I don't know much about history . . .

Hmmm. The adage that those who forget history are doomed to repeat it loomed large yesterday. I was three-times jarred in Obama's eulogy to John Lewis by what can only have been historical ignorance.

This was the passage:

[John Lewis] knew, from his own life, that progress is fragile, that we have to be vigilant against the darker currents of this country’s history, of our own history, with their whirlpools of violence, and hatred, and despair that can always rise again. Bull Connor may be gone, but today we witnessed with our own eyes police officers kneeling on the necks black Americans. George Wallace may be gone, but we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators.

Obama transitioned from there to an indictment of the unnamed current administration. The pivot was unpleasant but not uncharacteristic. He has had a pattern of soaring rhetoric married to mean-spiritedness.

The jarring part was the invocation of Bull Connor and George Wallace. Both lifelong Democratic politicians; segregationists; members of the Democratic National Committee; both staunch opponents of the Civil Rights legislation of the 1960s.

Why would Obama invoke his own party's racist history in order to condemn his successor's administration? No one could credibly claim that there is a single politician today as committed to segregation and institutionalized racism as Wallace and Connor.

It would seem that either Obama forgot that Wallace and Connor were influential Democratic Party leaders or, possibly, he knew it but presumed he could pass them off as Republicans to an unknowing audience.

Neither interpretation reflects well.

But for any intelligent person with a good education, there was something of a triple-whammy. To hear Connor and Wallace as Democratic leaders invoked as an indictment of America's racist past was one thing. But hearing that, you almost immediately associate into the current reality. All the charges of racism are centered on a handful of cities which have been administered by Democrats for thirty, forty, fifty years and more.

Which at the level just below the conscious kind of leads you to - America's racist past is strongly associated with the Democratic party and the diminutive presence of racism in America today is concentrated in Democratic bastions.

Finally there was a third jarring effect, again, I assume, entirely unintentional.

What does "we can witness our federal government sending agents to use tear gas and batons against peaceful demonstrators" bring to mind? Can you think of some instance in the past half century or so where a Republican President brought in the National Guard to force a Democratic Governor to comply with Federal law?

If you don't think of the desegregation of Arkansas schools in 1957 after the overturning of "separate but equal" by the Supreme Court in Brown v. Board of Education, then shame on your history teachers.

Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower federalized the Arkansas National Guard in September 1957 in order to permit the safe integration of Arkansas's public schools in the face of the Democratic Governor Orval Faubus's efforts to oppose integration.

Click to enlarge.
Republican President Eisenhower used the National Guard to protect African-Americans during desgregation in Arkansas in 1957.

John Lewis would never have made these mistakes. But he was a classy, moral gentleman who called his fellow Americans to a higher standard of behavior not just because it was right but because he loved his fellow Americans.

In one paragraph, Obama reminded his audience that the most visible faces of institutionalized racism in the 1950s-1970s were leaders in the Democratic Party; reminded them that the only places with intense accusations of racism today are in the cities so long governed by Democrats; and reminded the audience that the most famous instance of an American President federalizing a State National Guard was by a Republican President to protect black citizens from segregation by a Democratic Governor and violence related to it.

I am pretty certain these were not the intended messages.

And all for an ignorance of basic history or a pridefully cavalier attitude towards it.