Discriminations

Now it is apparently safe, at least for celebrity humorists, to make fun of The Obamessiah.

On Tuesday, the nationally televised comedian David Letterman offered a “Top Ten Signs Barack Obama Is Overconfident.” One, he said, was Obama’s proposing to change the name of Oklahoma to “Oklobama”; another, “measuring his head for Mount Rushmore.”

The only drawback of using this term — or is it an added virtue? — is that doing so would no doubt be denounced as anti-Muslim as well as racist.

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[NOTE: This post has been UPDATED twice three times.]

It’s been said that every time a United States Senator looks in the mirror he or she sees someone who should be president. In this regard Obama is no different from any other Senator, or any other presidential candidate. Nevertheless, for a young man whose major actual accomplishment to date consists of writing two autobiographies, I think it fair to say that he has carried self-regard to a new level.

But there is this all-important (to Obama) “difference” — the pigmentation of the fact that stares presidentially back at him from his often-used mirror (the quotes to remind you that the essential, fundamental difference of those with darker skins provides the only justification for discriminating in their favor to provide “diversity”).

Thus the candidate who staked much of his original appeal on his bi-racial identity, an identity that fueled his promise to move us beyond race, misses no opportunity to remind of his blackness (more chosen than inherited). It has become a standard trope of is campaign. Thus in Berlin he began his speech by stating that “I know that I don't look like the Americans who've previously spoken in this great city.”

Obama constantly reminds voters that he’s black in order to attack anyone who opposes him (obviously Republicans, of course) of being racist. In Jacksonville, Florida, last month, for example, Reuters reported that “Obama says Republicans will use race to stoke fear.”

“It is going to be very difficult for Republicans to run on their stewardship of the economy or their outstanding foreign policy,” Obama told a fundraiser in Jacksonville, Florida. “We know what kind of campaign they’re going to run. They’re going to try to make you afraid.

“They’re going to try to make you afraid of me. He’s young and inexperienced and he’s got a funny name. And did I mention he’s black?”

“Nobody thinks that Bush and McCain have a real answer to the challenges we face. So what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Obama said. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough, he’s got a funny name, you know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills.”

.... Addressing supporters Tuesday night at a fundraiser in Springfield, he said, “It’s a leap, electing a 46-year-old black guy named Barack Obama.”

I think, and I’m sure many Republicans think, that electing Obama would indeed be “a leap” — of the off a cliff, not of faith, variety.

UPDATE: Republican Response

ABC News reports that the McCain campaign is not pleased with Obama’s repeated charges of Republican racism.

Sen. John McCain’s campaign is accusing Sen. Barack Obama of playing the race card by suggesting in recent campaign appearances that Republicans are going out of their way to point out that he is “different.”
McCain and Obama

The McCain campaign scoffed at suggestions from Obama that the GOP will make Obama’s race an issue in the election.

“Barack Obama has played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck. It’s divisive, negative, shameful and wrong,” McCain campaign manager Rick Davis said in a statement released today.
....
The strong words from the McCain campaign came after Obama seemed to suggest during a couple of campaign stops in Missouri on Wednesday that the GOP was preparing to make an issue of his Muslim middle name and race, which turned some McCain insiders livid.

The Obama campaign denied Wednesday that the presumptive Democratic presidential candidate was referring to the McCain campaign directly, saying he meant opponents in general and right-wing radio commentators specifically.

UPDATE II

In my earlier post on Obama playing the race card by accusing Republicans of inciting fear of him based on his race, I suggested that it might not be wise for him to keep reminding voters of his blackness, and quoted some words of wisdom from that always useful site, Protein Wisdom:

[Obama] is sounding about as post-racial as the Rev. Al Sharpton. Or about as post-racial as someone who spent the last 20 years under the spiritual tutelage of the race-baiting Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Fr. Michael Pfleger. Someone with that background ought to have some humility when it comes to dealing the race card, but he has chosen it as his opening gambit....

Another similar revealing slip has yet to be purged from Obama’s current campaign web page touting his civil rights record, where he proudly proclaims that in his 1991 state senate campaign he “helped 150,000 African Americans register to vote.”

Not Americans, Obama boasted, but African-Americans. (HatTip to, and paraphrase here of, Steve Sailer)

UPDATE III

Looking and sounding more and more like the little boy with the chocolate-stained mouth and fingers throwing a tantrum, stomping his feet, and shouting that he DID NOT raid the cookie jar, the Obama campaign continues to insist that Obama’s repetitive comments about how he looks are not about race.

Robert Gibbs, an Obama spokesman, said Thursday that Obama was not referring to race.

“He was describing that he was new to the political scene,” The Associated Press reported him as saying. “He was referring to the fact that he didn’t come into the race with the history of others. It is not about race.”

I would think that someone with so little history would not want to make an issue of it.

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McCain has already punctured the balloon of optimism from his supporters that rose over the weekend when he indicated his support for the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative.

He seems stuck in a time warp, fumbling to announce his opposition to “quotas” at every opportunity, as though “quotas” had some connection to the current effort to eliminate racial preference programs. Here is a decent summary of his various pronouncements going back to 1998, when he opposed an Arizona legislative attempt to curtail affirmative action.

McCain should have learned by now that he will never be able to compete with Obama in a war of carefully (or not) crafted, complexly nuanced obfuscations. Now is the time for his vaunted “straight talk”: he should state clearly and unequivocally whether he supports or opposes state policies that award preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity, or sex.

UPDATE [31 July]

A knowledgeable correspondent — a friend who is smart, independent, and no Republican flunky — tells me that I am being too hard on McCain. When he speaks, I listen, and so you should, too:

I think we should take McCain at his word when he says that he supports AzCRI, and so he has said unequivocally that he’s against these preferences. He knows what the initiative says; the fact that he dodged taking a position on it for so long should, ironically, provide us some reassurance that he knew what he was doing on Sunday. I think that if he is ... praised for doing the right thing, it will be that much harder for him to backtrack. If conservatives grouse that he hasn’t really taken a position yet, conversely, it will be easier for him to say, “That’s right, so NOW I will tell you what that position is,” and it will be worse than what AzCRI says.

To put it another way: No politician is going to take a stronger position than AzCRI, so we can’t ask for anything better from McCain than his endorsement of it. If conservatives treat it as a done deal that he’s crossed that bridge and praise him for doing so, it will be harder for him to backtrack than if we suggest that it’s all still up for grabs.

That sort of news hurts McCain, especially if it’s accurate, and us, whether it’s accurate or not.

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The left’s predictable attacks on McCain for his “divisive” support of the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative banning racial preferences — and the enthusiastic applause of his supporters for the same stand — had hardly begun to trail off when the Arizona Senator gave a confused, and disturbing, reply to CNN’s Wolf Blitzer about the identical initiative in Colorado.

BLITZER: You’re in Colorado right now. They have an initiative on their ballot in November that would eliminate affirmative action. I don’t know if you’re familiar with that referendum, but is that a good idea?

MCCAIN: I’m not familiar with the referendum, Wolf. It’s hard for me to say. I’ve always opposed quotas.

If McCain is unable to endorse neutral, colorblind equality on his own steam, his staff still has its work cut out for it.

UPDATE

Michelle Malkin also expresses doubt about McCain’s commitment to colorblind equal treatment.

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I have just reported (see post immediately below) that Barack Obama said over the weekend that he supports quotas — more specifically, that he supports affirmative action “when it is properly structured, so that it is not just a quota....”

He will, of course, deny that he said that, but since there is a CNN video confirming it he will no doubt fall back on clarifications and emendations to the effect that he misspoke, or that somehow the CNN video recorder misrecorded what he actually meant.

In this effort of clarification he will be able to point to, and in all likelihood receive confirmation from, mainstream press reporters who can, in this one clear instance, be shown to have heard what they wanted to hear rather than what their subject actually said.

I documented in my previous post that the New York Times and USA Today quoted Obama’s “properly structured” obfuscation but neglected to quote his so long as it’s “not just a quota” line. Others, however, actually had him saying the opposite of what he said. A few, but only a few, examples:

• Houston Chronicle: “I am a strong supporter of affirmative action when properly structured so there it is not a quota....”

