Was it a figment of our imagination? I’m talking about the 2004 keynote address at the Democratic National Convention by Barack Obama, then a little-known state senator from Illinois. In his uplifting speech, he had a warning for “the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.”
“There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America. There’s not a Black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.
“We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don’t like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states. We coach Little League in the blue states and have gay friends in the red states.”
And enough Americans believed it, believed in the promise of unity, that U.S. Sen. Obama was rewarded with two terms as president of the United States, the first Black man to be elected to that office.
Even then, though, there were hints that not all Americans were celebrating the milestone, not everyone bought the lofty words.
In the background hovered Donald Trump, the same guy whose family’s real estate business had settled with the federal government after excluding folks who looked like Obama from renting a Trump property.
Trump tapped into the wariness and hostility that some felt about this Black man and his beautiful family moving into the White House and becoming the face of America to the world. Trump’s absurd “birther” lies doubting Obama’s American-ness, his bleating the president’s middle name, Hussein, on cue, all of that was lapped up by Americans insecure about their place in a changing country.
The backlash fighting progress that my historian son has told me turns up like clockwork in our country helped give us President Donald Trump. And now, with a New Hampshire primary victory and what looks like a clear path to the Republican presidential nomination, Trump is back — though, as his racist attacks on Republican challenger Nikki Haley and disparaging comments about Black and brown migrants prove, his act has hardly changed.
