“In this country,” said Barack Obama in his victory speech six years ago today, “we rise or fall as one nation, as one people. Let’s resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long.”
Nothing stopped Obama from fulfilling this promise, but he never meant what he said. Recently, former Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele, who is himself black, summed up Democratic strategy in the 2014 campaign, a strategy abetted by Obama at every turn. “[Democrats] have been playing on this nerve in the black community,” said Steele, “that if you even so much as look at a Republican, churches will start to burn, your civil rights will be taken away and young black men like Trayvon Martin will die.”