The Party of Racists
Republicans have a built-in excuse not to vote for Barack Obama—he’s a wild-eyed, race-mongering, terrorist-befriending, crypto-Communist.
Democrats have no such excuse: they consider those some of his best qualities.
Deep-seated racial misgivings could cost Barack Obama the White House if the election is close, according to an AP-Yahoo News poll that found one-third of white Democrats harbor negative views toward blacks — many calling them ”lazy,” ”violent” or responsible for their own troubles.
The poll, conducted with Stanford University, suggests that the percentage of voters who may turn away from Obama because of his race could easily be larger than the final difference between the candidates in 2004 — about 2.5 percentage points.
Certainly, Republican John McCain has his own obstacles: He’s an ally of an unpopular president and would be the nation’s oldest first-term president. But Obama faces this: 40 percent of all white Americans hold at least a partly negative view toward blacks, and that includes many Democrats and independents.
More than a third of all white Democrats and independents — voters Obama can’t win the White House without — agreed with at least one negative adjective about blacks, according to the survey, and are significantly less likely to vote for Obama than those who don’t have such views.
I think it only fair to observe that more than a few African American academics, columnists, and politicians have themselves suggested some of the same failings about their people (with the exception of “lazy”, which is only a stone’s throw from “shiftless”).
But let’s accept this as the offensive problem it really is. One-third of Democrats—Democrats!—have a negative attitude toward black people, and won’t vote for one as neatly wrapped (and articulate!) as Barack Obama.
As former Democrats ourselves, as defenders of Israel, we are more than familiar with the biases and blindness of Democrats. They could give a crap what we think about them, but this—that they are no different from those other Democrats Robert Byrd and George Wallace—this should have them quivering in their Birkenstocks.
PS: Not for the first time, Jules Crittenden got here first.