#BlackMetrosexualLincoln: “The Defeat of Barack Hussein Obama”
Sometimes when I log into my Twitter, I sincerely regret not checking the news earlier. Scrolling through links, various comments and incredulous exclamations, I stumbled across the trending topic #blackmetrosexuallincoln. Confused about the reference, I googled the term only to find journalists, commentators and bloggers outraged in response to a New York Times article detailing a conservative Super PAC’s $10 million dollar plan for “the defeat of Barack Hussein Obama.”
The group, backed by a conservative billionaire, plans to release a series of advertisements connecting Obama to controversial remarks by his former pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright, a man who became a political liability during the 2008 campaign. Reaching into the past, the Super PAC hopes to reignite concerns about the president’s allegiances and beliefs.
Such advertisements are not only a waste of money, but highly irrelevant. Obama has been president for four years. If we don’t know his policies and beliefs now, I doubt we ever will. Furthermore, he has been very public in showing the evolution of his ideologies through myriad speeches as well as through his writing in Dreams From My Father and The Audacity of Hope. In other words, for those who care to pay attention, his presidency has been highly transparent. Four years are another public vetting process in and of itself. Past details have now become irrelevant. As Ranush Ponnuru, a senior editor at National Review, tweeted, “the notion that Americans are going to learn something about Obama pre-presidency that will turn them against him seems absurd on its face.”
So why bring up old news? In my eyes, referencing Reverend Wright appears to be a blatant case of race-baiting especially in the wake of recent national discussions of a increasingly white, wealthy and older GOP fighting a multicultural Democratic Party. Referencing race is something that John McCain wisely avoided in the 2008 election because of the dangerous and volatile place that the topic occupies in the American psyche.
However, the Super PAC in question anticipated possible allegations of race-baiting by planning to enact one of the most offensive campaign strategies that I have seen thus far. According to the New York Times, “the group suggested hiring as a spokesman an ‘extremely literate conservative African-American’ who can argue that Mr. Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as what the proposal calls a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln.” Not only if the reference to an “extremely literate conservative African-American” blatantly racist as it implies that African-Americans as a whole are uneducated, but labeling Obama as a “metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln” plays on the homophobia that still plagues certain parts of the nation including GOP strongholds in the South. Speaking of a President is such a way is so disrespectful that it has resulted in a national uproar.
While Romney has apparently repudiated the plans of this Super PAC, they speak of a dark underbelly of the current climate of the GOP that is both saddening and deeply disturbing.
