Obama “Tone Deaf To Blacks’ Needs Says Douglas Wilder

When he was elected governor of Virginia in 1990, Douglas Wilder became the first African-American governor of a U.S. state since reconstruction.  Wilder supported the election of the first African-American president in 2008, but withheld an endorsement in 2012 and in his new autobiography called “Son of Virginia” complains that Obama has failed America’s blacks.

Although he ended up voting for Obama’s reelection many were surprised when the former Governor refused to endorse the President in 2012:

Former Gov. L. Douglas Wilder, who backed Democrat Barack Obama for president in 2008, did not endorse Obama or Republican Mitt Romney in an opinion column released days before the election.

“I have campaigned for and supported the president in the past and many people now want to discuss his job performance with me,” Wilder writes in a column for Reuters.

“They often note that Obama ran as a moderate — and that is the man they threw their support behind in 2008. But some look back and say that he has governed as a left-of-center liberal who did not keep the focus squarely on jobs and economic recovery.

Wilder gets more specific in his book which was released on October 1st:

In his new autobiography Son of Virginia, expressed deep disappointment with America’s first black president, calling him “aloof” and “tone deaf” to blacks’ needs, leaving African-Americans to ask, “When is our time coming?”

Wilder, governor from 2005-09, and who served twice as mayor of Richmond, wrote, “This was not the ‘hope and change’ president we had expected.”

Worse, in his otherwise inspirational book about growing up the grandson of slaves in the cradle of the Confederacy, Wilder charged that black America is worse off under Obama. Describing what voters told him during Obama’s reelection campaign, Wilder wrote, “I was distressed by the deep well of unhappiness I felt as voters repeatedly described the ways in which they were worse off than they’d been at the beginning of President Obama’s term.”

He recalled a 2012 meeting at Washington’s historically black Howard University where blacks discussed the lack of programs aimed at them. “Nowhere was the promise of his election more deeply felt than in our community. Yet in the fourth year of the president’s term, they were left wondering, ‘How long?’”

Even Joe Biden takes a hit in the book, with Wilder slapping the vice president’s charge that 2012 GOP challenger Mitt Romney would “put y’all back in chains.” Said Wilder, “I got criticized myself when I said Biden was a tar baby that Obama was stuck with. I made no apologies. Unfortunately, it was true.”

According to Wilder President Obama was afraid of looking like he gave Blacks preferential treatment.

“In his history, Obama had been thoughtful and even profound on social issues, and it’s the main reason he was elected president. But like so many politicians, he became a tool of his advisers as they tried to sway in cadence with the political winds. Too often, he was a president whose main goal seemed to be not making anyone mad. And as a result, he achieved the opposite.”

Thats where Wilder and I differ, this is a president who has made many people mad not just African-Americans, in fact many see him as a man who do not care what others (like the public) think.  Look at his two “crowning” achievements Obamacare, and the Iran deal, both are hated by the voter and it really doesn’t matter to him.

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