• Kansas City Star: “I am a strong supporter of affirmative action when properly structured so there it is not a quota....”

• Detroit Free Press: “Obama also reiterated that he is a supporter of affirmative action programs if they are properly executed. He said he does not approve of quotas....”
  

In my previous post I commended the Associated Press and the Chicago Sun Times for quoting Obama correctly. Further research reveals that the Boston Globe and the National Journal also got the “not just a quota” remark just right.

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In his first speech and talk with reporters back in the U.S. after his campaign swing through Europe, Obama said

I am a strong supporter of affirmative action when it is properly structured, so that it is not just a quota, but acknowledging or taking into account some of the hardships and difficulties communities of color have experienced and continue to experience.

Obama said he did not want to see wealthier African-American children getting more breaks than poor white children.

He apparently has no objections to poor blacks “getting more breaks” than poor whites and Asians; middle class blacks “getting more breaks” than middle class whites and Asians; and rich blacks “getting more breaks” than rich whites or Asians. I suppose the only remaining question about his pro-quota position is whether he supports rich blacks “getting more breaks” than middle-class whites or Asians and middle-class blacks “getting more breaks” than poor whites and Asians.

Obama has tried to qualify his support for racial preferences before by using this “properly structured” language. In a recent interview with the Chronicle of Higher Education, for example, he said:

When properly structured, affirmative action programs can open up opportunities to qualified minorities—and can do so without diminishing opportunities for white students. Given the dearth of black and Latino Ph.D. candidates in mathematics and the sciences, for example, a scholarship program for minorities interested in getting advanced degrees in these fields won’t keep white students out of such programs but can broaden the pool of talent that we need to prosper in the new economy.

3. How can affirmative action programs that treat race in a preferential manner be “properly structured” so that they give additional opportunities to blacks without “without diminishing opportunities for white [or Asian] students”?

5. How would “a scholarship program for minorities interested in getting advanced degrees in [math and science] ... broaden the pool of talent that we need to prosper in the new economy” more than a scholarship program that was not racially restrictive? If such a program were racially restrictive, why would it not “keep white [and Asian] students out of such programs” who could not attend without a scholarship?

The more Obama talks about affirmative action, the more he makes even Bill Clinton’s “mend it, don’t end it” sound almost real. Do American voters really want to elect a candidate who stands four square with ... Al Sharpton, who announced that “he, too, was disappointed” that McCain has finally come out for colorblind equal treatment?

Is it still possible to think of Obama as the post- or trans-racial candidate? Give me a break....

WAFFLE WATCH UPDATE

Watch for the waffle, er, “clarification,” that is sure to come from the Obama camp.

The Associated Press, like the Chicago Sun-Times article quoted above, reports that Obama told the UNITY convention of black journalists in Chicago that he is a “strong supporter of affirmative action when properly structured so that it is not just a quota.”

For some reason, however, the New York Times did not find that quota comment fit to print. Its article, by Michael Powell and Susan Saulny, and this one by Susan Saulny, stated only the following:

Mr. Obama said on Sunday that he supported affirmative action “when properly structured” to take into account not only race but also economic hardship.

The Democratic candidate, seeking to become the nation’s first African-American president, said he supports affirmative action “when properly structured.”

Suggestion for enterprising reporters: when Obama says that what he actually said was that he supports affirmative action when it is “properly structured so that it is not a quota” — as opposed to the “not just a quota” as quoted by the Associated Press, the Chicago Sun-Times, and others — ask him what is wrong with quotas that is not also wrong with treating some people better and some worse than others because of their race even if no quota is involved.

Note: It is of course possible that Obama was misquoted by reporters on the scene from the Associated Press and the Sun Times. If someone has a transcript of what Obama actually said to the UNITY convention, I'd like to see it.

UPDATE II

John McCormick of the Chicago Tribune also reports the “just”:

While saying he is a “strong supporter” of affirmative action, Obama said it must also be structured so that it is not just a quota system.

I can now report, and you can confirm, that Obama said he supports affirmative action “when it is properly structured so that it is not just a quota.” This statement occurs at about 14 minutes through the 18 minute video.

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In an interview with George Stephanopoulus finally stepped away from (“abandoned” might be too strong) his ridiculous refusal to endorse colorblind equality and announced that, after all, and his previous reluctance to the contrary, he really does believe the state should treat its citizens without regard to race, ethnicity, or sex.

STEPHANOPOULOS: “Opponents of affirmative action are trying to get a referendum on the ballot here that would do away with affirmative action. Do you support that?”

MCCAIN: “Yes, I do. I do not believe in quotas. But I have not seen the details of some of the proposals. But I’ve always opposed quotas.”

STEPHANOPOULOS: “But the one here in Arizona you support?”

McCAIN: “I support it, yes.”

“I think in the past he [McCain] had been opposed to these kinds of Ward Connerly referenda or initiatives as divisive. And I think he’s right. You know, the truth of the matter is, these are not designed to solve a big problem, but they’re all too often designed to drive a wedge between people, “ Obama said to a question asked from an audience of journalists.

Welcome to Obamaland.

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The headline of an article by Jim Rutenberg on the front page of the New York Times this morning is “Black Radio on Obama Is Left’s Answer to Limbaugh.” The article reflects as pure an example of racialism — an ideology that regards race as the fundamental building block of personal identity and social reality — that I recall seeing in the mainstream press.

It begins:

ATLANTA — Warren Ballentine, one of black talk radio’s new stars, was on a tear against Senator John McCain as he broadcast from the Greenbriar Mall here last week, blithely dismissing Mr. McCain’s kind words about Senator Barack Obama at the recent N.A.A.C.P. national convention.

“He came out talking about how good of a race Barack Obama was running, and how proud he was of Barack,” Mr. Ballentine said. “You know he went back home and said, ‘I can’t believe I spoke in front of all those Negroes today!’ ”
....
Rush Limbaugh, meet your black liberal counterprogramming.

To assume otherwise, as the NYT does, is to assume, falsely, that all blacks are on the left (unless it wants to argue that “black radio” does not really represent blacks, an argument I haven’t read in its pages). It is also to assume, also falsely, that conservative talk radio supports McCain because he is white, not because he is more conservative than Obama, and that it opposes Obama because he is black.

I also think it’s revealing that, in the excerpts quoted, Warren Ballantine, “one of black talk radio’s new stars,” stretches to accuse McCain of racism — not, mind, you on the basis of anything he’s said, which has only been complimentary of Obama, but on the basis of what we “know” he says in private.

By contrast, when conservative talk radio criticizes Obama in areas that might be regarded as similar, it quotes what he actually said — bitter, clinging whites; what his long-time mentor/pastor/substitute father actually said — “greedy whites” running the United States of AmeriKKKa; what his wife actually said — America is “just downright mean,” and she became proud of it only recently.

Do Ballantine and the New York Times believe there is a “black” position on, say, Iraq? On bailing out failing banks? Indeed, as I demonstrated here by citing a number of opinion surveys, there is not even a reliably identifiable “black” view of racial preference policies.

Is “black radio” fundamentally black or fundamentally liberal? Would it be supporting, say, Condi Rice or Colin Powell as uniformly if one of them were the Republican nominee and some white, any white, were the Democrat? I doubt it. And that suggests, at least to me, that “black radio” is a pretty good analog to black interest groups and black voters: a wholly owned subsidiary of the liberal left and its dominant institution, the Democratic Party.

Seen in this light, maybe the New York Times view that “black,” as least as blacks are represented institutionally and politically, really is the opposite of “conservative.”

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John Fund has has a must-read article in Saturday’s Wall Street Journal on “The Far Left’s War on Direct Democracy.” If I were you, I’d stop reading me discussing it right now and go read it.

By “direct democracy” he means the initiative process,

a reform born out of the Progressive Era, when there was general agreement that powerful interests had too much influence over legislators. It was adopted by most states in the Midwest and West, including Ohio and California. It was largely rejected by Eastern states, which were dominated by political machines, and in the South, where Jim Crow legislators feared giving more power to ordinary people.

