Discriminations

The Genuis Of Nancy Pelosi, below, has been UPDATED.

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Mark Steyn, sounding positively Burkean, on the origins of the financial crisis:

... isn’t it the case that we’re in this mess because US politicians previously subordinated “the general reason of the whole” to “local interests” and “local prejudices”? That’s to say, with their usual casual destructiveness dressed up in the baby talk of “diversity”, they chose to turn the mortgage industry into just another branch of the affirmative-action racket. The United States government in effect decreed credit a human right rather than a privilege judiciously granted by one independent contractor to another.

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[NOTE: This post has been Updated]

Mickey Kaus asks, “If Nancy Pelosi had wanted to screw Sen. McCain, could she have done a better job?” Good question.

Although she and her consigliere Barney Frank are now quick to blame Republicans, they apparently did nothing to secure votes for this “essential” legislation from their own caucus. Rep. Hank Johnson (D,GA) told ABC’s Jake Tapper that “he felt no pressure at all to vote for the bill.”

David Bernstein, on Volokh, also notes that Pelosi’s actions appear designed to sink the bill.

She was trying to round up votes for a bailout package that shes claims to believe is essential for the stability of the American economy. She can’t, and doesn’t want to, pass the bill without a substantial number of Republican votes. So what does she do? You would think she would say, “let’s pass this emergency measure now, in the best interests of the country, and talk about who is to blame later.” Instead, Pelosi began her speech with a highly partisan tirade against “Bush” and “Republican” economic policies, which were allegedly to blame for this situation.... She focused on an attack on the growth of federal deficits, which clearly are at best tangential to the current crisis. That, to me, is the sort of irresponsible thing you do when (a) you’re not claiming there is a vast emergency; and (b) you are in the minority, and not claiming to exercise leadership....

All I’m saying is that if you are trying to rally the House to pass an emergency bill, you make it seem like there is AN ACTUAL EMERGENCY, which more or less precludes partisan attacks. To the extent any Republican voted against the bill because of Pelosi’s speech, it may not be a question of them being offended by her partisanship, but the perspective that if Pelosi thinks that the situation calls for partisanship, it must not be a serious emergency, because leaders simply don’t engage in such antics when a true emergency is at hand. For that matter, if I were a Democrat skeptical of the bill, Pelosi’s speech may have discouraged me from voting for it for the same reason.

Pelosi was not acting out of stupidity, but out of malice to obtain partisan electoral advantage.

The woman knows how to count votes. She has kept several bills from coming to votes over the past Congress because she knew she was short on votes and would lose.

The woman knows how to follow polls. Obama was losing to McCain until this mess emerged a little over a week ago. Now Obama has a 5 point lead.

One has to be willfully blind not to see that Pelosi was attempting to dump on Bush and pick a fight with the GOP to ensure that this rescue plan lost and the partisanly advantageous crisis continues.

Perhaps the view that Pelosi and the Dems wanted to help Obama and embarrass the Republicans more than they wanted to pass the legislation is too conspiratorial. I can be persuaded that’s true, but in order to persuade me you’ll have to demonstrate that Pelosi and Frank are so incompetent, or so dumb, that they didn’t know they didn’t have enough votes when they allowed the bill to be voted on.

UPDATE

The Wall Street Journal reports today:

Democratic leadership aides said they didn't try to compel rank-and-file lawmakers to vote for the legislation in recent days, leaving individuals largely on their own to make decisions.

Mr. Obama had said he was inclined to support the bill that failed Monday. But it remains an open question how much political capital he will seek to expend, or how invested he wants to become, in helping Democratic leaders win passage of a bill....

Aides to Mr. Obama said he had not directly reached out to try to sway any House Democrats who opposed the measure. But where Mr. McCain had accused Mr. Obama of taking a hands-off approach to the financial crisis, Democratic advisers said they believed that Mr. McCain now had a role in the legislation’s failure.

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On the Forbes magazine web site Shikha Dalmia, identified as a senior analyst at the Libertarian Reason Foundation, has some advice for Barack Obama: he should reverse course (it wouldn’t be the first, or sixth, time) and come out against both racial preferences and legacy preferences. To win, she writes, Obama

will have to deliver on his promise of being a post-partisan unifier and convince working-class whites to join blacks--two key Democratic constituencies--to join forces behind him. This charge will require him to perform a delicate double-maneuver: persuade working-class whites that he's not an identity politician indifferent to their interests and, at the same time, assure black voters that his appeal as a post-racial candidate doesn't involve selling them out.

One principled way he could do both? Ask colleges to end preferences for minorities and white children of alumni in admissions.

