President Barack Obama’s 2012 re-election campaign is suddenly making an “urgent” push to hire more minorities, particularly blacks, Politico reports. The move comes after conservative outlets such as Breitbart News reported the stunning and hypocritical lack of diversity among Obama 2012 staffers at his campaign headquarters in Chicago–in photos that his own campaign made public.
While the move is obviously a response to the firestorm the photos caused–which resembled the lily-white profile of the “Occupy Wall Street” movement last fall–it took Politico 18 paragraphs and 972 words to mention the photos that most likely spurred Obama campaign officials to send out e-mails to African-American leaders for urgent “help” in finding “qualified, African American candidates for some of these positions” in what is going to be a “fast moving process.”
Make no mistake, this is a concession from Chicago that those triumphant photos were a public relations disaster for the Obama campaign.
Politico also noted that Obama’s campaign manager is running a working group “dedicated to ensuring that we are looking at a diverse pool of applicants for jobs.” Even the White House has suddenly reached out to members of the Congressional Black Caucus to build a better pipeline for hiring black staffers, which is a concession that Obama’s White House not only hypocritically pays women 18 percent less than it does men while ginning up its “war on women” rhetoric, but also lacks in diversity while it tries to paint Republicans as being intolerant of minorities.
In March, Breitbart News revealed the close association between Obama and radical Harvard Law School professor Derrick Bell. Obama had participated in a 1990 protest on Bell’s behalf, which Obama’s defenders characterized as a protest for greater faculty diversity. No plans are reported for similar protests at Obama campaign quarters in Chicago.
Obama needs minorities, particularly blacks, to turn out in the numbers they did in 2008, especially in crucial swing states such as North Carolina and Virginia. Polls have shown that if the 2012 electorate resembles the 2010 electorate, Obama may lose in November, and a lack of diversity among his own staff surely will win him no favor among minority voters.
More importantly, for an administration that has advised many of the nation’s public institutions to increase their levels of diversity, it is ironic that the Obama campaign has been shamed into diversifying its own ranks.
It is yet another example of Obama’s actions not matching his lofty–and often hypocritical–rhetoric.
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