But more power to ordinary people remains unpopular in some quarters, and nothing illustrates the war on the initiative more than the reaction to Ward Connerly's measures to ban racial quotas and preferences....

Aggressive legal challenges have bordered on the absurd, going so far as to claim that a blank line on one petition was a “duplicate” of another blank line on another petition and thus evidence of fraud. In Missouri, Secretary of State Robin Carnahan completely rewrote the initiative’s ballot summary to portray it in a negative light. By the time courts ruled she had overstepped her authority, there wasn’t enough time to collect sufficient signatures.

Those who did circulate petitions faced bizarre obstacles. In Kansas City, a petitioner was arrested for collecting signatures outside of a public library. Officials finally allowed petitioners a table inside the library but forbade them to talk. In Nebraska, a group in favor of racial preferences ran a radio ad that warned that those who signed the “deceptive” petition “could be at risk for identity theft, robbery, and much worse.”
....
The police had to be called when BAMN blocked the entrance of a Phoenix office where circulators had to deliver their petitions....

But BAMN proudly posts videos on its success in scaring away voters, or convincing circulators to hand over their petitions to its shock troops. “If you give me your signatures, we’ll leave you alone,” says a BAMN volunteer on one tape to someone who’s earning money by circulating several different petitions.

BAMN has filed suit to keep the initiative off the ballot because, as national director Shanta Driver explained, “she fears a majority of Arizonans will vote for it.”

An official from the aptly-named group By Any Means Necessary is quoted today in the Omaha World-Herald, on why her group is trying to disrupt the signature-gathering efforts of Ward Connerly, who is leading an effort in Nebraska (and Colorado and Arizona) to pass a ballot initiative that would ban preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex: “The key to defeating the initiative is to keep it off the ballot in the first place. That’s the only way we’re going to win.”

The Left, as you know, favors democracy, power to the people, and nondiscrimination, except when it doesn’t.

But the left has turned against more than a hallmark of the Progressive era; it has also rejected its own past. The videos of the intimidating, bullying tactics that BAMN, ACORN, and union activists have been using against those distributing civil rights petitions and those attempting to sign them are virtually identical with the vicious, disgusting behavior of anti-union scabs trying to block workers from signing up with unions; with Southern racists attempting to prevent blacks from registering to vote; and with anti-abortion activists trying to scare, intimidate, and block women from entering abortion clinics.

To paraphrase Roger Clegg (with echoes of John Kerry), the left was for citizen-empowering democratic action ... before it was against it.

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Might oaks, in the old proverb, may from little acorns grow, but in the case of ACORN (Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now) what sprouts — planted, fertilized, and nourished with abundant federal tax dollars — is fraud, corruption, and voter intimidation.

As Steven Malanga has just noted in City Journal,

Community organizing’s roots stretch back to the 1930s and Chicago organizer Saul Alinsky, founder of the Industrial Areas Foundation and author of Rules for Radicals. But it wasn’t until President Lyndon Johnson’s ambitious plan to end poverty through massive federal spending that the Alinsky model—grassroots organizing, neighborhood by neighborhood—really took off. Starting in the mid-1960s, the federal government directed billions of dollars to neighborhood groups, convinced that they knew better than Washington what their communities needed. The federal funds, eventually supplemented by state and local tax dollars, helped create a universe of government-funded community groups running everything from job-training programs to voter-registration drives—far beyond anything Alinsky could have imagined. Some 3,000 local social-services groups were soon receiving government funding in New York City alone. Many were new, but the money also helped turn traditional charities that had operated on private donations into government contractors.

In a recent post that discussed what one ACORN apologist called its “voter education” activities, i.e., intimidating voters and disrupting signature gathering in Missouri, I noted that

ACORN activists are to “voter education” what scabs are to union organizing. See, for starters, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here....

A whistle-blower forced Acorn to disclose the embezzlement, which involved the brother of the organization’s founder, Wade Rathke.

The brother, Dale Rathke, embezzled nearly $1 million from Acorn and affiliated charitable organizations in 1999 and 2000, Acorn officials said, but a small group of executives decided to keep the information from almost all of the group’s board members and not to alert law enforcement.

Dale Rathke remained on Acorn’s payroll until a month ago, when disclosure of his theft by foundations and other donors forced the organization to dismiss him.

“We thought it best at the time to protect the organization, as well as to get the funds back into the organization, to deal with it in-house,” said Maude Hurd, president of Acorn. “It was a judgment call at the time, and looking back, people can agree or disagree with it, but we did what we thought was right.”

The amount Dale Rathke embezzled, $948,607.50, was carried as a loan on the books of Citizens Consulting Inc., which provides bookkeeping, accounting and other financial management services to Acorn and many of its affiliated entities.

Wade Rathke said the organization had signed a restitution agreement with his brother in which his family agreed to repay the amount embezzled in exchange for confidentiality.

Wade Rathke stepped down as Acorn’s chief organizer on June 2, the same day his brother left, but he remains chief organizer for Acorn International L.L.C.

He said the decision to keep the matter secret was not made to protect his brother but because word of the embezzlement would have put a “weapon” into the hands of enemies of Acorn, a liberal group that is a frequent target of conservatives who object to its often strident advocacy on behalf of low- and moderate-income families and workers.

The executive director of New York Acorn, Bertha Lewis, who has been named director of an interim management committee set up to run the national group’s day-to-day operations, said Dale Rathke was paid about $38,000 a year but that none of that money was used to pay back Acorn.

Instead, she said, the Rathke family has paid Acorn $30,000 a year in restitution since 2001, or a total of $210,000.

A donor has offered to give Acorn the rest of what the Rathkes owe, and an agreement to that effect should be finalized in coming days, Ms. Lewis said.

the fact that most of the handful of people who did not disclose the fraud when they learned of it eight years ago still work for Acorn or its affiliates concerns many of the group’s financial supporters.

As you will have guessed, I’m interested in ACORN primarily because it has teamed up with BAMN to supply hordes of activists (your tax dollars at work) in a joint attempt to prevent civil rights initiatives from appearing on the ballots of several states. (More to come on this later). But I want to bring ACORN and its “supporters” to your attention now (rather than later, when I’ll be returning to its voter intimidation tactics) because Congress is about to pass legislation, which the president has indicated he will sign, that will give this organization and its teams of bullies a massive new infusion of federal cash.

Two days ago the Consumer Rights League issued a statement warning of what is about to happen. An excerpt:

this legislation will pump tens, if not hundreds, of millions of dollars into ACORN and its affiliate, the ACORN Housing Council (AHC). Because of that, these groups must be held accountable for not only their histories of questionable practices but for how they will spend this massive cash influx funded by American taxpayers. Appropriate oversight has not been established and as we've recently seen, the opportunities for fraud within ACORN are rampant....

the granddaddy of all phony government trust funds may be soon enacted in housing bailout legislation before Congress. The so-called Affordable Housing Trust Fund — part of the legislation that passed the Senate Banking Committee in May and is poised to come to the Senate floor as early as this week — is almost set up from the beginning to be diverted to purposes other than affordable housing. The holes in this “trust fund” would allow the money to be easily siphoned off to liberal activist groups such as Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (ACORN) for lobbying and even political campaigning.....

There are prohibitions on using the funds for lobbying and political activity, but the bills — including the Banking Committee package — contain virtually no teeth in enforcing these bans. There are no explicit requirements for recipients of the grants to fill out timesheets for housing activity, or restrictions on groups using grant money to pay employees who also happen to do other things — such as lobbying and political campaigning. And there are really no penalties other than being forced to give the money back and being disqualified for a new grant.

