In-credibility!

Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I think Barack gets leeway to speak the way he does about race because, to put it bluntly, he knows what he's talking about. I mean this in a very specific personal way. For instance, you can talk about Lil Wayne, when you have Jay-Z on your Ipod, when Nas has a song about you, and you can pull the "dirt of your shoulder" move. You can talk about black kids not obsessing over basketball, when you yourself had to balance basketball with school, and you still play. You can talk about black fathers laying down on the job, when your father laid down on the job, while your father-in-law clearly did not. You can critique black communities up one side and down the other, when you've spent a good part of your adult life organizing and working in those same communities, and when you're married to a black woman.

Okay so far, right? But then he hits a sour note:

My point, though, is that, Obama has a sort of credibility that, say, a guy who really had spent no time around black people (and didn't seem particularly interested in being around black people) just doesn't have. Furthermore, Obama isn't saying personal responsibility and no policy. He's talking both.

I've been enjoying a back-and-forth with Noah on whether or not bright and ethical conservatives owe it to themselves to Sister Souljah the whole damn conservative movement on the grounds that it has engaged in years of unethical campaign strategies, in particular ones that prey on white lower-class fears. I shot back at one point by saying that Democratic direct mail campaigns foment elite contempt just as unethically as right-wing ones target lower- and middle-class fears, and Ta-Nehisi's post is a classic example of one of the Left's worst lines: if you're not in favor of government interference, you are indifferent to human suffering. If Ta-Nehisi believes that the problems he's talking about demand a government program, that's fine. I have a problem with the idea that agreeing with him on that point is a prerequisite for credibility.