Another thing that really pisses me off about this jihad against Rahm Emanuel is that the message it implicitly sends is that Obama is not calling the shots- he’s just Rahm’s puppet. That is explicitly a Republican frame- that Obama is weak and an empty suit.I'll go a step further. It's more than that, the "Obama is an empty suit meme" has always smacked of implied racism, the same "soft bigotry of low expectations"/"The Bell Curve" bullshit that Obama's just not quite bright enough to be Commander-In-Chief because he's...well...you know. Naturally, the theory goes, he needs a politically smart white guy to run the show for him while just smiles and nods and teaches him the ropes. Obama's attitude is laissaze faire and all because he has no choice: he's the just black guy on the outside of the cereal box, the real decisions are made by other, smarter, not_black folks.
That's the stuff that really burns me. You really can distill much of the whisper campaign against him to racism, and the Right then finds a way to build on it, capturing the impatience of those on the Left to then serve to destroy the progressives altogether.
Now I'm no Annenberg School graduate, but even I can see this crap for what it is.
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