Oh, and one more thing. While you’re savoring ACORN’s tactics as described in the sources linked above, you may also want to recall one of ACORN’s greatest successes to date has been leading a voter registration drive that helped elect its Chicago lawyer, Barack Obama, to the Illinois state senate, an alliance that was richly rewarded by the new senator during a generally unproductive senate career. As City Journal’s Steven Malanga pointed out in the article linked above,

Obama’s legislative achievements as a state senator were not extensive, but his supporters count among his biggest victories his work to expand subsidized health care in Illinois with social-justice groups like United Power for Action and Justice, an offshoot of Alinsky’s Industrial Areas Foundation. Later, when he announced his run for president, Obama visited some of these groups and reminded them of their long struggles together. Meeting last November with the leaders of the Association of Community Organizers for Reform Now (Acorn)—the nationwide network of left-wing community groups that taps government money for a host of causes—Obama declared: “I’ve been fighting alongside Acorn on issues you care about my entire career,” including representing Acorn in a court case in Illinois. Acorn members apparently reciprocated by working hard to turn out voters for Obama’s Illinois campaigns, according to a 2003 piece in the magazine Social Policy by a Chicago-area Acorn organizer. After the candidate’s November appearance, Acorn’s affiliated political action committee endorsed Obama for president.

Obama’s nomination will be celebrated as a first for African-Americans. But the racial symbolism may obscure the importance of his presidential run to the tens of thousands of government-funded community groups that stand to benefit from an Obama agenda that’s right out of the 1960s....

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Opponents of civil rights initiatives — proposals pending in three states that would require treating individuals without regard to race, ethnicity, or gender — often say that such a requirement isn’t needed because the discrimination these initiatives claim to prohibit is already illegal and that no such targeted preferential treatment programs actually exist. They say that about as often as they also say if misguided and misinformed voters actually prohibit state agencies from “taking race into account,” etc., the sky will fall, resegregation will occur, Jim Crow will reign again, leading a resurgent Ku Klux Klan to dance in the streets. (You may think I exaggerate, but if you do you haven’t seen the videos I have — more on them to come — showing opponents of racial equality in action as they try to disrupt the signature gathering process for these initiatives.)

Colorado University, Boulder, without quite admitting that it practices discrimination, has recently issued a statement claiming that a requirement to treat applicants, students, staff, etc., without regard to their race/ethnicity/gender would have a “big impact” on its operations.

What, exactly, would be lost? Well, that’s not so clear.

The University of Colorado, which has been working to increase its minority enrollment at the Boulder campus, said Thursday it couldn’t consider an applicant’s race, gender or ethnicity if voters dismantle state affirmative-action programs.

The university also said about 100 privately funded scholarships designed to benefit women and minority students could be restricted if the November ballot measure, Amendment 46, becomes law.

“If this initiative is passed by Colorado voters, it would indeed have a big impact on the University of Colorado, as we would have to modify some of our admissions programs,” said spokeswoman Deborah Mendez-Wilson.

“We’re not sure of the full impact at this point.”

And no longer being able to discriminate in these instances is bad because ... ?

Meanwhile, I have it on impeccable authority that opponents of non-discriminatory equal treatment in Colorado have told Jessica Peck Corry, the executive director of CCRI, that she engaged in “racial fraud” for using some blacks to gather signatures during the (successful) drive to place CCRI on the ballot.

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This article on Pajamas Media today is eerily similar to this post here a few days ago.

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In the Wall Street Journal today Shelby Steele explains why and how Obama “is the nullification of Jesse Jackson — the anti-Jackson.”

Mr. Jackson was always a challenger. He confronted American institutions (especially wealthy corporations) with the shame of America’s racist past and demanded redress. He could have taken up the mantle of the early Martin Luther King (he famously smeared himself with the great man’s blood after King was shot), and argued for equality out of a faith in the imagination and drive of his own people. Instead — and tragically — he and the entire civil rights establishment pursued equality through the manipulation of white guilt.

Their faith was in the easy moral leverage over white America that the civil rights victories of the 1960s had suddenly bestowed on them. So Mr. Jackson and his generation of black leaders made keeping whites “on the hook” the most sacred article of the post-’60s black identity.

They ushered in an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage. To argue differently — that black development, for example, might be a more enduring road to black equality — took whites “off the hook” and was therefore an unpardonable heresy. For this generation, an Uncle Tom was not a black who betrayed his race; it was a black who betrayed the group’s bounty of moral leverage over whites. And now comes Mr. Obama, who became the first viable black presidential candidate precisely by giving up his moral leverage over whites.

Mr. Obama’s great political ingenuity was very simple: to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America’s racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them.

He sells himself more as a cultural breakthrough than as a candidate for office. To be a projection screen for the cultural aspirations of both blacks and whites one must be an invisible man politically. Real world politics, in their mundanity, interrupt cultural projections. And so Mr. Obama’s political invisibility — a charm that can only derive from a lack of deep political convictions — may well serve his cultural appeal, but it also makes him something of a political mess.

Already he has flip-flopped on campaign financing, wire-tapping, gun control, faith-based initiatives, and the terms of withdrawal from Iraq. Those enamored of his cultural potential may say these reversals are an indication of thoughtfulness, or even open-mindedness. But could it be that this is a man who trusted so much in his cultural appeal that the struggles of principle and conscience never seemed quite real to him? His flip-flops belie an almost existential callowness toward principle, as if the very idea of permanent truth is passé, a form of bad taste.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:38 AM | Permalink | Say What? (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Obama is already sending not-so-coded messages to the civil rights establishment that his election will not reduce the need, and his support, for continued race preference policies. As Gregory Rodriguez writes today:

A Barack Obama presidency could end the Iraq war, transform our national energy policy, revive America’s standing in the world -- but please don’t expect the first black man in the Oval Office to move us above and beyond the civil rights era. At least that’s what Obama himself suggested last Monday in his speech to the NAACP. In a campaign fueled by high expectations, Obama seemed to be trying to lower his audience’s hopes that the election of the first black president would be anything more than a symbolic milestone.

“Just electing me president doesn’t mean our work is over,” he told civil rights activists.

Obama was no doubt reacting to predictions, one of which I discussed recently here, that his success to date portends the “death of affirmative action.” In March the Boston Globe reported that

[l]eading opponents of affirmative action are increasingly seizing on Illinois Senator Barack Obama’s historic run for the presidency as proof that race-based remedies for past discrimination are no longer necessary.

All of this is particularly interesting given the enthusiasm for Obama’s candidacy in some conservative quarters. Anti-affirmative-action activists Ward Connerly and Abigail Thernstrom, for instance, are seeing greater historical significance in an Obama victory than many Obama supporters themselves. To them, large numbers of white voters willing to vote for a black man signals a welcome sea change in whites’ attitudes toward blacks. And to them, that means that what they’ve been saying all along is right: Race-based policies designed to redress inequality and past discrimination have outlived their usefulness. That’s an idea many Democrats are loath to accept.

It hasn’t been that long since the Sharptons were hinting, and many pundits were predicting, riots in the streets of Denver if Obama were deprived of the nomination. Will there be similar blackmail threats about what will happen if Obama loses the election?

This is supposed to be the year when even the Democrats can’t lose a presidential election. If Obama does lose, will there be a single “civil rights activist” who will doubt that his loss must be attributed to continuing, pervasive white racism?

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:46 PM | Permalink | Say What? (4) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the reasons the New Yorker cover showing fist-bumping Obamas in Muslim garb caused such a ruckus is that its appearance coincided with the release of a Pew Research Center report showing that 12% of Americans (interestingly, 12% of both Democrats and Republicans) still believe Obama is in fact a Muslim. As Eleanor Clift laments, typically, in Newsweek,

A survey released this week conducted by the Pew Research Center finds the notion Obama is a Muslim “bipartisan and enduring.” Equal percentages of Republicans and Democrats (12 percent in each party), believe he is a Muslim, with Democrats who hold the belief significantly less likely to vote for Obama.

For a while, I thought only rightwingers and other Obama haters bought into the lies being spread about him. Then I got a call from Ross Perot, who was trying to plant some dirt about John McCain leaving live POWs behind in Vietnam (untrue, by the way). In the course of the conversation, it became clear that Perot thought Obama was a Muslim. When I informed him that Obama was actually a Christian, Perot was relieved....

