Page: Obama's reality: Nation still divided
President Barack Obama at the NATO summit in Newport, Wales on Friday, Sept. 5, 2014. Credit: AP
Whatever happened to "Obamamania"?
Recent polls suggest that race relations have gotten worse since President Barack Obama's 2008 election -- or, at least, that more Americans think they have.
It didn't help anybody's feeling of sunny delight that the two latest polls were conducted in the wake of racial unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black teen by a white police officer.
Either way, the polls add fuel to the conservative portrayal of Obama as more of a divider than a uniter. For example, only 6 percent of voters in battleground election states this fall say race relations have improved under the first African-American president, according to a Politico poll. Forty-six percent say they've gotten worse and 48 percent say the dynamic has remained about the same.
One thing that we do share across racial lines is gloom, according to the poll, although more white voters, 49 percent, say relations are worse, compared with 38 percent of African-Americans who say so.
Almost half -- 47 percent -- of both white and African-American voters say race relations are about the same. Among Hispanic voters, 14 percent say relations have improved, 30 percent say they have worsened and 56 percent say they have stayed the same.
That's disappointing, but it also may be a sign of realism setting in after the euphoria of Obama's election.
The good news may be that, compared with five years ago, a long-range national survey taken by the Pew Research Center and USA Today after Ferguson found that "overall perceptions of relations between blacks and whites are only modestly changed."
Although the number of black respondents who said blacks and whites get along "very well" or "pretty well" increased 7 percentage points between 2007 and 2009 to 76 percent, the share that holds that positive view now has dropped 12 points since then. Similarly, white respondents who thought blacks and whites got along well increased 3 percentage points from 2007 to 2009 to 80 percent, but fell 5 percentage points from 2009 to 2014.
Significant as those differences may be, they do look modest compared to the dramatic differences between the races in their views of police. Seventy percent of black respondents thought police did a poor job of treating racial and ethnic groups equally, compared with only 25 percent of whites.
That reminds me of the late Rodney King's plea during the Los Angeles riots: "Can we all get along?" The possibility of a positive answer to that question fueled much of the euphoria surrounding Obama's election. But racial eruptions during his terms reveal the limits on anything one person can do to heal our historic racial divide.
He's learned that the hard way, as in the "beer gate" fiasco. By saying the Cambridge police behaved "stupidly" in arresting a black Harvard professor for breaking into his own home, he opened up an O.J.-like divide that led to a "beer summit" photo-op to smooth ruffled feathers.
The president's My Brother's Keeper program, aimed mostly at connecting young black males to support networks, is a worthwhile effort to blend government help with conservative self-help values. But the urgency of such hot-button issues as crime and allegations of police misconduct continue to drive wedges between the races.
Democracy, wrote journalist Walter Lippmann in his 1922 book, "Public Opinion," "has never seriously faced the problem which arises because the pictures inside people's heads do not automatically correspond with the world outside." We're still trying to face it.
Many voters may have had it in their heads that Obama's election would inaugurate a post-racial America. Instead, it has only revealed our racial divide to be deeper than many, perhaps even Obama, thought it was. That's the new reality.
