He seems like the criticism won’t have him sitting in a darkened White House bedroom lamenting his fate. He’s a big boy. He can handle it.
That’s why I can’t understand why the Black community as a whole, and Black journalists in particular, are shying away from serious criticism of our new president.
Oh, I don’t mean criticizing how he dresses, or how he is a media star, or how his wife is going sleeveless. I’ll leave that up to the tabloid magazines. And let the Rush Limbaugh Party criticize him just for being Obama.
But these are serious times, and they require serious answers to serious questions. This is not the time for faint hearts and easily bruised egos.
During the campaign, Tavis Smiley had the temerity to suggest that candidate Barack Obama might not be the best thing since sliced bread for Black people. Smiley criticized Obama for not deigning to show up at his State of the Black Union conclave.
If you remember, Smiley nearly had his Black card revoked. Reaction was so negative that e-mail and bloggers pimp-slapped Smiley so hard he withdrew from the Tom Joyner show.
Perhaps that has cowed other journalists and community leaders who recognize that the fastest way to get labeled a race leper is to suggest that Obama might not be the second coming of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. or the Black Jack (Kennedy).
So we have a president employing extraordinary – even unprecedented – means to try to right a listing economic ship, with too much of the Black community still warehoused down in the cargo hold, but the Black community is not part of the conversation about how to get out of the deep water.
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