The Democrats try, but fail, to transcend race

"Barack Obama’s emphatic win in Iowa 10 days ago was widely portrayed as a historic moment in America’s political story. The fact that a black American could win in the overwhelmingly white state of Iowa was seen as a tipping point. But that may prove to be a premature – as well as historically glib – judgment of what took place.

First, it has happened before. Jesse Jackson, who was a much more overtly African-American candidate in 1988 than Mr Obama is now, won 11 primary elections in his ultimately losing bid for the Democratic nomination, including the largely white state of Vermont.

Others, notably Douglas Wilder, the first black governor of Virginia, which was headquarters to the Confederacy during the civil war, flirted with a presidential run in 1992. And in 1996, 80 per cent approval ratings suggested that the White House was Colin Powell’s for the asking. Mr Powell turned the offers down (but not because he believed his skin colour would prevent him from winning).

More importantly, though, the Iowa-breakthrough narrative has already been put into question by what has happened since then. Many attribute Hillary Clinton’s surprise comeback in New Hampshire last week to her emotional interlude in a diner, which some believe helped bring women voters out in droves the following day. Certainly Mrs Clinton won many more female votes in New Hampshire than Mr Obama (46 to 34 per cent) having lost that gender battle to him in Iowa five days earlier.

But a number of pollsters have put out a more disturbing explanation for why they got their New Hampshire forecasts so badly wrong: the so-called “Bradley effect”, named after Tom Bradley, an African-American Democrat who lost California’s gubernatorial race in 1982 after opinion polls showed him leading by a wide margin. A number of highly respected pollsters, including Andrew Kohut, head of the Pew Research Center, believe New Hampshire’s voters, too, may have said one thing and voted another.

Then there is South Carolina, where the Republicans hold their vote next Saturday (the Democrats vote the following Saturday). Racial controversy in the state, the first in the South to participate in the presidential primaries, is more normally associated with the Republicans. In 2000, George W. Bush retrieved his presidential hopes in South Carolina from the ashes of a New Hampshire defeat two weeks earlier partly by issuing coded racial messages to the state’s overwhelmingly white Republican electorate.

Mr Bush spoke at Bob Jones University in Greenville, South Carolina, which until recently banned interracial dating. Meanwhile, shadowy groups disseminated
fliers stating (inaccurately) that John McCain, his rival for the nomination, had fathered an illegitimate black child.

This time round an unlikely racial tension is simmering within the Democratic camp. It is taking place against the backdrop of a Democratic primary in which up to half of voters will be African-American."

First of all, not all democrats are liberal democrats who have a problem with blacks. To them, the Obama/Clinton controversy must be daunting to decipher, but not so with their far left brethren.

Dyed in the wool lefties dislike the very concept of liberty. To them, most people are either stupid or ignorant or otherwise incapable of handling the day to day chores of life without some sort of assistance from an omnipotent government. If birthing a baby is too difficult, well then no worries, you can abort it whenever you wish. Paid far too much for your home? Overextended yourself to a fair-thee-well? Stand by, because we're going to step in and help you as much we can. You've decided to raise a family but haven't made the slightest attempt to insure their health and safety? No problem. Government health care will settle that.

And on, and on some more. And remember, it was the democrat party that fought the assimilation of blacks into mainstream society, but if they thought white folks were dumb they were aghast at blacks being able to do dangerous things like owning weapons, so the nigger-town special laws became enacted to bar negroes from acquiring guns. Ones the blacks were disarmed it was easy to include ALL the people, and before you knew it our biggest cities were defenseless.

I do feel for the "moderate" dems. Basically, we're talking about fence-sitters who have SOME of the pie in the sky dreams of their far leftern brothers and sisters, but do happen to believe that America is a darn good place to live. But they've been presented with a choice thats difficult to understand.

There's the former First Lady who has absolutely no experience in anything other than fending off lawsuits from the women her husband raped and abused, and on the other side there's this black fellow who is the prototypical lefty...a stentorian speaker with not all that much to say. At the end of the day it really shouldn't matter, as both candidates will do their level best to inundate America with entitlement programs that will bog down the economy even more than it is now. My advice to moderate democrats is thus; vote for Obama. You simply do not want Bill Clinton hanging around the White House for another 4 years, and all Barack can do is make a fool of himself and not a fool of the entire nation.If you're a registered democrat then you've decided to accept form over substance, and thats what you've got so don't complain about NO ONE with much of anything to say that makes a lick of sense.