No president wants to be known as that president: the one who oversaw a period of social unrest and rioting. Presidents can deal with wars or natural disasters. They can even deal with contagions or national public health hazards. But in the case of what’s transpiring in Ferguson, Missouri, President Obama – wager it – would rather be managing an Ebola outbreak than having to deal with what are now endless nights of protests and mornings where we’re waking up to yet more reports of violent clashes.
Ordering calibrated airstrikes on evil black-clad bands of Islamic State terrorists roaming the Iraqi countryside is, relatively speaking, easy. You can even enjoy a bit of dark humor playing geopolitical chess with Russian President Vladimir Putin as you attempt to contain the Ukraine crisis.
But it’s clear, based on the nearly monotone and diffident way in which the president is responding to events on the ground in Ferguson, he wants to be nowhere near this kind of shit. This is what he read in history books, sharpening his skills eons ago as a community organizer on the hardened streets of Chicago. White presidents deal with protests and riots. Black presidents? There’s no precedent for that, Black people typically celebrated and/or vilified as the humble, defenseless protesters demanding justice and peace. In the post-racial America, race riots weren’t allowed, much less having them erupt during a Black president’s watch.
And, as you can feel the heavy head-shaking grumblings of Black folks wanting more from their first Black president, here are a few reasons why he’d rather stay vacationing in Martha’s Vineyard than take this mess more head on than he already has:
(1) ‘It’s My Legacy.’ Obama has had two good terms of a legacy as the First Black President of the most powerful nation on the planet. Even if he’s remembered as the president Republicans refused to work with, he’s still made history. In other words, he’s set. But Ferguson, in all its strange ways, completely trashes that narrative and makes everyone forget the feel-good racial transcendence that, arguably, put him there in the first place.
(2) Republicans Could Retake the Senate – Ferguson Gives Them the Keys. Here’s a Pew Research graph that Democrats should be worried about only two months away from the Congressional midterm elections:
And here are two more from YouGov:
And the president might be watching those numbers, too, which explains his milquetoast seeing-it-from-both-sides approach. More than likely, Congressional Democrats are hoping Ferguson doesn’t blow up into a fresh new wedge issue that Republicans can count on. The president, already a perpetual target of racial taunts, doesn’t want them to. But if the issue of race keeps heating up, Republicans might get more their usual share of Caucasian votes in November. Think about it from their perspective for a moment: a Black president siding with the uncontrollable Black “protesters” and “rioters” with nothing constructive to do but hate on the cops just doing their job. It’s already starting, the conservative bloggers are lighting it up. Incidentally, it’s also a reason presumptive 2016 Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton has been awfully mum on the issue, too. No one wants to end up having their comments sliced and diced into a Republican campaign ad.
(3) ‘I’ve Got Other Things on My Plate, Fam.’ Presidents by their nature are multi-tasking human beings. Their ability to run a decision or play on any number of problems simultaneously is what gets them in the White House. In this particular case, Obama already has enough happening – the entire expanse of the Middle East is blowing up all at once into a virtual Armageddon scenario (with a slaughtered American journalist raising the stakes); he’s only a step away from, at the very least, a conventional weapons clash between NATO and the Russian Federation should things continue to devolve in eastern Europe; he’s trying to keep the peace in Asia where China and Japan are saber rattling; and while he’s steering a slow economic recovery, he’s got to constantly face belligerent Republicans who won’t work with him and are poised to solidify their grip on the Congress. Ferguson, in the grander scheme of things, is that smallest fish in the frying pan he’d rather pass along to an Attorney General who’s made a career out of getting embroiled in this stuff.
(4) The Feds Can’t Step Too Deep into State Shit. He’s in a complex damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t situation. If he doesn’t show that he’s, at the very least, optically in control of the situation or using a massive show of federal resources at his disposal, he’s going to get criticism from black folks that he’s selling out and other folks that he’s too weak and indecisive. But if he heads in to strong, rambling conservatives who’ve always painted him as “King Obama” will say he’s using federal resources to encroach on state rights – something he’s got to watch carefully in Missouri where the Republican-dominated legislature just passed a bill nullifying federal gun laws. Too much federal presence in Missouri under this particular president sparks more political polarization and a pre-Civil War-like revival that’s already worsened during clashes over the Affordable Care Act.
(5) This Isn’t Trayvon Martin. There are just as many differences between Sandford, Florida and Ferguson, Missouri than there are similarities. Yes: two young, before-their-prime unarmed Black men were fatally shot. But the difference here is that one was shot by a police officer and one was not. That’s a big difference. And, it’s probably one reason why Obama isn’t saying anything like “Michael Brown could have been my son” (other than the fact he used that line already). It’s easier to call out an idiotic, trigger-happy private citizen with a gun than it is a law enforcement officer, especially after the president had political hell to pay in 2009 just for criticizing the judgment of a Cambridge, MA police officer who cuffed his Ivy League buddy up. He’s not going out on that limb anymore, especially after video surfaces of Brown allegedly snatching cigars from a convenience store. It’s much more complex and a treacherous game of sharp political eggshells when the police are the perpetrators.
CHARLES D. ELLISON is a veteran political strategist and Chief Political Correspondent for Uptown Magazine. He’s also Washington Correspondent for the Philadelphia Tribune and a frequent contributor to The Root. He can be reached via Twitter @charlesdellison.