Hillarysworld

Well, it's official. The Obama phenomenon is over. Permanently.

It's not just that Obama's favorite weapon, the Big Speech, no longer moves public opinion. (Last Wednesday's health-care speech produced a slight "bounce" in public support for the health-care bill, but it disappeared in less than a week.)

What really ends the era of Obama is this: a major part of Obama's appeal was his symbolism as the first black president, which was supposed to give Americans an opportunity to put the whole ugly history of racial politics behind them. Yet here we are, less than eight months into Obama's administration, and the racial politics are worse than they have been in a long time.

The common theme of the signs was individual rights versus collectivism, an advocacy of limited government held to the restrictions placed on it by the Constitution. One of the signs in the photo essay sums up the message of the tea party rally: "It's the Liberty, Stupid."

The fact that the tea party had such a clear philosophical message, and that the bogus racism smear so thoroughly evades this message, says a lot about the intellectual confidence of the tea party movement—versus the lack of philosophical confidence on the left. The tea partiers are very happy to have a philosophical debate on the most basic political issues. The left, by contrast, wants to change the subject with personal, ad hominem attacks—which indicates that they are not confident that they can win the debate if it stays on the question of the size and role of government.

To say that the left is resorting to "racial politics" is a bit too vague. Let's define exactly what they are doing: they are resorting to a decades-old politics of racial slander, reflexively accusing any opponent of racism in an attempt to shut down discussion.

Racism is one of the worst insults you can throw at someone today, only a few steps up from accusing him of being a child molester. That this is so is, in fact, a tribute to the heroic change in American culture in recent decades. In less than fifty years, America has gone from a country in which segregation was openly enforced and defended to a country in which an accusation of even indirect racism can ruin a man's reputation and career. Just ask Don Imus. But this has come to be used as a weapon—a bludgeon of intimidation wielded by the left.

Barack Obama's color-blind campaign, the idea that he was running as if race didn't matter, promised us an uplifting break from this history. There were indications from the beginning, however, that he didn't really mean it. Obama had to tap dance around his close, longstanding association with the race-baiting preacher Jeremiah Wright, and he sat back while his proxies used accusations of racism as a weapon against the Clinton campaign.

If he could do that in the Democratic primary, there's no reason to think he'll object to those who are doing it again now. Obama allegedly wants to stay out of the current racism smear campaign—but leaders don't get that option. By remaining silent, he is signaling his approval; he is voting "present" on the revival of the racism smear in American politics. This is an enormous disappointment to many people who once voted for Obama—and to many others, like myself, who once saw an element of nobility in his campaign, even if we disagreed with everything else he stood for.

If Obama doesn't immediately and forcefully reject the new racism smear against the tea party movement, then he will have destroyed the last remaining element of his appeal to voters—and he will have made millions of passionate new enemies among the voting public.