"The true measure of affirmative action's staying power is that its absence now is virtually inconceivable."

Writes Harvard lawprof Randall Kennedy:

Liberalism has made racial homogeneity uncool and unacceptable. Even many conservatives are made uncomfortable by lily-white gatherings -- hence the enhanced value to the right of Clarence Thomas, Shelby Steele, Condoleezza Rice, Linda Chavez, and any well-spoken Negro or Latino who consorts with the Tea Party crowd. That conservatives practice affirmative action even as they condemn it is a tribute to liberalism's handiwork.

"But if the old bowing and boyish president is receding, a new and more ominous president is emerging."

Shelby Steele examines the new Barack Obama, after the health care fight:

A historic figure making history, this is emerging as an over-arching theme—if not obsession—in the Obama presidency....

The old fashioned, big government liberalism that Mr. Obama uses to make himself history-making also alienates him in the center-right America of today. It makes him the most divisive president in memory—a president who elicits narcissistic identification on the one hand and an enraged tea party movement on the other. His health-care victory has renewed his narcissistic charge for the moment, but if he continues to be a 1965 liberal it will become more and more impossible for Americans to see themselves in him.

"Our new 'post-modern' race problem" — Shelby Steele on Barack Obama.

In today's WSJ:

America's primary race problem today is our new "sophistication" around racial matters. Political correctness is a compendium of sophistications in which we join ourselves to obvious falsehoods ("diversity") and refuse to see obvious realities (the irrelevance of diversity to minority development). I would argue further that Barack Obama's election to the presidency of the United States was essentially an American sophistication, a national exercise in seeing what was not there and a refusal to see what was there—all to escape the stigma not of stupidity but of racism....

Mr. Obama won the presidency by achieving a symbiotic bond with the American people: He would labor not to show himself, and Americans would labor not to see him....

I think that Mr. Obama is not just inexperienced; he is also hampered by a distinct inner emptiness—not an emptiness that comes from stupidity or a lack of ability but an emptiness that has been actually nurtured and developed as an adaptation to the political world.

A truly tragic flaw, which we will read and think about for the rest of our lives.

... Mr. Obama always knew that his greatest appeal was not as a leader but as a cultural symbol. He always wore the bargainer's mask—winning the loyalty and gratitude of whites by flattering them with his racial trust: I will presume that you are not a racist if you will not hold my race against me....

It was much more than just "you will not hold my race against me." It was you will invest my race with a special, amorphous goodness — and I will not laugh at your foolishness. I will not doubt myself and you will assume I know what I'm doing.

***

Much more at the link. Steele writes an excellent essay — providing a great starting point for the self-examination that will be required of us in the years to come as we ask ourselves how this charming young man became President of the United States.