Since being sworn in, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has been doing what most freshman senators have always done: keeping a relatively low profile. For Obama, a national star whom the media keeps a close eye on, that’s been tricky, but he’s done well pulling it off.
But yesterday, even the mild-mannered Obama couldn’t keep quiet.
Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) said Thursday that President Bush’s argument for African Americans to support his Social Security plan is “offensive.” … Obama said the notion that Bush would tailor his Social Security appeal to blacks by talking about their shorter lifespans — without linking it to the causes of the death rate — was “stunning” and “puzzling.”
Obama said he would prefer the president not frame his Social Security argument “in racial terms.”
[…]
[Obama] criticized what he said was the cynical use of disparities as a reason to dismantle Social Security. Instead, people should be talking “about how are we going to close the health disparities gap that exists, and make sure that African-American life expectancy is as long as the rest of this nation.”
“The notion that we would not be talking about lack of health insurance, and reducing diabetes, and reducing incidents of AIDS, and making sure that African Americans have the wealth and the income to save into retirement and supplement Social Security is stunning to me.”
Good for him. Bush, more so now than at any point in his political career, has been exploiting race in a disturbing and cynical way.
On the one hand, the president is trying to deceive African Americans with bogus claims of Social Security injustice, while on the other he argues that those who disagree with him are themselves racist.
Bush is wrong with regard to priorities (he should care about alleviating high black mortality rates instead of exploiting them), wrong with regard to the substance (even the chief actuary of the Social Security Administration wrote that the “nonwhite population actually enjoys the same or better expected rates of return from Social Security” as whites), and he’s stark raving mad to accuse his critics of racism.
That said, it was great to hear Obama respond to Bush.
“This is as if the president is arguing for privatization of fire protection because our houses aren’t worth as much as houses in rich neighborhoods. Or maybe we could privatize police protection because if we get robbed, our stuff is not as nice. It defies logic.”
Indeed it does.