David Gregory Adds ‘Conservative’ Opinion After David Brooks Won’t Hate Obama Enough

david brooks

Wow. This is a ball of crazy. A mostly white panel gets together to discuss the first black president’s comments on race and things get awkward. Poor David Gregory got upset when David Brooks wouldn’t hate on Obama’s speech enough, so he had to add in the “conservative” point of view, since Brooks is… well, conservative.

While New York Times conservative columnist David Brooks made some great points on Meet the Press today about race, in order to get there, he tripped on his whiteness, but he wasn’t enough of a hater to serve as the ‘conservative’ opinion. He was there ostensibly as an expert on the President, having written a biography on Obama.

Brooks said of Obama that his speech was beautiful, but it’s important to note that he’s all about race, “It seemed superficially unimportant, but it’s important to remember race is his first subject, as it would be if you had a black father and a white mother. He brings to all the other issues… But it’s important to remember, race is how he started.”

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Gregory had to interject that conservatives would disagree, because if the conservative panelist won’t hate enough to fairly represent the party, well, we can count on Gregory to round it out. Conservatives don’t think the President should have been speaking on the matter of race at this time. Shocking.

Watch here via Meet the Press:

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DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. It seemed superficially unimportant, but it’s important to remember race is his first subject, as it would be if you had a black father and a white mother. He brings to all the other issues, the way he framed race and the way he started thinking about race, his tendency to do on the one hand, on the other, his desire to reconcile opposites, his ability to see different points of view, all the stuff we’ve seen him come to apply to every other issue, it started with race.

I thought this speech was one of the highlights, I thought it was a symphony of indignation, professionalism, executive responsibility, personal feeling. It had all these different things woven together. I thought beautifully. But it’s important to remember, race is how he started.

DAVID GREGORY: Again, I come back because I want to make sure to represent that other side as well. Some conservatives have said, look, this was the wrong moment to inject race into the trial, their view, and for the president to speak out in this way.

(Good thing Gregory is representing the other side, what with a conservative just having spoken – just because Brooks wasn’t frothing at the mouth doesn’t mean the conservative point of view hasn’t been heard. Or does it.)

DAVID BROOKS: Yeah. I guess I would disagree with him. I think if the young man had been a white kid and the older guy had been a black guy, it would be a different story. And the president said that. And I think that happens to be true.

And that concludes our snippet of the mostly white panel discussing Obama’s comments on race.

It’s true that David has been a fan of the President, once praising then Senator Obama as smarter than him regarding political philosophy and policy:

“I don’t want to sound like I’m bragging,” Brooks recently told me, “but usually when I talk to senators, while they may know a policy area better than me, they generally don’t know political philosophy better than me. I got the sense he knew both better than me.”

But does Gregory really need to go provide yet more conservative points of view, simply because Brooks’ conservative point of view isn’t hostile enough to qualify? What he’s admitting is that it’s not conservative unless it is against this President.

Gregory wants to make sure he gives weight to the white conservatives who don’t think this black President should have spoken about his own experience with race at this time, because that’s just what the country needs right now: White people deciding when the black President can discuss his experiences.

Should we take a poll about when they would be happy for a black president to speak about his experiences? Maybe we can take a poll on if we should ever let a black president speak without permission. I mean, gosh, he might say something that a white conservative won’t like, and if Tucker Carlson’s gang of thugs aren’t there to shout him down, and Republicans aren’t there to shout “YOU LIE!”, well, he might get uppity.

No one ever asked whether George W Bush should be discussing his white childhood experiences. His experiences were not considered offensive. And this is indicative of the problem.

It should surprise no one that the first black President would need to avoid issues of race, so that Americans who were frightened off of him by a desperate Republican Party’s southern strategy might be able to relax a bit.

Obama is no more all about race than a white person is all about race.

Obama is a thinker. He’s a strategist. He’s often the smartest person in the room, and he didn’t get there by focusing on race. He got there by transcending other people’s limited ideas about race.


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