Be that as it may, the advice to Obama to make good on his initial promise, now faded into the post-Wright sunset, of “One America,” — “There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America,” he impressively told the Democratic Convention in 2004 — is sound, both morally and politically.

Racial preferences have been a sleeper issue so far, but they will generate more attention come November, given that Colorado and Nebraska are facing ballot initiatives--authored by a black businessman from California, Ward Connerly--to ban their use in public universities. If similar initiatives in California (1996), Washington (1998) and Michigan (2006) are any indication, they will win handily, thanks to white working-class support. Indeed, the Michigan initiative passed 58% to 42%, receiving nearly 70% of the votes in places such as Macomb County--home of the Reagan Democrats.

But Obama has condemned Connerly’s initiatives as “divisive.” This will likely irritate working-class whites who already feel alienated by his “god and guns” remark....

Dalmia’s advice to Obama to link his reversal on race preferences with a call to eliminate legacy preferences, although politically sound enough, is more problematical. The Obamas, after all, are representative of a whole generation and more of black college graduates with children who would benefit for legacy preferences. Will they be happy about that preference being taken away from them just as their children become old enough to benefit?

Dalmia’s more general comments on doing away with legacy preferences — for example, that no admissions system using them can be “generally fair” — are even more problematical. Here’s a particularly troubling comment:

Dismantling racial preferences while leaving legacy preferences in place, as Connerly’s initiatives would do, won’t advance the cause of color-blind admissions because it will open up minority slots for white candidates but no white spots for minority candidates. It would effectively force disadvantaged minorities to compete on merit without holding rich, privileged kids to the same standards.... Connerly has acknowledged the unfairness of legacies but has conspicuously omitted them in his campaign to ban racial preferences.

Legacy preferences may not be wise policy, and they certainly have a disparate negative impact on applicants not fortunate enough to have been born into families with Private U. graduates festooning the family tree, but, as I’ve written here too many times to cite (see here, here, here, and here for a few among many examples), the invidiousness of any unintended and disparate impact they involve is as nothing compared to the conscious and intended racial discrimination that is the foundational core of preferential admissions.

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[NOTE: This post has bee UPDATED]

I have written many times that I believe it is almost always illegitimate for the state to “take race into account,” to use the current euphemism for employing racial preferences. Indeed, the only acceptable (to me) exception to such a prohibition I’ve found is the legitimacy of assigning, say, black police officers to go undercover to penetrate a black gang. (But even that exception is not without problems; see here and here.)

But continuing reflection on the common description of Clarence Thomas, and now Sarah Palin, as affirmative action selections, as I just discussed in my immediately preceding post, leads me to conclude that more needs to be said about some nooks and crannies of our public life where the rule barring consideration of race probably does not, and should not, apply. And, where “more needs to be said,” I’m always happy to say it.

As I wrote in my previous post,

Thomas was ... criticized as, in effect, an affirmative action hire by people who do not object in principle to affirmative action hires ... (and defended, of course, by people who do have principled objections to affirmative action hires in most situations).

Of course being appointed to the Supreme Court is not “most situations,” and neither is being nominated for vice president....

Before getting to those (and other) examples, however, let me first try to establish the principle that creates these exceptions. And to do that let me begin with an extreme example: marriage. Does anyone doubt that there should be no law restricting a person’s right to choose, or reject, a marriage partner on the basis of race? Another example: voting. Liberals have been telling us incessantly that if Obama loses it will be because some white voters are racist and won’t vote for a black candidate. But presumably even they don’t believe such “race-conscious” behavior is, or can be made, illegal. Indeed, I suspect many, maybe even most, liberals would argue that a whites-only political party, a party that excludes blacks and Jews, has a right to exist and field candidates.

In short, there are some areas of life, both public and private, where civil rights protections simply do not, and should not, apply. But this is not simply a matter of there being no “rights” involved. It is true that no one has a“right” to be appointed to the Supreme Court, or selected to run for vice-president, but that’s not precisely the point. After all, no one has a “right” to be accepted to college, either. But there’s a big difference between the former and the latter: prospective Supreme Court justices or vice presidents have no “rights” in the matter of their selection whatsoever; the president, or presidential nominee, has total and unreviewable discretion regarding their selection (although that decision is subject to later review by the Senate in one case and the voters in the other).

College and job applicants, by contrast, although they have no right to be admitted or hired, do indeed have, and should have, the right to be judged in a manner that does not benefit or burden them because of their race. Or at least they would if the 14th Amendment and civil rights laws were fairly and reasonably interpreted and applied.

