Obama acknowledged that the depth of problems may be more extensive than many thought.
Under Obama, racial hope, no change
By EDWARD-ISAAC DOVERE
Obama, who's been more openly and personally tackling racial issues over the last year, acknowledged Monday that the depth of the problems may have been more extensive than many people had considered, calling the "root causes" for the tension in Ferguson "a big project."
"It's one that we've been trying to carry out now for a couple of centuries. And we've made extraordinary progress, but we have not made enough progress," Obama said.
The White House is very much aware that anything Obama says immediately gets filtered through the polarization of the country, and anything he says on race only more so.
Matthew Hughey, co-author of "Language, Race and the Republican Party in the Age of Obama," is among those who say that Obama's political opponents have trafficked in implicit racial language in attacking him, with all the suspicions about his birth certificate or lines like Newt Gingrich's accusation that Obama has a "Kenyan, anti-colonial" mindset feeding on white anxiety.
"It is the same courting of white reactionary conservative fears, of using coded language," Hughey said. "The 2008 election and the presence of a black first family in the White House allowed people to activate anti-black attitudes in nonracist terms."
For Obama, Ferguson and the larger bubbling unrest is a huge potential political problem: He's always been buoyed by strong African-American support, and should that start to slip, he'll be in danger of an overall approval number low enough to usher him into political oblivion — after all, he won 95 percent of the African-American vote in 2008.
That has remained high, even in the wake of Ferguson, when Obama's public comments have been muted but the White House's behind-the-scenes outreach to black groups has been intense. In a CBS/New York Times poll out Thursday, 60 percent of African-Americans say they approve of Obama's response, while only 35 percent of whites do. That's compared with just a quarter of African-Americans who say they're satisfied with Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon's response. And the criticism of Obama also broke down along party lines: 59 percent of Democrats approved, while 52 percent of Republicans disapproved.
In what Obama has said on Ferguson, he's ended up in a familiar bind: People who feel racial issues haven't been discussed enough expect him, as the first black president, to speak out more forcefully, and they are disappointed when he doesn't, while people who feel that racial issues have been exploited tend to see anything he says on the topic as showing favoritism and overreach.
That's become a factor exacerbating the racial divide, said Andra Gillespie, a former Democratic pollster who now studies black politics at Emory University.
"We didn't discuss this stuff, but the moment of the African-American president brings what's latent to the forefront, and now it's a question of how we deal with it," Gillespie said.
"That's going to be the big takeaway of the Obama presidency: It takes more than one president to fix problems that are this entrenched and this long-standing. Not that there wasn't progress, not that it wasn't important, but we built up too much of a cult of personality around the president," Gillespie said. "That was a bit naive on all our parts."
David Nather contributed to this report.