Dick Morris: Obama race bating will backfire

Dick Morris says Obama's decision to play the race card in a desperate attempt to reverse his dramatic slide in the polls will backfire. By claiming that anyone who criticizes Obama's failed policies is a racist, the president will lose more of his Democratic base, Morris said.

From his new column:

Now, Obama is letting his supporters strip away his image of a post-racial president by their increasingly racial rhetoric and his support for radical black activists.

Attorney General Eric Holder's refusal to prosecute the New Black Panthers so obviously guilty of racial intimidation at the Philadelphia polling places in 2008 is of a piece with the NAACP's loud denunciation of the tea party movement as racists, likening it to the White Citizens Councils of the segregationist past. And the Obama administration's decision to sue to overturn the Arizona immigration law -- despite the fact that Americans approve of the statute, and disapprove of the lawsuit to void it, by 59 percent to 28 percent -- is an attempt to foundation his appeal to Latino voters in racial terms.

In a bid to increase enthusiasm and, therefore, turnout among minority voters, Barack Obama is sacrificing his white support and his non-racial image.

Already, the results of this disastrous strategy are apparent. The latest FoxNews/Opinion Dynamics survey shows that his job approval among Democrats has fallen from 84 percent two weeks ago to a mere 76 percent today. This fall has led to a drop in his overall approval from 47 percent at the end of June to 43 percent in the middle of July.

But the political implications of Obama's lurch to the left and his efforts to polarize his administration racially are only part of the problem. Obama, as president of the United States, is increasingly taking sides in the old racial debates, reigniting them and lending new fuel to their flames. He is no more the president of all the people, but is retreating into the racial cocoon of a supportive minority vote.

Read the full column, "The End of the Post Racial Presidency," at Townhall.com