In this, alas, Ross Perot has plenty of company, and among people with a much less conspiratorial bent....

Since I don’t need the wrath such a suggestion would invite, I don’t intend to suggest it. But it does seem worth pointing out (more in the nature of a reminder than an original observation, since others have made this point) that, in addition to the 12% of dumb, misinformed, probably bitter Americans, millions of people around the world are firmly convinced that Obama is a Muslim. Why do they think so? Because a strong, perhaps dominant, interpretation of Muslim Sharia law tells them so.

As the well-known military and foreign affairs analyst Edward Luttwak wrote in a New York Times OpEd just two months ago, but well before the New Yorker implosion,

As the son of the Muslim father, Senator Obama was born a Muslim under Muslim law as it is universally understood. It makes no difference that, as Senator Obama has written, his father said he renounced his religion. Likewise, under Muslim law based on the Koran his mother’s Christian background is irrelevant.

Of course, as most Americans understand it, Senator Obama is not a Muslim. He chose to become a Christian, and indeed has written convincingly to explain how he arrived at his choice and how important his Christian faith is to him.

His conversion, however, was a crime in Muslim eyes; it is “irtidad” or “ridda,” usually translated from the Arabic as “apostasy,” but with connotations of rebellion and treason. Indeed, it is the worst of all crimes that a Muslim can commit, worse than murder (which the victim’s family may choose to forgive).

Osama bin Laden must be chuckling in his safe house. After all, the 2008 campaign could very well give Al Qaeda the ultimate propaganda tool: President Barack Hussein Obama, Muslim apostate.

The fact that Senator Obama – the son of a Muslim father – insists he was never a Muslim before becoming Christian is irrelevant to bin Laden. In bin Laden’s eyes, Obama is a murtad fitri, the worst type of apostate, because he was blessed by Allah to be born into the true faith of Islam....

Acording to Islamic jurisprudence, children of a Muslim father – even an apparently nonpracticing one, such as Obama’s father, and irrespective of the mother’s faith – are automatically Muslims. Most Muslims around the world agree: A child of a Muslim father is a Muslim. Period.

Fortunately, the United States is not governed by Sharia law. Individuals, even candidates for president, are free to choose their own religion, and their choices deserve a certain measure of respect — though not absolute respect, lest we be inhibited from offering the robust criticism that Rev. Wright, Minister Farrakhan, and those who follow them so richly deserve.

So, is there any sense in which Obama is a Muslim? I suppose the answer depends, at least in part, on what the meaning of “is” is.

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You’d think any presidential candidate wants to win — otherwise, why go to the trouble? — but McCain’s continuing failure to come out forcefully for colorblind equality suggests, at least to me, that he may not (and even if he does want to, that he won’t).

Today, in his highly regarded political newsletter, Stuart Rothenberg writes that the five states that will determine who is the next president are Colorado, Virginia, Ohio, Nevada, and Michigan.

“Let’s be clear,” he writes,

I’m not suggesting that these will be the five closest states. But together these five states will tell a great deal about whether Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) has added to the Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Al Gore states, thereby giving him at least 270 electoral votes, or whether Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) has either held the 2000 and 2004 George W. Bush Electoral College coalition together or been able to offset one or two losses with a previously Democratic state of his own.

Colorado and Virginia make the list because they are the two states mostly likely to switch to Obama that went for Bush in both 2000 and 2004.

Early polls show Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee, ahead in Colorado and running essentially even with McCain, who will be the GOP standard bearer, in the Old Dominion. Of the two, Colorado would seem to be the more likely Democratic opportunity, and it is not easy to imagine Obama winning Virginia while losing Colorado.

Obama’s potential in both states is in the suburbs, with upscale, white voters who are drawn to the Democratic nominee’s message of change. Both states have seen Democratic gains recently — Democrats won the two states’ last Senate races and made gains in each state’s Legislature in 2006.

If Obama fails to carry either state, his arithmetic gets dicey. Even more important, a pair of McCain victories would suggest that the Republican made substantial gains between June and November — a bad sign for Obama nationally.

Colorado voters will have to vote on an initiative, the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, that would amend the state constitution to prohibit the state from discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment, to any individual based on race, ethnicity, or sex. Identical initiatives passed by very large margins, as you know, in California, Washington, and Michigan.

Obama has opposed all these initiatives, and continues to oppose the current ones. That is, he forthrightly opposes having the state treat everyone without regard to race etc. And McCain? Who knows. He hasn’t said. I don’t think he can continue to get away with dodging this question, which will be on the ballot in Arizona and Nebraska as well as Colorado.

I believe a strong, principled, unequivocal, statement by McCain supporting the core value of colorblind equality would go a long way toward securing victory for him in these crucial states of Colorado, Virginia, and Michigan (which passed its identical initiative with 58% of the vote in 2006, while voting heavily Democratic for everything else.) It’s really a win-win proposition, since it would also strengthen him in virtually every other state as well, except perhaps New York, Calif., and Illinois, and maybe even in those. He’s not going to win any more black votes by refusing to endorse the principle of colorblind equality.

National polls show consistently overwhelming opposition to preferential treatment based on race. If a good and decent Republican strongly supporting colorblind equality, and thus opposing race preferences, can’t win Virginia and Colorado running against an empty-suit liberal Democrat who supports race preferences, then there’s no point in continuing to campaign anywhere....

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Bonnie Erbe, a U.S. News and World Report columnist who claims to have covered Washington politics “since God was a baby,” argues that Obama’s election “would kill affirmative action.”

What could do more damage to the argument that African-Americans deserve racial preferences than a majority of Americans voting to put an African-American in the White House? Little, from where I sit. Of course, there will still be economic data showing African-Americans disproportionately represented among low-income Americans. But the argument racial bias is widespread in American society becomes that much more difficult to make.

In short, I would file Erbe’s hopeful prediction that Obama’s election would relegate racial preferences to the dustbin of history in the same wishful thinking file I discussed here:

The hopeful optimism of Stuart Taylor, Edward Blum, George Will, and others that Obama can lead the country to a new plateau of racial reconciliation must rest, at least at this point, on a conviction that the bi-racialism that Obama literally “embodies,” that what he is, will ultimately be more important than whatever he may believe, say, or even do.

They may be right. If he wins I certainly hope they’re right. But at this point their confidence that what Obama is will trump his long support for racial preference policies leaves me with a troubling, Clintonian observation: it depends on what the meaning of “is” is.

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In the past week or so Obamaphiles have been dismayed to see their messiah’s candidate’s lead in the polls diminish dramatically. (See Rasmussen daily tracking polls here.)

Most observers attribute this decline to a highly publicized series of rapid flip-flops on major issues, nicely summarized by Dick Morris here:

• After vowing to eschew private fundraising and take public financing, he has now refused public money.

• Once he threatened to filibuster a bill to protect telephone companies from liability for their cooperation with national security wiretaps; now he has voted for the legislation.

• Turning his back on a lifetime of support for gun control, he now recognizes a Second Amendment right to bear arms in the wake of the Supreme Court decision.

• Formerly, he told the Israeli lobby that he favored an undivided Jerusalem. Now he says he didn't mean it.

• From a 100 percent pro-choice position, he now has migrated to expressing doubts about allowing partial-birth abortions.

• For the first time, he now speaks highly of using church-based institutions to deliver public services to the poor.

• Having based his entire campaign on withdrawal from Iraq, he now pledges to consult with the military first.

• During the primary, he backed merit pay for teachers -- but before the union a few weeks ago, he opposed it.

• After specifically saying in the primaries that he disagreed with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's (D-N.Y.) proposal to impose Social Security taxes on income over $200,000 and wanted to tax all income, he has now adopted the Clinton position.

But, liberals, take heart! All is not bleak on the liberal landscape. On the one issue that most concerns us here, Obama has been steadfast, unwaffling, and consistent: just as he always has, he continues to support governments and private entities dispensing benefits and burdens to individuals based on their race, ethnicity, or sex.

