Posted on 10/11/2009 8:50:44 PM PDT by smoothsailing
October 11, 2009
Obama and the end of white guilt
By Jeff Lukens
Barack Obama portrayed himself as America's first "post-racial" president, yet he and his supporters continue to play the race card against ordinary Americans who oppose him. Despite a big election victory, Obama is unable to understand that ordinary Americans do not like being bullied. Nor does he understand that they do not like being called racists for political disagreements.
The Obama agenda is desperate and out of ideas. In their desperation, they deal from the bottom of the deck. The race card has never failed them before, and when the logic of their position fails, evoking racism always ends the discussion. Unfortunately for them, this time the discussion will not end. The more they smear everyday Americans with the charge of racism, the more meaningless the accusation becomes.
In the wake of town halls, tea parties and 9/12 protests against Obama's policies, many media pundits — Jimmy Carter, Maureen Dowd of the New York Times, and Newsweek Magazine, to name a few — have branded these patriotic Americans as racists. It is appalling to think that the Left has played this game for decades. Americans of all backgrounds have fought for Civil Rights for too long to have accusations of racism used in such an offhand manner.
Among the many who voted for Obama, there is a growing sense that they have been had. The idea of electing an African-American for president intrigued them. Many voted for Obama with the belief that he was sincere about ending partisan and racial animosities. They believed that he was a new and transformative figure in Washington.
That was then. Now people are wise to his ways and do not like what they see. From runaway deficit spending, to a sputtering economy, to cap and trade, to weak foreign policy, the list of policy failures goes on. The more Obama speaks about his health plan, the more people do not want it. His magical spell may still work in Oslo for a Nobel Prize, but with the public over here, it is gone.
Even with 60 Democrat votes in the Senate, it is doubtful whether Obama will get a health plan passed. He is fading in the polls because everyone knows that his speeches are just words and don't mean anything. It is all a smokescreen to obscure his true agenda of restricting personal freedoms and imposing ever-greater state control.
The Obama presidency is destined to fail due to his doctrine-over-practicality approach to politics, and the impossibility of his plans to succeed. And just as people aren't buying into Obama's policies, people just aren't buying into blind charges of racism either.
Obama and his allies are overplaying the race card so often and so wantonly that such accusations no longer have much meaning. The irony of Obama's presidency is that the demon of white guilt that has haunted the nation since the founding may finally be exorcized. Whatever sense of guilt whites may have felt about the racial injustice in our history has faded with his rise to the presidency.
No matter. With Obama's blessing, Attorney General Eric Holder plans to hire more than 50 new civil rights lawyers to search out racism wherever it can be alleged. Obama's Department of Justice will now set out to undo the emphasis on cases of obvious discrimination, and create a divisive new witch-hunt.
Author, columnist, and research fellow, Shelby Steele wrote his book, "White Guilt," in 2006. According to Steele, the success of the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s showed that America's power structure lacked moral authority. White guilt was an attempt by whites to regain that right by attempting to appear benevolent toward blacks, while many African-American leaders took advantage of white guilt to gain handouts such as affirmative action. The result has been troublesome for both races, and for America as a whole.
While we should confront racism when it occurs, over the years it has become rare and marginalized. Only in a country as colorblind ours is could a black man easily win the presidency when white Americans cast the vast majority of the votes.
With the passing of white guilt from the forefront of the national conscience, perhaps the likes of Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Jeremiah Wright, and all the other race hustlers of the land will no longer be taken so seriously. And perhaps the identity politics that has divided the country and sustained the Democrat Party for a half-century can finally be ended.
When Obama and his ways are finally rejected, perhaps then, we can finally live in a country where all will be judged by the "content of their character." This may be one Obama legacy that we can look forward to.
© Jeff Lukens
RULE 12: Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it." Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions. (This is cruel, but very effective. Direct, personalized criticism and ridicule works.)
The left knows the race card is powerful, but it is getting old though over use and unfair use.
“Sheesh, that’s a long sentence”! :)
Interesting that you should mention long sentences since they have been a topic with which I have long been interested with the exception of those who do your run of the mill run on sentences expept for those people who do, in fact, strive to make a point somewhere within the sentence they are writing.
Yep. I now openly mock anyone who plays the race card.
The best ones don’t have commas! :)
Offer common sense. That's all. Watch how the moderates & independents vote. It was the moderates & independents who gave 2006 & 2008 elections to the rats. They'll wake up, IMHO. The rats are wrecking the economy, promising to do more with cap & trade while a baseball playoff is going on at 29 degrees Fahrenheit and generally courting national security disasters.
IIRC, the rats have 61 Congressional Districts that voted for McCain or Bush in either 2008 or 2004. Don't be so gloom and doom.
What’s white guilt, something liberal democraps have?
“The end of white guilt”????
It would appear that he now endangers any person of color from the democratic side from ever being elected to President again. He portrays himself as “every blackman” in the country and what reasonable white person would ever do it again after waqtching him make a dangerous fool of himself and the country he is supposed to represent?
I don’t see him winning the Democrat primary in 2012; without a lot of jobs being created, everyone can see that they’ve been had. “Hope & change” that people voted for was actually just decent jobs, and they’re nowhere to be found.
I do not agree,
This marxist p.o.s. has pissed off so very many folks and the big deal will be economy and that sir is not going to come around by the 2010 election or even the 2012 election.
10 percent or more unemployed does not spell out good things for the dems.
I agree with your assessment.
And the answer is no.
I though that [people learn] after the Clinton regime. Boy was I wrong.
The question is, can it be cleaned up before permanent damage is done.
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The answer is no, the permanent damage is already done.
obama didn't grow up here, so he doesn't understand things the way people who are born and raised here do. Besides, if it's not on his teleprompter or in Rev. Wright's "sermons" how would he know?
Enter 18 - 29 under 30 voted for "obama over mccain" two to one
They weren't paying attention, IMHO. They were too young. Obama signed up 14 million names for Organizing for America. He had to rely on union flunkies to counter demonstrate at the tea parties and townhalls.
...”Among the many who voted for Obama, there is a growing sense that they have been had.”...
This statement enrages me. There was ample evidence before the election that Barack Obam is a hard-left fraudulent creation of the dominant media. Folks in Illinois knew it long ago, when he stole elections and used nastry hardball tactics to drive opponents out of the arena.
The individuals who now claim “buyer’s remorse” sicken me. They willingly and willfully chose Obama and now the entire country will suffer because of their fantastical dreams.
As long as there are ditzy suburban white females, particularly in areas where blacks only exist on the television screen, there will always be “white guilt.”
The only thing the Demlibs fear is, is the troubling thought that they will turn the Democratic party into the “black party” and make it as appealing as the Harold Washington Party was in Chicago. Till Obama put the brakes on the race baiting they were within a couple of weeks of destroying their best weapon (the race card) on the rocks of irrelavancy.
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