Thus, even if Clarence Thomas and Sarah Palin were selected because of their race or sex (and, as I argued in my last post, I don’t believe that is necessarily the case), no colorblind principle would have been violated, because such a principle does not and should not apply to those cases. Thus there is no inconsistency in conservatives lauding those appointments, although I do believe it remains inconsistent for liberals who approve of affirmative hiring across the board to denounce these two, and others they don’t like, as affirmative action hires.

UPDATE [29 Sept.]

By email, Roger Clegg demurs:

I think you make this mistake: Just because an act is not legally challengeable doesn’t mean that it’s morally right. That is, it may be a bad idea to take people to court for not honoring their father and mother, but its still a bad thing if they don’t. Same thing for voting against someone simply because that person is black and you don’t like black people.

The answer depends, at least in part, on exactly why it is wrong to "take race into account" in the situations where it is clearly wrong — it can't be simply be because it's illegal. Why, that is, do (or should) most people, most of the time, have a right to be treated by the state without regard to their race? I'll get back to you on that....

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If you’ve hung around these precincts long enough you will know that I’ve had, and taken, many opportunities to poke fun at SLATE’s legal style writer, fellow Charlottesvillian Dahlia Lithwick who, as I wrote here, is “known more for the sizzle than the steak of her columns.” And as I wrote of one of her pieces here,

I am a big fan of her verve and style but not of what she actually says most of the time. Her titles can be quite engaging (“Slippery Slop,” “Pick A Chick,” etc.), and her breezy style can be quite seductive. Indeed, in commenting on the bizarre views on religion and the law she expressed in “Rock of Ages and a Hard Space,” I succumbed to what can only be described as a Lithwickian style myself, calling my post “Gimme That Ole Time (Anti-) Religion...” and writing at one point:

Lithwick's summary of the argument was, not to coin a phrase, generally fair and balanced, but when she offered her own views in the last paragraph she suddenly morphed into a sputtering character right out of Looney Tunes.

Dahlia Dahling’s comments in the current C-Ville piece reveal yet again that her style and verve, impressive as they are, still can’t convert the sow’s ear of the content of what she writes into silk purse commentary....

Lithwick’s article today in SLATE, comparing Sarah Palin and Clarence Thomas as joint victims of affirmative action, is actually one of her less dramatic and zany ones, although it predictably still misses a number of marks.

After noting what even she recognizes as Thomas’s eloquent anger at the stigma affirmative action attaches to its “beneficiaries” (“a word,” she notes with evident disapproval, “Thomas puts in quotation marks”), she writes that one can believe his anger is not justified,

but nobody can argue that his most passionate legal writing vibrates with his anger about it. In a sharp dissent in a 2003 case allowing race to be used as an admissions factor at the University of Michigan’s law school, Thomas described affirmative action as “a cruel farce” under which “all blacks are tarred as undeserving.” In an earlier case he wrote that such programs “stamp minorities with a badge of inferiority.”

Critics have scoffed at Thomas’ tendency to view affirmative action exclusively through the narrow lens of his own life, but it’s clear the “badge of inferiority” has tainted a lifetime of enormous achievement. He will never forgive America for the chances he was given, or for how small it has made him feel....

Based on all her other writings, I think it fair to say that Ms. Lithwick agrees with those anonymous “[c]ritics” who “have scoffed at Thomas’ tendency to view affirmative action exclusively through the narrow lens of his own life,” and for some reason I doubt that she would agree with my criticisms (see here and here for examples) of the many defenders of affirmative action who justify the practice of racial preference because it produced ... them. Here, for example, I took issue with Theodore Shaw, former president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, who had written that without racial preferences he would not have been accepted a Wesleyan or Columbia Law School:

One can readily understand why Mr. Shaw regards his own success as compelling justification for the racial discrimination against someone else required to achieve it, but there may be some benefit in those of us without his interest examining the argument. Let us begin by assuming, with him, that he would not have been accepted at Wesleyan or Columbia without the racial preference he received, although in fact that may not be true. (In the absence of preferences, after all, some minorites are still admitted into even the most selective schools.) Still, there is no reason to assume that it was Wesleyan and Columbia or nowhere. Since Wesleyan found him “qualified,” he presumably would have been accepted elsewhere, and since it sounds as though he was poor he would have qualifed for financial aid. Indeed, he might have wound up exactly where he is, for even the NAACP LDF doesn’t require graduation from elite colleges and Ivy League law schools of its employees. Nor is there any reason to assume that the white’s, Asian’s, or other non-preferred minority’s place Mr.Shaw took would have led a life of sloth and indulgence, contributing nothing comparable to Mr. Shaw’s contribution to the national well-being. I mean no disrespect to Mr. Shaw when I say that, placing his success and contributions on one side of the scale and the principle of non-discrimination on the other, there seems to be no compelling national interest in sacrificing the latter for the former.

