In remarks that are sure to dismay the race-baiting crew at MSNBC, President Obama admitted in an interview yesterday that he does not think that his conservative critics are racially motivated.
Obama made those remarks in a very flattering discussion with PBS NewsHour hosts Gwen Ifill and Judy Woodruff after he gave an address commemorating the 50th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
The interview was very wide-ranging and overwhelmingly soft (see earlier post from Brent Baker which deals with some of its other topics) but at the end, the racially obsessed Ifill decided to ask the president to address a theory that far-left individuals believe: that Obama’s opponents on the political Right are actually motivated by racial hatred. Trying to put a bit of distance between herself and the conspiratorial topic, Ifill phrased her question through the words of someone else, a leftist historian named Taylor Branch whom she had recently interviewed:
“One of the things he [Branch] said was that you suffer — you are a victim of partisan racial gridlock. That’s the way he put it. And you talked a moment ago about that a little bit,” Ifill said. “I wonder whether you think that’s true, and if so, what, if anything, the first African-American president can do to break through that kind of motivated gridlock.”
Obama refused to take Ifill’s racial baiting, however.