WASHINGTON — After nearly two years of Hope and Change, the seas have not receded, the world has not turned into a gentle dove in His hands, and we have not slipped the surly shackles of partisanship.
Turns out, President Obama hasn’t even advanced us beyond puberty when it comes to race relations.
No matter the extraordinary efforts yesterday to mollify fired USDA official Shirley Sherrod — including offering her another job. The fact remains that again, the Obama administration went off half-cocked and turned a routine situation into a poisonous racial fight.
In a thoughtful speech last March about racism before a civil-rights group, Sherrod, who is black, told a black audience of her own personal experience learning that racism against white farmers is no less evil than racism against blacks. Impoverished blacks and whites are in it together, she said.
For this, she was fired.
The Obama administration prejudged Sherrod and her 45-minute speech based on a two-minute snippet zapped around the Internet by her detractors.
Welcome to yet another “teachable moment” in American race relations. In the last such moment, Professor Obama initially went off half-cocked and assumed that a white cop was wrong to arrest his black buddy.
With debt cascading all around us, government incompetence more evident than ever, and puny politics reining unchecked, Americans thought we could take solace in one sure achievement of Obama’s election.
America’s first black president, we thought, might move us beyond the tangled kelp of racism.
Sadly, this has not been achieved.
But not to worry, the “take responsibility” administration is on the case.
After blaming America, the media, Beltway politics, pop culture and the Department of Agriculture several times, White House spokesman Robert Gibbs was ready to take responsibility for this miscarriage of justice.
“A disservice was done,” he said. “An apology was owed.”