Like Thomas, Palin has been blasted for inexperience, and she has fought back with claims that she is not being judged on her merits, but on her gender, just as he felt he was inevitably judged on his race. While it's possible to assert that Sarah Palin is the most qualified person in America for the vice presidency, only approximately nine people have done so with a straight face. That's because Palin was not chosen because she was the second-best person to run America but to promote diversity on the ticket, even the political playing field, and to shatter (in her words) some glass ceilings....

Of course being appointed to the Supreme Court is not “most situations,” and neither is being nominated for vice president. At no time in the past, and certainly not in the present, has there ever been a national consensus holding that a vice presidential nominee should be “the most qualified person in the country for the vice presidency,” whatever that might mean. If McCain selected Palin because she’s a woman, because he wanted “diversity” on the ticket, that’s no more illegitimate than Obama picking Joe Biden to appeal to working class Catholics.

Among Ms. Lithwick’s many talents, one of them is presumably the ability to read John McCain’s mind. Otherwise, how could she be so certain that Palin was selected “to promote diversity on the ticket”? I can’t read McCain’s mind any better than Lithwick can (actually, that may not be true), but it seems to me that she was selected primarily as an outsider, reformer, taker on of corrupt establishments who could reinforce his image as “maverick,” and the fact that she’s a woman who could appeal to some women was an added plus. Although much was made of McCain's supposed intent of having her appeal to disaffected Hillary voters, insofar as that was true I suspect he thought, accurately, that she'd appeal more to Hillary's blue collar male voters. My own guess, for whatever it’s worth, is that if Tim Pawlenty had been the short-term governor of Alaska with Palin’s exact record of having defied the local corrupt Republican establishment, and Palin had been governor of Minnesota with Pawlenty’s record, Pawlenty would now be the VP nominee.

But this is not the first time that Ms. Lithwick has demonstrated her uncanny (if ultimately unpersuasive) mind-reading abilities. As I discussed here, in discussing the unfortunately failed nomination of Miguel Estrada to the U.S. Court of Appeals she also pretended to have the ability to read President Bush’s mind (actually, both President Bushes):

First, she takes the Bush administration to task for not coming right out and admitting that in nominating Estrada they were pandering to the Hispanic vote, “no different from George Bush Sr.’s determination to replace Thurgood Marshall with an African-American.” But how can she be so sure? Does she mean that, absent his ethnicity, no reasonable president could possibly have thought to nominate Estrada to a circuit court of appeals? That’s absurd.

Lithwick claims that the Estrada nomination “mirrors [Bush’s] profoundly illogical claim that he supports racial diversity in education but opposes affirmative action,” but she presents no argument as to why this claim is illogical, profoundly or otherwise. I think it’s quite reasonable to believe that diversity is a Good Thing but that “affirmative action” as done today requires discriminating on the basis of race, which is not only a Bad Thing but indeed is so bad that it is almost never justified. I, of course, have no more access to the president’s motives than does Lithwick, but it does not strike me as illogical, or even unlikely, that he thought appointing someone as eminently well-qualified as Miguel Estrada is precisely the way to promote diversity without relying on discrimination to achieve it. Perhaps I will be persuaded by Lithwick’s argument to the contrary if she ever makes one, but she did not make it here.

Liberals inclined to blindly support affirmative action would do well to contemplate the lessons of Sarah Palin and Clarence Thomas. Although the former exudes unflagging self-confidence and the latter may always be crippled by self-doubt, both have become nearly frozen in a defensive crouch, casualties of an effort to create an America in which diversity is measured solely in terms of appearance....

.... There is much that is laudable about affirmative action, but its tendency to divide people in often crude ways is not. It can lead to a class of “beneficiaries” who also see the world in crude ways, and to even-cruder ways of talking about the very complicated and real gender and race disparities that continue to plague America.

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[This post has been UPDATED twice three times.]

Readers will not be surprised, or disappointed, that I haven’t added my two cents to the apparently ongoing conversation about our financial crisis. As a former graduate student, I feel perfectly comfortable saying that’s not my field. But there is one political point I’d like to make, primarily because I haven’t seen anyone else make it.

The defenders of the Paulson plan argue that the survival of our financial markets depend on its passage. This conviction is shared not only by both President Bush and his administration but also by the Democrats. For example, late yesterday afternoon, according to the Washington Post,

[t]he leading Democratic negotiator on the Bush administration’s $700 bailout plan accused John McCain of undermining the proposal and prodding House Republicans to lay out a wholly different approach that is opposed by the White House.

“This is the presidential campaign of John McCain undermining what Hank Paulson tells us is essential for the country,” said Democratic Rep. Barney Frank, (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee. “This is McCain at the last minute getting House Republicans to undermine the Paulson approach.”