True, there is a certain tension between Obama’s rigid support for racial preference policies and his occasional rhetorical nods to a post-racial America that, like his earlier bi-racial self, is neither black not white, etc. But since he has never opposed any racial preference policy and has re-iterated his longstanding opposition to state initiatives that would require states to treat their citizens without regard to race, most people now recognize that rhetoric for what it is: rhetoric.

ADDENDUM

When Obama’s lofty rhetoric falls to earth, it conflicts not only with the policies he supports but also with what he says when he’s not speaking in rhetorical flourishes. As I’ve noted a number of times, such as here, here, and here, when Obama answers questions about affirmative action what he says is usually “a textbook model of waffling obfuscation.”

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The most recent CBS/New York Times poll on the racial divide in the U.S. (actually, more like a chasm) is depressing, as is the NYT’s article about the poll.

You’ll need to read the article/poll for yourself. They stop just short of portraying a stark racial divide on absolutely everything. Thus, almost surprisingly, no evidence is presented showing a racial disagreement over whether the sun rises in the east.

I will leave it to others to analyze the poll’s techniques and methodology, with one exception: the question on affirmative action was maddeningly, although not unexpectedly, obfuscatory and slanted:

55. In order to make up for past discrimination, do you favor or oppose programs which make special efforts to help minorities get ahead?

In addition to being misleading, and thus producing misleading results, this formulation of the question is quite odd, inasmuch as special treatment of minorities “[i]n order to make up for past discrimination” has been regarded as unconstitutional, at least in higher education, ever since Bakke (except in cases where such treatment has been allowed as a remedy for proven discrimination by a specific defendant).

In addition, asking people whether they favor or oppose “programs which make special efforts to help minorities get ahead” is too broad a question to reveal anything useful. Almost everyone would favor at least some “special efforts,” and similarly almost everyone would oppose some other “special efforts.” Most people, if they thought about it, would need to know some details about the “special efforts” at issue in order to say anything meaningful about whether they favored or opposed them.

Based on other polls, I believe it’s clear beyond cavil that changing “special efforts” to “preferential treatment based on their race” would have produced a substantial majority in opposition. On the other hand, if the question concerned support for non-discriminatory “special efforts,” the majority in favor would be equally substantial.

Good evidence for the above assertion can be found in the answers to the question that immediately followed the one on affirmative action:

56. Do you favor or oppose programs that make special efforts to help people get ahead who come from low-income backgrounds, regardless of their gender or ethnicity?

By using such a mealy-mouthed term as “special efforts” in its question on affirmative action, the CBS/New York Times poll has disguised, whether on purpose or not, the pervasive unpopularity of most of what is actually done under the rubric of “affirmative action,” which is providing preferential treatment to some individuals based solely on their race or ethnicity.

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Missouri, you will recall, is the state where obstructionism by the Democratic Secretary of State and Attorney General, later declared illegal, and thuggish intimidation of petition signers succeeded in keeping the Missouri Civil Rights Initiative off the ballot this year.

It is easy to understand why supporters of racial preferences were so afraid to give citizens the opportunity to enshrine the “without regard” principle of colorblind equality into their state constitution. Racial preferences are so unpopular that there is no doubt about how citizens would vote, if allowed to by their Democratic office-holders.

Indeed, as I have commented before, racial preferences are so unpopular thats the term “affirmative action,” usually thought to be more appealing (because it obscures the actual nature of preference policies) is itself rapidly coming into disrepute. As I noted (here) last month:

The Kansas City, Kansas, Community College (KCKCC) is launching a new program to hire minorities, but for some reason it is reluctant to call this program “affirmative action.”

Kansas City Kansas Community College announced this week they would actively seek qualified minorities to fill open positions at the college....

However, college staff stopped short of referring to the plan as “affirmative action.”

“We can only hire individuals for these jobs if vacancies are available,” said Leota Marks, dean of human resources at the college. “We are not setting quotas and we’re not planning to hire someone who is qualified just because they are a minority or female. But we know we have to take some affirmative steps and develop a diversified workforce.”

Dean Marks, it seems, defines “affirmative action” as a program that sets quotas to hire people “just because they are a minority or female” for openings that do not exist.

And people wonder why it’s unpopular....

Lincoln Scott, Assistant to the President for Diversity and Equal Opportunity at Southeast Missouri State University, has been in charge of recruiting more minority faculty.

At conferences and through existing faculty, Scott identified people who would be good fits. He spent hours on the phone. Eventually the university paid to fly in five people. They were shown the community and introduced to faculty members.

“I don’t want to use the expression ‘wine and dine,’ but I gave them a good time,” Scott said.

The participants were encouraged to apply. Four out of five were hired....

Scott is quick to point out the none of the filled faculty positions were affirmative action positions. “We had jobs, we needed them filled, and we hired qualified people,” he said.

That says volumes about how “affirmative action” is now understood, even by its supporters.

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“What weekly chutzpah award?” you may well ask. You’re right. At the moment DISCRIMINATIONS doesn’t bestow a weekly chutzpah award, but if it did this week’s would go to Princeton.

Regular readers will be aware of Jian Li’s complaint that Princeton discriminates against Asian applicants by holding them to a higher standard than others, a case I discussed here. Li’s complaint is being investigated by the Department of Education, and in fact has been broadened, causing nervous jitters across all Ivy Leaguedom.

Today’s Trenton Star Ledger has an article about Li’s case today that avoids most common pitfalls of mainstream media news coverage of racial preferences ... except this one: author Ana M. Alaya writes:

For decades, critics of affirmative action have contended elite colleges, in their zeal to form racially diverse student bodies, have discriminated against top white applicants.

In a twist on that long-running feud, federal authorities are investigating an allegation that Princeton University discriminates against Asian-American applicants by accepting black and Hispanic students with lower entrance scores.

At the heart of both arguments lies the question of whether and how colleges should consider race when choosing a class....

But that slip pales into insignificance compared to the following remark that earned Princeton the much un-coveted DISCRIMINATIONS Chutzpah of the Week Award (or would if there were such an award):

Princeton, for its part, denies using quotas. The university declined, however, to release admissions data broken down by race and test scores, spokeswoman Cass Cliatt said, “because we don’t want anyone to make the mistake that we make admissions decisions by category.”

Nevertheless, it’s still not clear exactly why Princeton is afraid to release this data, since it claims to believe that discriminating against Asians is not really discrimination.

A commitment to “acting affirmatively to ensure diversity,” Cliatt said, is not the same as discriminating.

But wait! There’s more entertainment from Ms. Cass Cliatt of Princeton.

At Princeton, race is one factor, including socioeconomic background, extracurricular talents and academic record, considered during the admissions process, Cliatt said. Building a diverse class is like forming an “orchestra,” that may need different talents from year to year, she added....

In short, if words have meaning Princeton believes that choosing some applicants and rejecting others on the basis of their race or ethnicity is no different from filling a violin vacancy with a violinist.

Despite decades of tutelage to the contrary from Princeton et. al., liberals, Democrats, etc., most Americans continue to march to the tune of a different drummer, believing that everyone should be treated without regard to their race or ethnicity. Being black, white, Asian, Hispanic, or whatever, is simply not the same as playing an oboe or plucking a guitar. And that’s not just whistlin Dixie.

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The Rocky Mountain News more often than not gets things right. Yesterday, however, it did not.

Here is the piece in its entirety:

Initiative backers plan to file complaint

Organizers of an initiative to eliminate most affirmative action programs in Colorado say they will file a fraud complaint against their opponents, whom they charge with lying.

Jessica Peck Corry, executive director of the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative, is advocating for Amendment 46 on the November ballot. It would ban programs aimed at boosting minority and female contracting, educational enrollment or hiring except those that are a requirement for receiving federal funding.

Corry said Coloradans for Equal Opportunity, which is gathering signatures for Initiative 82, a measure that would retain affirmative action programs, has mischaracterized what Amendment 46 says.

