Maureen Dowd Thinks Obama Needs More Black People Around Him
Apparently Maureen Dowd has grown tired of calling President Obama a girl. This week Obama’s problem is a a black one. Again.
It must be said that, if nothing else, MoDo is brilliant at taking the week’s news and shaping it into a catchy talking point that will dominate the Sunday shows and at least a few days of morning shows in the week to come. Whether or not Dowd offers any insight or enlightenment regarding the issue at hand long ago seemed beside the point. Here is the latest: “The Obama White House is too white.”
Not one to let Peggy Noonan have all the ‘grown-up’ fun, Dowd adds salt to the wound by implying that Bill Clinton never found himself in this predicament because he “never needed help fathoming Southern black culture.” Which, as Joan Walsh points out, may be the first nice thing Dowd has said about the Clintons in…a very long time.
Dowd, and Congressman James Clyburn whom she quotes, believe that the solution to Obama’s too white White House problem is that he needs to surround himself with more black people:
“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.
Concludes Dowd in typical form: “The president shouldn’t give Sherrod her old job back. He should give her a new job: Director of Black Outreach. This White House needs one. ”
I remain unconvinced this whole debacle didn’t have as much to do with the White House’s stunning lack of media savvy as anything else — there is no mention in this column of Andrew Breitbart, or that the White House, and everyone else, should have taken any video clip originating with him with a pound of salt. Nor is there much mention that the reality is the White House really is running scared of the conservative media, says Dowd: “His closest advisers — some of the same ones who urged him not to make the race speech after the Rev. Jeremiah Wright issue exploded — are so terrified that Fox and the Tea Party will paint Obama as doing more for blacks that they tiptoe around and do less.”
I think that’s possibly too narrow a view…being painted as a “socialist” I sadly suspect comes largely into the mix, also. Dowd does, however, manage to make a very sharp point about this whole situation that I think is worth considering, though it’s buried in the middle of her column:
“The president appears completely comfortable in his own skin, but it seems he feels that he and Michelle are such a huge change for the nation to absorb that he can be overly cautious about pushing for other societal changes for blacks and gays. At some level, he acts like the election was enough; he shouldn’t have to deal with race further. But he does.
The other day Politico’s Ben Smith pondered how our national race conversation got so dumb: “The election of Barack Obama, America’s first black president, was supposed to be a sign of our national maturity, a chance to transform the charged, stilted “national conversation” about race into a smarter and more authentic dialogue, led by a president who was also one of the nation’s subtlest thinkers and writers on the topic. Instead, the conversation just got dumber.”
It’s hard not to wonder whether Dowd has a point about the administration suffering from feeling (or hope) that the election of Obama was the solution and not just the beginning of that conversation. Beer Summits make for entertaining cable headlines but alas, not much beyond that.
This is an opinion piece. The views expressed in this article are those of just the author.