In the past Congressional Democrats have had the courage of their convictions. They passed Clinton’s tax increase in 1993 without a single Republican vote. Today’s Democrats, by contrast, with the fate of the country (in their own view) hanging in the balance, are begging for “cover.” As Time magazine put it,

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has demanded that [House Minority Leader John] Boehner get at least half of his caucus — or 100 members — to vote for the legislation so that Democrats are not left passing this still very unpopular bill by themselves less than two months before the election.

On Wednesday Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid had explicitly called for McCain to use his influence as party leader to bring House Republicans along. “We need, now, the Republicans to start producing some votes for us,” Reid said. “We need the Republican nominee for president to let us know where he stands and what we should do.” Reid explained that McCain was crucial to any deal because his approval of a deal would give congressional Republicans political cover necessary to sign on to a bipartisan agreement.

If McCain manages to persuade the House Republicans to accept a compromise that is also acceptable to many Democrats, do you think Pelosi, Reid, Frank, et. al. would prefer to have

a) A solution for which McCain would receive credit; or

b) A financial meltdown?

UPDATE [10:15 A.M.]

Nancy Pelosi said this morning that the rescue of U.S. financial institutions “will happen because it has to happen.”

But she added that a deal would be up to House Republicans who balked at the $700 billion package being negotiated by congressional leaders and Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson and who have given no sign that they will support it.

Pelosi and her fellow Democrats have said that President George W. Bush has to deliver a large number of Republican votes for the politically unpopular bailout to pass Congress.

Nancy Pelosi, Profile in Discourage.

UPDATE II [1:05 P.M.]

According to the fearless Frank,

Ms. Pelosi will not bring a partisan bill to the floor. She will not say that we’re going to have a one-sided Democratic bill that is attacked by the House Republicans in response to a request from George Bush. That’s not good for the country.

Funny, she’s never seem to care that much about their opinions before. She doesn’t want bi-partisanship; she wants unanimity.

UPDATE II [1:30 P.M.]

Michael Barone on the substance of Pelosi’s bi-partisanship:

Obviously, Pelosi is looking out for the political fortunes of her Democratic colleagues. The bailout/rescue package has been getting middling to poor responses in polls and furious responses from constituents who don't want their tax dollars sent to Wall Street....

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The University of Virginia, according to this report, has just enjoyed its third annual “de-stereotype day.”

The University of Virginia continues to work on fixing race issues on grounds. They have dealt with housing, and political cartoons, and Wednesday, it was stereotypes.

More than 1,500 students walked the grounds in white t-shirts with written messages to defy stereotypes. Their words were different but their collective message was there is more to everyone than meets the eye.

The goal was to get people to acknowledge and talk about stereotypes and hopefully to keep that conversation going. Organizers say some people do not think they are stereotyped, but they say it happens all the time.

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Since I’ve waited a few days to discuss it, by now most of you are probably already familiar with the new AP/Yahoo poll on the role race is likely to play in the election. The gist of it, and the nature of most of the coverage it has received, is nicely captured by the Chicago Sun Times headline on this widely read Associated Press article by Ron Fournier and Trevor Thompson, “Bigoted white Dems could doom Obama's effort.” That article’s lede:

WASHINGTON -- 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.

Some examples from the sidebar:

First, interestingly, on all the positive adjectives, white Democrats have a more favorable attitude toward blacks than white Republicans or Independents. For example, about 40% of white Dems regard blacks as “Friendly,” compared to about 31% of Republicans and only 25% of Independents. Similarly, about 25% of white Dems regard blacks as “Smart at School,” compared to about 20% of white Republicans and Independents. (Unreported is whether this means that 75% of white Dems do not regard blacks as “Smart at School,” etc., which I think is the logical implication.)

The negative attitudes, however, or rather attitudes about negative characteristics — Violent, Boastful, Complaining, Lazy — are more interesting, especially since they provide the media paydirt here (“white bigots” may rob election, etc.). About 12% of white Dems, for example, regard blacks as both lazy and irresponsible, compared with about 15% of white Republicans and Independents.

By far the most interesting negative attitude, at least to me, is “Complaining,” which all categories of whites regarded as the most negative of all their negative attitudes about blacks. About 22% of white Dems thought this term applied to blacks, compared to about 35% of white Republicans and Independents. This was the largest spread on all of the negatives. I think this “Complaining” button was what Rev. Wright pushed, and Michelle Obama re-enforced with her comments about America being a mean country that had made her proud only recently. I also believe that when whites regard blacks as “complaining,” what they are primarily responding to is the demand for special treatment, i.e., for racial preferences.

