And The More Things Change....

Ta-Nahisi Coates (a black man), blogging on atlantic.com about the Gates-Crowley-Obama affair, makes a couple of interesting, and critical, points.

Mr. Coates is a little hard on law enforcement when he contends "The rest of us are left with a country where, by all appearances, officers are well within their rights to arrest you for sassing them. Which is where we started." But he is right about this: wherever the incident has taken us, it is precisely "where we started." Most of us are not Harvard professors, and notwithstanding the little, if any, potential benefit of a discussion of police-black community relations, clearly there will be no consideration of the relationship between police departments and the white, Hispanic, or Asian communities. We are, notwithstanding- and in part because- of Obama's response, left "where we started."

This demonstrates the ultimate futility of Obama's response, and the limited impact his victory in November is likely to have upon the historic American struggle with race.

Once Barack Obama prevailed against a hapless GOP nominee and his ill-equipped running mate, many whites patted themselves on the back for overcoming racial prejudice while many blacks were relieved that, finally, someone would pay attention to the unique problems of their community.

Naivete reigned supreme, across racial lines. And as Coates notes

Here is what the election of Barack Obama says about race--white people, in general, are willing to hire a black guy for the ultimate job. That's a big step. But it isn't any more than what it says.

Well put, even if he could have gone further. Reporting on its poll taken from November 6-8, 2008, Gallup observed "only 27% of Americans approve of the job Bush is doing as president." That would be Republican President George W. Bush, from whom an exasperated John McCain, who had spent much of the campaign disassociating himself, blurted out during an autumn debate, "I am not George Bush." Yes, (sarcasm alert) Barack Obama faced the daunting task of running as a Democrat against a nominee representing a party with an incumbent president about whom Gallup explained:

With barely two months remaining in his second term, Bush could quite possibly finish with the lowest final job approval score of any president serving out his term in at least a half century. His current 27% job approval rating is below Harry Truman's final rating of 32% in December 1952, as well as Carter's 34% in December 1980. No other president since the advent of polling was rated below 49% as he was leaving office.

Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. And as Ta-Nahisi Coates apparently understands, sometimes an election is just an election.