Juan Williams has a piece in The Wall Street Journal that illustrates this quite nicely. He writes of the “Clouds over [President Barack] Obama’s Second Term,” and surely there are such clouds. But he couches his discussion in this way.
…there is no sign that the GOP’s current goal is anything other than hastening this president’s transition to lame-duck status and stopping any Democrat from succeeding him in 2016.
…Republicans have made it difficult for the president to get any bill passed without a supermajority of 60 votes because of the minority party’s increased use of the filibuster in the modern era.
Even leaving aside the fact that the rise in the use of the filibuster includes several Congressional sessions of Democratic Party minority, this is an interesting argument. Williams is claiming that Republican opposition to Obama’s bills couldn’t possibly be because those bills are terrible ideas. No, being universally fine, the only purpose for opposing them must be personal—to harm Obama.
But this is entirely consistent with Williams’ next point.
…one factor for anyone judging Mr Obama is race.
Really, Mr Williams? Have we met? Certainly it’s no secret to my half-dozen readers that I disagree, with considerable enthusiasm, with nearly all that Obama has done or said. But on what basis do you ascribe my opposition to race? I reject your racist slur.
Along these lines, Williams offers this:
Even among his liberal supporters, the conventional wisdom is that Mr Obama’s leadership style is lacking in forcefulness because he is the “first black” in the White House. By that line of thinking, he is not allowed to be too forceful in his emotions, or he will risk being seen as scary—an “angry black man.”
This is another manufactured beef, or it’s a concession that Liberals generally are racist. Certainly no Conservative whom I know looked at Obama as anything other than a bad president. Not a bad black president. And not, even when he did show anger, an “angry black man.”
Where are you getting this stuff, Mr Williams?