What makes this poll such a hot commodity right now is not simply the numbers of whites who have some negative attitudes about blacks (the positive attitudes aren’t newsworthy), but the pollsters’ claim that

[s]tatistical models derived from the poll suggest that Obama’s support would be as much as 6 percentage points higher if there were no white racial prejudice.

[t]he pollsters set out to determine why Obama is locked in a close race with McCain even as the political landscape seems to favor Democrats. President Bush's unpopularity, the Iraq war and a national sense of economic hard times cut against GOP candidates, as does the fact that Democratic voters outnumber Republicans.

[o]thers would say that the question requiring investigation is why John McCain is locked in a close race with Barack Obama, when Obama has no discernible qualifications for the office and (as the survey shows) holds views well to the left of the electorate. Occam’s razor would suggest that the fact that 47 percent of respondents describe Obama as “inexperienced” accounts more readily for the tight race than the divinations of “racism” derived from the poll.

what are we to make of this kind of sentence: “One finding: More than a quarter of white Democrats agree that ‘if blacks would only try harder, they could be just as well off as whites.’”

I don’t think that agreeing with that statement makes one a bigot, and I don’t see how agreeing with it makes it harder to vote for the particular black guy who’s running for president.

Is the sentiment in that sentence — that too many African Americans are not availing themselves of the opportunities they now have — very far removed from what Bill Cosby has said? Similarly, associating black with “violent” makes Jesse Jackson a bigot, too, I suppose (recall his famous admission that he was relieved when he found that the teenagers walking behind him are white instead of black).

Recognizing that, in 2008 America, African Americans are, statisically speaking, more likely to be underachievers and violent isn’t the same thing as saying that they are hardwired to be so. Sheesh.

I should add here that not everything in the poll or in the current reports of it are objectionable. It was conducted with the assistance of Stanford political scientist Paul Sniderman, who has written widely and well about race and polling about race. (I do not say that simply because I’m a Stanford grad, nor do I know Sniderman. But see here for some of the works to which I refer.) And the AP article does contain some important cautions and qualifiers, such as the following:

Lots of Republicans harbor prejudices, too, but the survey found they weren’t voting against Obama because of his race. Most Republicans wouldn’t vote for any Democrat for president — white, black or brown.

Not all whites are prejudiced. Indeed, more whites say good things about blacks than say bad things, the poll shows. And many whites who see blacks in a negative light are still willing or even eager to vote for Obama....

Race is not the biggest factor driving Democrats and independents away from Obama. Doubts about his competency loom even larger, the poll indicates. More than a quarter of all Democrats expressed doubt that Obama can bring about the change they want, and they are likely to vote against him because of that.

Finally, returning to the “hardwired” issue and assumptions about the meaning of racism, we are constantly told that race is “socially constructed.” I think this is largely true (whatever it means exactly), but I also think this truth has some implications that are rarely recognized. Consider, again, the fact that by far the most negative characteristic attributed to blacks is “Complaining,” which is also the negative characteristic that most clearly flows from a position on public policy (demanding racial preferences). As I’ve pointed out several times, no one thinks of Colin Powell as “complaining” about things. As I pointed out here, first quoting the New Republic’s Peter Beinart and then criticizing him:

Despite the pervasive racism of the electorate Beinart remains an optimist, “because even racists can be wooed.”

Think about it this way [Beinart writes]: Many of the voters who right now won’t vote for Obama because he’s black would probably vote for Colin Powell even though he’s black. That’s because they don’t see Powell as a racial redistributionist, a guy who would favor his community at their expense.

What Beinart is really saying here is that Powell is not really black, because he’s not a “racial redistributionist.” It never seems to occur to Beinart that if voters will vote for black candidate P, who does not support racial redistribution, but will not vote for black candidate O, who does (or who they think does) support racial redistribution, the reason they don’t support O in greater numbers is not at all because they’re racist and he’s black but because they disagree with his position on an issue (actually, probably many issues) that are important to them.

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In its Overview of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Department of Justice states:

Title VI, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d et seq., was enacted as part of the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1964. It prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, and national origin in programs and activities receiving federal financial assistance. As President John F. Kennedy said in 1963:

Simple justice requires that public funds, to which all taxpayers of all races [colors, and national origins] contribute, not be spent in any fashion which encourages, entrenches, subsidizes or results in racial [color or national origin] discrimination.

If a recipient of federal assistance is found to have discriminated and voluntary compliance cannot be achieved, the federal agency providing the assistance should either initiate fund termination proceedings or refer the matter to the Department of Justice for appropriate legal action....

is taking small steps to widen the pipeline. Duke has financed two postdoctoral positions for minority candidates each year, with the hope that it will eventually hire some of them for tenure-track faculty positions.