Neither the purpose nor the effect of Prop. 46 is or would be to “ban programs aimed at boosting minority and female contracting, educational enrollment or hiring except those that are a requirement for receiving federal funding.” It would ban only programs that give preferential treatment to some minorities and women, that treat some people better and some people worse because of their race, sex, or ethnicity. All programs, even “affirmative action” programs, that do not engage in race, ethnic, or gender preferences would be left intact.

ADDENDUM

And speaking of non-news by a source that usually gets things right, you also should take a look at Fred Barnes’ long, fascinating, and depressing article about the “Colorado Model,” what rich liberals are doing to politics in Colorado.

It’s a fine article, except that you’d think such a long, thorough piece on the political landscape in Colorado would at least mention the increasingly incendiary debate over the Colorado Civil Rights Initiative and the role it will play in the coming election. Alas, Barnes doesn’t.

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Some readers may have noticed (and even cheered) the drop in my blog posting (blog output? blogput?) for the past ten days or so. We’re in California for a while, house-sitting in San Francisco, traveling around the greater (and lesser) Bay Area, heading for Pasadena and Southern California in a week or so. (Don’t worry; Mosby The Dog is in good hands.)

Anyway, I’ve gotten behind in my posting and thus am late in informing you that reader and frequent commenter Hans Bader has a terrific letter in USA Today criticizing an editorial that I should have criticized here several days ago. Bader expands on the points made in his letter here.

Roger Clegg of the Center for Equal Opportunity, another reader/commenter, also made some excellent points about the weird editorial, here.

The editorial acknowledged that “high-scoring Asian students face higher admissions hurdles” than others. It mentioned the study by two Princeton scholars (discussed here, here, and here) who found that

if students were admitted on grades and test scores alone, the acceptance rate for African American and Latino students would plummet while the rate for Asians would rise sharply.

Yes, it necessarily does.

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July 4th is a holiday for all Americans, of whatever persuasion, to celebrate America, but we live in a time when Left and Right increasingly view each other as un-American. Like many others on the Right, I came from the Left (whether or not I really am on the Right is a question I’ll let pass for now, but it’s clear that many of my friends — and many more of my former friends — think I am), and so, once again, I think it in order for me to revisit/recycle/reprint perhaps the last occasion in which I appeared in print with my former colleagues.

As I wrote, here, nearly six years ago (and reprised here, two years ago), I “was in sympathetic and close association with The Nation for a number of years” and “continued to publish there a bit after I left, but with decreasing frequency as my views and the magazine’s began to diverge even more.”

On one occasion the editor, Victor Navasky (whom I still regard as a fine fellow), rejected something I had submitted as too far beyond the pale, but, perhaps for old times’s sake or maybe simply a commendable bid for a bit of diversity, he asked me contribute to a special July 4 issue on “Patriotism” that, as it turned out, contained a large number of short statements by various writers in The Nation’s orbit.

I would say, given the company I was in, my piece was way out in right field. But, given that company, it was so far out that it’s a mistake to regard me as having any company there at all. I can’t link it because that was back in the days before the Internet, even before computers. You can find it in Nexis or the library in the July 15, 1991, issue, but you needn’t.

FOR TOO LONG THE LEFT HAS TOO EASILY REGARDED patriotism as the first refuge of scoundrels. Perhaps the main source of this longstanding discomfort with patriotic sentiment is that patriotism celebrates, at least in theory, the national community as a whole while the left, especially in theory, is oppositional, outside, dissenting. Traditionally class based, with workers viewed as the engine driving society to a better future, the left is now largely a collection of racial, ethnic and gender interests plus some academic defenders of multiculturalism--progressives all, but with no agent of progress and hence no real reason to believe in progress, in sight or in mind.

With little to unite it except opposition to the dominant culture, the left today has lost both the desire and the ability to lay claim to any significant portion of the landscape of American values. Equal opportunity? It has a disparate impact. Free speech? It protects racist and sexist epithets. Self-determination? A principle useful only for bashing the Russians or protecting oil sheiks. This is overstated, to be sure, but not by much. From what precinct of the left today could an authentic voice claim something like “This land is your land, this land is my land . . .”? Patriotism is an expression of solidarity, a principle long favored on the left, but the term itself reveals our predicament. Solidarity of whom? With whom? For what? It is a far but revealing cry from “Solidarity Forever” to “Solidarity in Support of Diversity,” a banner displayed during the recent controversy over affirmative action at Georgetown Law School.

That’s a hard flag to rally around.

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Jesse Helms, known both affectionately and with hostility as “Senator No,” is dead today at 86. There will be many obituaries, but this is not one of them. I’ve come to praise Helms, not bury him.

I certainly did not agree with everything he said or did, but, burnishing and brandishing my qualification for elite membership in the esteemed DISCRIMINATIONS Minority of One Club, I would like to go on record, again (see here and here), to offer my commendation of Helms for the one thing he did that earned him bitter, visceral enmity (which will not die with him) from all liberals and Democrats, and not a few others: his infamous “white hands” ad from his 1990 race against Harvey Gantt.

Although that ad, even more than the Willie Horton ad, has come to symbolize, for most observers, the bitter, unbridled racism liberals attribute to most Republicans, I beg to differ.
As I wrote here:

Take a close look and listen at what is widely regarded as an almost exquisite example of the worst excrescence of white, conservative, Republican, Southern racism in the modern era: Jesse Helms’ white hands ad from his 1990 campaign against Harvey Gantt. That ad featured a close-up of a pair of white hands crumpling what was described as a rejection letter as the voice over said, “You needed that job, and you were the best qualified, but they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota....” According to Helms consultant Alex Castellanos, surveys had identified Gantt’s support of affirmative action as highly unpopular.

The message in that spot’s very clear and that is nobody should get a job, or be denied a job because of the color of their skin. The vast majority of Americans believe that. And if it’s wrong for us to discriminate that way it’s wrong for our government to discriminate that way....

It has become an article of faith that the infamous “White Hands” ad that “derided racial quotas by depicting a pair of white hands crumpling a job rejection letter” was a mean, nasty, racist tactic. But was it? I may be a minority of one, but I don’t think so. First, if you’re curious, go take a look at the ad itself, here. It accuses Harvey Gantt of supporting “Ted Kennedy’s racial quota law.” Supporters can argue that affirmative action does not necessarily amount to quotas, but they can’t reasonably argue that it never does. If it is a “racist tactic” to oppose affirmative action, is it similarly a racist tactic to support it?

Well, yes. I guess they do.

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In two impressive columns, last week and this week, Charles Krauthammer has chronicled a large number (but not all) of Obama’s reversals of field, changes of direction, modifications of principle, etc., on major issues.

• In the fall, he opposed retroactive immunity for telecom companies who assisted in anti-terrorist monitoring, even threatening to filibuster. Now he supports it.

• In the fall, he trashed NAFTA. Now he calls his previous opposition “overheated” and supports it.

• In the fall he promised to meet with the likes of Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad “without preconditions.” Now there will be “preparations,” and he may not meet with Ahmadinejad anyway.

• In the fall he promised to accept public financing and abide by spending limits if the Republicans would. Now he has abandoned that pledge and continues to raise tons of unaccountable cash in record amounts.

• In the fall he was no more able to disown Rev. Wright than his own grandmother, but then he ditched both of them, dissing the former as “a typical white person” and proclaiming, much like Rick Louie the Gendarme in the presence of gambling in Casablanca, that, after 20 years of listening to Rev. Wright, he was shocked by what he had just heard.

• In the fall he told the Chicago Tribune that he thought the Washington, D.C., gun ban was constitutional. Now he supports the Supreme Court’s decision that it was not, forcing his campaign spokesman to admit that Obama’s earlier support for the constitutionality of the gun ban was “inartful.” (DISCRIMINATIONS definition: an “inartful” statement is one supporting a previous commitment that is no longer convenient.)

• And here’s a flip-flop not mentioned in either of Krauthammer’s columns: In the fall, and before, Obama has always supported civil unions but opposed same sex marriage, believing marriage is between a man and a woman. Now he supports the California Supreme Court’s decision that his former view of marriage is unconstitutional, and he opposes the California initiative that would re-establish the view that he formerly held, describing it (the initiative and presumably its definition of marriage) as “divisive and discriminatory.”

