If the Obama Administration wants to get artists involved to push their agenda, fine. They can do that through groups like Organizing for America. But leave the NEA out of this. This is a government agency that is supposed to support all Americans, not just the ones that support whoever is in office.

It’s ironic. When Democrats (including key Black Democrats) wanted Secretaries of State Powell and Rice to “fail” under the Bush Administration (i.e., not deliver the goals set forth by the Bush Administration in the best interests of the American people), it was not out of racism and not wanting to see the first two Black secretaries of state to success. Of course, it was out of principle against the Bush foreign policy.

If there is one notion emerging from the George W. Bush administration that has been excoriated from the left and the right, it was the effort to democratize tyrannical states. The left viewed this stratagem as a manifestation of arrogance, a form of imperial assertiveness. The right (at least some on the right) characterized democratization as utopianism, an unrealistic exercise in overreaching.