Oh, wait. Duke is private. Maybe it’s free to discriminate because it doesn’t receive any public funds.

Nope, that’s not it. A quick check of FedSpending.org reveals that in Fiscal Year 2005 Duke received $454,076,071 in federal assistance.

Has our idea of “simple justice” so eloquently stated by President Kennedy in 1963 really changed so much since then?

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Since it is widely believed, at least in some circles, that affirmative action is threatened exclusively by Ward Connerly and his friends, the evil racist Republicans and the right-wing judges they appoint, it may be useful to note that the bureaucrats and politicians who manage affirmative action programs have also contributed a great deal to the justified disgust increasing numbers of people have for these programs.

Here’s a good example from south Florida:

Auditors are alleging that Broward County government has mismanaged a program designed to steer millions of dollars in work to small businesses owned by women and minorities.

The report from internal county auditors released this week charged that officials repeatedly forced contractors to set aside more work for minority firms than federal regulations require. The auditors said little documentation exists to justify set-aside goals on federally funded projects for the past three years and that inaccurate reports were sent to regulatory agencies....

“The whole point of the program is not to divvy up contracts among races, but to encourage opportunity and growth and the program was not doing that,” said Herbert Schlanger, the Atlanta attorney representing the local chapter of the Associated General Contractors.

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This post has now been updated a third time.

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I've often described Obama as an empty suit, but thanks to this excellent column by Rex Murphy (HatTip to InstaPundit) I now think that clothes him with too fixed and substantial an identity.

He has a quicksilver quality. Even after two autobiographies, Mr. Obama remains something of a floating, uncrowded presence. His story (and he is so impressively self-aware as to have made the most acute comment on it) is temptingly open-ended, very much a page to be written on. He himself has written, most memorably: “I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views.”

That is as bold a statement as it is an insightful one. Bold, because it is a remarkable confession from a presidential hopeful. Insightful, because it matches the facts. There are not many personalities so fluid or vague on which an attempt to “project” a storyline would take hold....

Mr. Obama, however, has a kind of welcoming emptiness. Eager acolyte or stern observer, both find it difficult not to add, or project, the most flattering, even jubilant, fill-ins. The Obama candidacy, in its rocket-blast phase when he outsoared Hillary Clinton, drained the dictionaries of every superlative. The great “O” had them swooning in the stands. Why?

True, Oprah had passed her potent wand over him, but even the afternoon regent of a thousand therapies has stays on her sorcery. Mainly, his was very much a candidacy constructed by those who were drawn to him. If there was any meaning to that fortune-cookie poeticism that “we are the ones we have been waiting for,” it was that his campaign was a feedback loop. People saw what they came to see. Mr. Obama was the slate; the crowds brought their own chalk.

This is the nature of Mr. Obama’s particular kind of charisma. People project their best wishes on him, they fill in the blank of a very attractive and plausible outline. His is not, emphatically, a charisma of deeds. For what has he done, save run for president? He is an accommodating vessel - cool, smart, biracial and “unfinished.” This is the Gatsby quality of him that others have noted. Like Gatsby, he is a receptacle of others’ glamorous invention.

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[NOTE: This post has been Updated, twice three times]

Every time I see another charge that one or another of McCain’s ads is racist for making fun of Obama as an empty-suit celebrity or calling attention to his woeful lack of experience or accomplishment (this amounts to calling him “uppity,” it is said), I think these ridiculous, overly sensitive politically correct objections can’t get any dumber.

But they can, and do, as evidenced by this new bottom-scraper from Time’s Karen Tumulty.

According to the clear implications of her complaint, Obama should be immune from criticism for taking advice from former Fannie Mae chairman Franklin Raines because Raines is black. Apparently criticizing one black man, Obama, is bad enough, but criticizing two of them in one ad is, well, beyond the pale.

Byron York quotes the Obama campaign’s criticism of this ad as

another flat-out lie from a dishonorable campaign that is increasingly incapable of telling the truth. Frank Raines has never advised Senator Obama about anything — ever....

UPDATE

York now notes that the Washington Post is taking McCain to task for relying on ... the Washington Post.

UPDATE II

Instapundit asks: “if Obama is President, will Time regard every criticism of his administration as racist?”

Probably not — only the ones that it regards as effective.

UPDATE III [20 Sept.]

