RUTHFULLY YOURS

On the day before Martin Luther King Jr’s birthday, the New Yorker unveiled an extended interview with Obama in which the flailing leader blamed his poor approval ratings on racism.

“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a black President,” Obama told the editor of the liberal magazine known for its cloyingly obscure cartoons and overwhelmingly white readership.

Obama began his first term with an approval rating of 68 percent; a figure unmatched since JFK. No Republican had enjoyed a starting approval rating above 60 percent in 60 years, indicating how much more willing Republicans were to give the other guy a fair shot than their Democratic counterparts. At 12 percent, his disapproval ratings were also much lower than those of Bill Clinton or George W. Bush.

If his current approval rating of 40 percent pro and 51 percent con can be put down to anything, it isn’t race. When Obama began his first term in office, he had the approval of 41 percent of Republicans. By the time the year was out, that number had fallen to 16 percent.

At the start of his first term, he had the approval of 62 percent of independent voters. Today he has the approval of less than half that number. Only his support from his own party has remained unchanged.

Any honest politician would put those numbers down to his actions, but Obama always takes refuge in race, telling Remnick, “There is a historic connection between some of the arguments that we have politically and the history of race in our country, and sometimes it’s hard to disentangle those issues.”

Few men knew that history better than the black Republican minister who stood on the steps of a memorial to the Republican president who ended the Democratic Party’s institution of slavery and, with a resonance that echoes across time, said, “I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.”

The post-equality civil rights movement of the left has long since buried that dream, exchanging it for a nightmare of calculated racial inequalities where your race is what you will be judged by when you apply for college, apply for a job or face low approval ratings after your national health care scheme explodes into a broken $600 million website and millions of angry people who have lost their health insurance and are being forced to pay more money for fewer benefits.

The media treated Obama’s victory as the fulfillment of Martin Luther King Jr’s legacy when it was actually the inversion of it. King had never wanted a country where votes were cast based on race instead of character and where failed policies were excused because of the race of the politician.

King called for a culture of character, while Obama represents the post-equality civil rights culture of grievance. He called for an end to racial divisiveness, while Obama and his political collaborators have weaponized racial division as a political strategy.

At the beginning of Obama’s first term, 69 percent of blacks said that Martin Luther King Jr’s vision had been fulfilled. Two years later, only 54 percent of blacks agreed and 45 percent disagreed.  By 2013, only 32 percent of blacks would even agree that a lot of progress had been made in fulfilling the dream.

What these numbers truly reveal is that Obama failed blacks even more than he failed whites.

“The Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity,” King said. The island has grown lonelier and drifted further away from the material mainland under Obama.

The paradox that black unemployment would increase faster under a black leader, that black median income would fall under him and that the disparity of wealth between the races would double under him is an entirely expected phenomenon. It is the outcome of the same economic processes that took place in the majority of urban areas under the control of black Democrats.

Obama was not King’s disciple; he was the disciple of Jeremiah Wright who warned against black middle-classness. Obama is not interested in equality through freedom, but in radicalizing inequality.

Black economic equality, like every other form of real, as opposed to artificially subsidized, equality, is a threat to the political ruling class of the left which weaponizes inequality to consolidate its power.

Despite his polished rhetoric, Obama is not any different than the Chicago ward boss who tells her constituents that they are poor because of white people, that their neighborhoods are dangerous because white people don’t care about them and that all the programs that are supposed to help them get sabotaged and drained dry by the ward boss… because of white racism.

Martin Luther King Jr. called for a nation whose politics would not rely on racial division, but racial politics are still as much the cement of the Democratic Party as they were during Segregation. It is as impossible to imagine a Democratic Party without racial divisiveness as it would be to imagine Microsoft abandoning software and switching to making furniture or Hostess switching from cakes to jet engines.

The Democratic Party that now claims the legacy of a Republican civil rights leader did not do a complete turnaround, instead it decided to play the game of racial division that it had been playing from one end, from the other end instead.

And it did not make this decision for moral reasons, but for purely pragmatic ones.

The civil rights movement was reinvented to reflect not King, but Obama, not healing, but grievance, not unity, but division, and is embodied by men like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton whose rhetoric is only a means of monetizing their manufactured outrage, who invoke King because they want to live like kings.

Civil rights ceased being an equality movement and became the long march of poverty pimps through every five-star hotel in the country, men of no faith calling themselves reverends and preaching the power of their left-wing bosses in ringing tones as if they were at the pulpit of a rural church instead of working the teleprompter at another political fundraiser.

Martin Luther King Jr’s dream was not fulfilled by the lecherous leeches calling themselves civil rights activists and invoking his name to pry open checkbooks and political offices, but by the American people whose decency and goodwill he had been appealing to on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. It is the American people who have made King’s dream real, not through marches or protests, but by doing the right things in their daily lives, year after year, decade after decade and generation after generation.

Obama and the left’s gang of poverty pimps and politically correct organizers hijacked King’s dream of the equality of character over the inequality of grievance. It’s up to the American people to take it back.