Regarding Shelby Steele's "A Referendum on the Redeemer?" (op-ed, Oct. 28): We liberals feel betrayed by President Barack Obama for reasons other than those Mr. Steele sets out. To date, Mr. Obama hasn't yet closed Gitmo or gotten us out of Afghanistan; he hasn't yet scrapped the military's discriminatory "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy—evoking the rationalization that Congress instead of the president and the courts ought to correct this constitutional violation of equality; and he quizzically opposes marriage equality even as he is rethinking his position. He would not have made a very decisive leader in the 1960s when visionary leaders and liberal elected officials staked out a moral claim and crafted legislation that struck a note of absolute legal equality as the road to social progress. Back then, a mixture of conservatives and liberals on the nation's high court put the Constitution on the side of blacks' and women's equality efforts.
But Mr. Obama could not even be depended on to help reshape the Supreme Court. His appointees have not been full-throated liberals, effectively taking the high court out of the social change realm for another generation. Our "liberal" president, moreover, did not even fight for a health-care plan with a public option, much less a single-payer plan. Instead, ObamaCare (with its legally dubious mandate on citizens to buy insurance) is neither affordable nor universal in its coverage.
During the presidential campaign Mr. Obama spoke of a post-racial America, but he has governed in ways that have thwarted bipartisanship, lambasted political enemies to the right and the left of him, and even defended the extensive domestic surveillance apparatus of the USA Patriot Act. His Justice Department has overlooked violations of the Voting Rights Act by black militants at a Philadelphia polling place, and his administration has enhanced racially identifiable colleges in the guise of funding historically black colleges, the second-rate remnants of a bygone segregated era. While he did indeed renounce the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, he has repeatedly welcomed to the White House the likes of demagogic and polarizing figures like Al Sharpton.
Even Mr. Obama's recent stump speeches, replete with "us" versus "them" and "don't let them turn back the clock" rhetoric, hardly sound like a racial healer, much less a redeemer. Consequently, today America seems more racially and politically polarized than before his election. Barack Obama, we hardly knew ye.
Michael Meyers
Executive Director
New York Civil Rights Coalition
New York
By definition a redeemer buys back someone or something by spending his own life or livelihood, not that of others. In spending our money like a spendthrift, Barack Obama proves himself to be no redeemer.
Donald Webber
Redmond, Wash.
The president sees those who oppose him—now more than half of the country—through the lens of the left's "counterculture Americanism." Rather than being the country's steward as nearly all other presidents have been, President Obama is the ideologue he has always been.
In fairness to Mr. Obama, President Franklin Roosevelt also had his share of leftist influences. But FDR, perhaps "rescued" by the demands of World War II, launched us into the golden age of American exceptionalism. By contrast, Mr. Obama is our first anti-American exceptionalism president. Rev. Wright, William Ayers, Frank Marshall Davis and many more of that ilk, past and present, are not outliers, but are part of an amazing, but scarcely scrutinized biography that, taken together, has largely and irrevocably shaped the president's thinking about our country and his political ideology.
Americans expected much more from this president who promised "hope and change," and they are deeply disappointed that what was supposed to be a historic opportunity has instead turned out to be a bumbling and very costly ideological experiment. Americans don't want our irreplaceable exceptionalism abandoned in favor of a statist-driven mediocrity, nor did they expect to be regarded as enemies in their own country because they oppose the president's aims. "Punish your enemies" were the president's words for those opposed to his notion of immigration reform during a recent pitch to Latinos.
Mike Curtiss
Hazel Green, Wis.
The more fault Shelby Steele finds with the president, the more convinced I become that President Obama is on the correct course.
Robert Weston
East Northport, N.Y.
Note from KBJ: You've got to admire Robert Weston's sterling reasoning.
Keith Burgess-Jackson, J.D., Ph.D. 