How President Obama governs on civil rights

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Some of his silence is political, as it would not serve much purpose for the president to cast his opponents as racist.

Some of it is practical: in 2012, the Obama campaign urged its surrogates not to focus too much on voter ID laws, because focus groups showed that such discussion didn’t fire up black voters, but made them feel helpless, like voting would be hard and they shouldn’t try. Obama, in a meeting with civil rights leaders last year, urged them not to speak as if the entire Voting Rights Act had been struck down, which might have lead people to believe there was no way to defend their right to vote.

But some in Obama’s circle, perhaps befitting people who serve under the first black president, are quite optimistic about race in America and do not believe most of the animus toward Obama is about him being black.

“Most people see him as simply the president, agree with him, disagree with him, he’s opposed because of the positions he’s taken, as opposed to who he is, by most,” said Holder.

He added, “The Republican Party opposes him because of his policies, the notion of big government, Obamacare, all that stuff. That’s the driver for them, for the vast majority of those who are opposed to him.”

In an interview in his New York office, Sharpton said of Obama, “He understands there’s still bigotry. I may think there is more than he does.”

But after George Zimmerman’s trial ended last year, Obama saw a moment where he did want to interject on race. He had spoken about Trayvon Martin and what he meant to the country, particularly African-Americans, in a number of private settings, with Holder, Jarrett, and others.

A few days after the verdict, Obama told his staffers in an Oval Office meeting that he wanted to give a formal address on the controversy.

“Do you feel like they need to hear from you,” one of the aides in the meeting asked the president, referring to African-Americans.

“I need to speak for them,” the president responded, according to one of the officials who attended the session.

But his remarks were telling. Obama acknowledged that the case had started a national dialogue on race, used his appearance in the White House briefing room to give his views  and simultaneously said he would be exiting this discussion immediately after he left the podium that day.

“You know, there have been talk about should we convene a conversation on race. I haven’t seen that be particularly productive when politicians try to organize conversations. They end up being stilted and politicized, and folks are locked into the positions they already have,” he said.

Obama, according to people who have spoken to him, was not being subtle: Obama thinks the series of formal conversations on America’s racial challenges President Clinton conducted in 1998 and 1999 under his “initiative on race” were not particularly useful.

But Obama does want to have a public conversation about race and policy with the ideas of intellectuals at the forefront. And he is already starting it.

Robert Putnam, a Harvard public policy professor who became famous in the 1990’s for a book called “Bowling Alone” that described how institutions that brought Americans together, like bowling, were in decline, has over the last several years turned to a new subject: inequality.

Putnam, in his research and writings, argues, as other academics have, that class, not race, is increasingly the dividing line that separates Americans. And he argues that social mobility, not poverty is the way to talk about inequality. Speaking in terms of class and mobility, according to Putnam, can unify Americans, many of whom view poverty solely as a problem of minorities in inner cities.

Obama, to be clear, is not a post-racial thinker in this kind of way, according to people who have talked to him about racial issues. He, for example, is strongly in favor of affirmative action based on race as well as programs that target class.

But the Putnam ideas dovetailed nicely with where the president wanted to go: a way to talk about the challenges of poverty and race with a unifying message. Last year, Putnam presented his ideas and framework in a session at the White House that included the president, as well as others who work on inequality, like Geoffrey Canada, the founder of the Harlem’s Children Zone.  Obama started publicly referring to Putnam’s work.

So in December, Obama gave a speech on inequality that referred to Putnam’s research. But he asked his aides to make sure the remarks directly addressed race as well. Poverty and inequality, Obama emphasized, are still problems for African-Americans and other minorities. But they are also increasingly problems for white Americans.

“Now, it’s true that the painful legacy of discrimination means that African Americans, Latinos, Native Americans are far more likely to suffer from a lack of opportunity — higher unemployment, higher poverty rates,” he said at a non-profit center in Anacostia, a heavily African-American part of Washington, D.C. He added, “But here’s an important point.  The decades-long shifts in the economy have hurt all groups:  poor and middle class; inner city and rural folks; men and women; and Americans of all races.”

It was a kind of unifying moment for Obama’s agenda on racial issues: the crowd at the speech included both his occasional critics, such as Cobb, as well his friends and allies Johnson, Holder and Jarrett.

But it also illustrated that the debate between Obama and other African-Americans on these issues is unlikely to end. The White House invited Rep. Keith Ellison, a black congressman from Minnesota, to attend the speech that day and also to speak briefly to Obama before the president went on stage.

With Republicans in Congress likely to block a broad minimum wage increase, Ellison used his time with Obama to urge the president to use his executive power and unilaterally require federal contractors to pay their workers above $7.25 per year, the federal minimum wage.

“His speech was awesome,” Ellison told MSNBC the next day. He added, “But now we can really do something.”