“I don’t understand how we got so toxic and just so divided and so bitter,” former President Barack Obama lamented at a campaign event last week in a display of pretend innocence so shameless that it may provoke an instant chuckle.
It was you, Mr. President. You did this to us.
It’s worth a quick review of the record. The case is easy to make, but don’t take the word of a conservative writer. Both Pew Research and Gallup tracked how people felt about race relations before Obama’s presidency, during, and after. Both polling firms affirm that Obama took us from a peak of good feeling into a nadir.
In the case of Pew, it demonstrated that a peak of 66% of Americans viewed relations between the races as good the day Obama took office in January 2009, which tumbled to 38% in December 2017. Gallup showed Obama had this effect on both black and white people.
This…