• In the fall Obama promised to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq “immediately” and to be altogether out in 16 months. Now he is “refining” that position. Indeed, he now even refers to his long-held support for immediate withdrawal as his “original position,” which reminds me of a man referring to his “first wife” ... while he’s still ostensibly married to her.
  

The spirits of the Confederate soldiers were good. Northern newspapers had reported McClellan’s description of his withdrawal to the James as a “change of base,” and when the story got to the men, they would loudly laugh at the loser of a dog fight and call out: “Look at him changing his base!”

UPDATE

A New York Times editorial discusses a few of these and several other examples of the New Obama throwing the Old Obama (that is, the one from six months ago; there’s no Obama of any significance older than that) under the bus, and is not pleased.

We are not shocked when a candidate moves to the center for the general election. But Mr. Obama’s shifts are striking because he was the candidate who proposed to change the face of politics, the man of passionate convictions who did not play old political games.

There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America

I could, and in the future no doubt will, go on.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:46 PM | Permalink | Say What? (7) | TrackBacks (0)

The Arizona Civil Rights Initiative has submitted 334,658 signatures with the Secretary of State's office, 100,000 more than the number required to qualify for the ballot.

BAMN has filed suit to keep the initiative off the ballot because, as national director Shanta Driver explained, “she fears a majority of Arizonans will vote for it.”

In addition, BAMN claims that it is “deceptive” to describe a measure that would prohibit discriminating against, or granting preferential treatment to, any individual because of race, ethnicity, or gender as a civil rights measure.

There is plenty of deception in this debate, but it is not coming from supporters of ACRI.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:05 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative submitted more than 167,000 signatures to place the initiative on the November ballot.

To qualify for the ballot Nebraska requires the submission of signatures from 10% of the registered voters in the state, 113,000 signatures. In addition, 5% of registered voters in 38 counties are required.

NCRI met or exceeded the state requirement in all 93 counties, making it one of the most successful petition drives in the state’s history.

UPDATE

Despite the success of the petition drive, the opponents of colorblind equality will do whatever they can to keep the measure off the ballot. As Roger Clegg noted two days ago, on The Corner, a BAMN official was quite clear about her group’s strategy:

The key to defeating the initiative is to keep it off the ballot in the first place. That's the only way we're going to win.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 6:29 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

One of the downsides of my “job” (I use the term loosely) providing your peephole/telescopic/microscopic view into the wonderful world of discrimination (not to mention my filter/sieve service, separating the chaff from the really bad chaff) is that I have to read so much offensive, militant nonsense from know-nothings like Shanta Driver, national chairpersonwoman of By Any Means Necessary (BAMN), the battering ram used by the Democrats to do the dirty work of supporting racial preferences, such as disrupting meetings and sending out threatening “blockers” to intimidate petition-signers.

She’s still in Arizona (where we encountered her only last week, here), and still spouting angry, duplicitous nonsense. One saving grace of having to read her, however, is being reminded that she’s so far around the bend that she doesn’t realize how offensive she sounds to most people, such as when she unblushingly reveals her disdain for democracy and the blighted, racist Americans who struggle to make it work.

The head of a group opposing an initiative to end affirmative action and other preferential programs said she wants to block the measure from getting on the ballot in part because she fears a majority of Arizonans will vote for it....

Driver said putting this measure before Arizona voters, even in 2008, would be like asking Alabama residents in the 1950s to vote on equal rights for blacks.

Nor does Driver seem to recognize that her opposition to colorblind equality depends upon a definition of “civil rights” that is distorted beyond all recognition.

Shanta Driver, national chair of By Any Means Necessary, said it is improper to push the measure as a “civil rights” initiative. She said that term connotes something to help minorities

As if Driver’s distorted connotions weren’t enough, for some reason she thinks a supporter who admits that she didn’t read the petition she signed strengthens her case.

“Civil rights applies to all people, regardless of their race or their sex,” [director of the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative Max] McPhail said. “To give someone preference based on something like a characteristic like race goes against what civil rights really means.”

But Pamela Brown, one of the people who signed the petition, said there is no question that the use of the words “civil rights” was designed to mislead.

Brown, who is black, said she grew up in the 1950s and 1960s watching TV coverage of fire hoses being turned on civil rights protestors in the South.
“When you say ‘civil rights’ to a person of my era, that’s what we go back to,” she said.

McPhail said anyone who actually read the text of the initiative, which legally must be attached to the petition, would see that it bans preferential treatment.

Brown, who signed the initiative, conceded that she did not look at the language.

Well, that must be the case, since that’s what Brown learned watching TV.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 1:04 PM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Apparently community colleges in Nebraska are permeated with policies that discriminate against, or grant preferential treatment to, individuals based on their race, ethnicity, or gender.

At least that is the claim of the Board of Governors of Southeast Community College, which has campuses in Beatrice, Lincoln, and Milford, which opposes the Nebraska Civil Rights Initiative that would ban such programs.

Officials there said many of the school’s programs would no longer exist if affirmative action is voted down.

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Regular readers (and even irregular readers who’ve visited here more than a few times) know that I have a high regard for the work of Peter Schmidt, who covers affirmative action and other mind-numbing topics for the Chronicle of Higher Education (sorry for that endorsement, Peter; I know it’ll get you in trouble with most of your readers). Of course, all that means is that I feel the need to give him a hard time for only about half the things he writes. A few days ago, however, he had a must-read column in the Wall Street Journal, “American Universities Are Living A Diversity Lie,” that passes all the severe DISCRIMINATIONS tests and emerges unscathed.

Schmidt begins:

Thirty years ago this past week, Supreme Court Justice Lewis F. Powell Jr. condemned our nation's selective colleges and universities to live a lie. Writing the deciding opinion in the case Regents of the University of California v. Bakke, he prompted these institutions to justify their use of racial preferences in admissions with a rationale most had never considered and still do not believe – a desire to offer a better education to all students.

To this day, few colleges have even tried to establish that their race-conscious admissions policies yield broad educational benefits. The research is so fuzzy and methodologically weak that some strident proponents of affirmative action admit that social science is not on their side.

In reality, colleges profess a deep belief in the educational benefits of their affirmative-action policies mainly to save their necks. They know that, if the truth came out, courts could find them guilty of illegal discrimination against white and Asian Americans.

Most of Schmidt’s piece is devoted to pointing out the insincerity of and the lack of any substantial social science support for the mantra that pigmentary “diversity” is essential to a good education. I think his argument is entirely persuasive, but I also don’t think it’s as important as he does. “Fortunately for affirmative action advocates,” he writes,

the Center for Individual Rights, which coordinated the legal assault on race-conscious admissions, made a tactical decision not to seriously challenge such research – out of a belief it could win on legal principle. When the Supreme Court waded back into the controversy, it reaffirmed Justice Powell's diversity rationale in a 2003 decision, Grutter v. Bollinger, involving the University of Michigan law school. The opinions revealed that the majority of justices had been swayed by a barrage of friend-of-the-court briefs spinning and exaggerating what the research said about the alleged educational benefits of diversity.

One of the few still-controversial aspects of the Brown decision was its reliance on the psychological evidence presented by Dr. Kenneth Clark in its conclusion that enforced racial segregation “generates a feeling of inferiority as to their status in the community that may affect the childrens’ hearts and minds in a way unlikely ever to be undone.”

The risk of this sort of reliance on social science is that judicial opinions that do so become hostage to the reputation of the studies they use, a reputation in the case of Dr. Clark’s doll studies that hasn’t fared very well. A good but far from unique example of this sort of criticism is Ed Whelan’s:

What if research a few years later showed that integrated schools increased black children’s “feeling of inferiority”? Are we to suppose that the Supreme Court might have overturned the decision in Brown? If so, should we respect a methodology that yields results that are so flimsy? And, if (as seems surely the case) differing social-science data would never result in the overturning of Brown, doesn't that show that the purported reasoning is entirely makeshift?

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