From the official McCain web site:

The only problem with Ms. Tumulty’s story is that we also released an today targeting Senator Obama’s extensive ties to Jim Johnson. The ad is called…Jim Johnson. And Ms. Tumulty might have been aware of its existence if she’d bothered to call this campaign to find out the facts (reporting) before indicting us for racism in a half-baked, late night rant. Tumulty also takes Obama’s response, signed by Mr. Raines, at face value. The Obama campaign says Raines didn’t advise the campaign, and Tumulty apparently wasn’t interested in getting to the bottom of that either. So we contacted Ms. Tumulty and told her of the multiple sources that tie Raines to Obama, including three separate instances in the Washington Post, none of which was ever challenged by Raines or the Obama campaign until yesterday.

Tumulty did not correct her post, she simply responded “I grew up in Texas. I know what this stuff looks like.” Well, now we all know what hysterical liberal bias looks like as well.

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This recent post has been Updated to acknowledge the unusual perspicacity (a big word meaning he agrees with me) of Roger Clegg.

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Some political scientists, the Chronicle of Higher Education reports this morning, are exploring what they believe are genetic influences on political behavior.

If conservatives and liberals can’t see eye to eye, it may be because their brains are wired differently from birth, according to researchers who have for the first time found a link between people’s political leanings and their physiology.

The researchers’ report, published in today’s issue of the journal Science, suggests that genetic differences may help explain why some people favor capital punishment and the Iraq War, while others support gun control and foreign aid. It’s part of a growing field, called “genopolitics,” that is threatening to rewrite the rules of political science, which hold that political beliefs are shaped by people’s environment and experiences. To work in the new field, political scientists are scrambling to learn genetics, neuroscience, and other aspects of biology.

In the laboratory, the participants completed a survey to gauge their support for policies such as foreign aid, pacifism, gun control, defense spending, patriotism, capital punishment, and the Iraq War. Then researchers measured the electrical conductivity of the subjects' skin—a function of how much they were sweating—while they watched images on a computer screen. Some of the pictures depicted innocuous subjects, like a bowl of fruit, while others portrayed a bloody face and a large spider on person's face.

Subjects who reacted most to the second type of image were more likely to support policies such as warrantless searches, school prayer, and the USA Patriot Act, according to the researchers.

In a second test, Mr. Hibbing's group measured how strongly the subjects blinked their eyes when they heard loud unexpected noises. The results matched the earlier findings, with participants more likely to react strongly if they held political views along the conservative end of the spectrum.

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[This post has been Updated]

Dick Meyer has an NPR blog called “Against The Grain.” He describes himself as “director of Digital Media at NPR.org,” and he describes “Against The Grain” as “a mix of sarcastic sociology and comic moral philosophy that occasionally descends into political commentary.” Judging by this example today, I would say it is comic sociology whose political commentary has descended below comic into a zone of deep pathos.

Consider:

Many undecideds haven’t really connected their negative feelings about race to Obama yet. Their view of Obama is unformed, and their negative feelings toward African-Americans could be easily triggered when they finally tune in....

.... [S]ome who have been doing recent research on race believe there is a current of racism that has not been triggered and that is likely to be — perhaps triggered intentionally by Republicans, but also as a natural consequence of the undecided voters finally focusing. And plenty of pundits and advice-givers think Obama is not doing enough to minimize or counter the racial impulses of undecided voters. (I am not convinced there is any way to spin this: What is, is.)

Does this mean John McCain, to capture the undecided vote, needs to actively trigger subterranean prejudices? Hard to say. But it is clear that many legitimate issues in the campaign also have racial angles or, to be fair, will be perceived through a prejudiced lens by some voters.

The “inexperience” issue is one of them. Obama has, in fact, less big league experience in government and politics than McCain or any other party nominee since JFK in 1960. If a voter is so inclined, this can play out as Obama coming off as an “affirmative action candidate.”

For example, in a recent column, I said, “If Obama were not black, if he were the same man (man, not woman) in white skin, he would most certainly be far ahead in the polls.” I think this is an uncontroversial assertion: All the models political scientists use to predict presidential elections have the Democrat winning in a rout. But now the polls are tied in a knot. What is the variable that none of the models take into account? Race.

After the column ran, my inbox was besieged by angry missives declaring that I was a half-wit for not understanding that Obama was given the nomination, not because he earned it by getting more votes, but because he was black and got what he didn’t deserve. He was an affirmative action candidate. These were not kind-hearted e-mails.

So as legitimate as the experience issue is, for some it triggers a notion that Obama is undeserving, presumptuous or “uppity,” to use an old and ugly word. If Democratic pollsters see that, so do Republicans.

Similarly, many people felt McCain’s famous ad that called Obama a celebrity like Paris Hilton was subliminally racist, subtly playing on racist impulses that fear black men with white women, or that preyed on the idea that black men succeed only in celebrity arenas like sports and music....

I do, however, agree with one of Meyer’s points — that his statement, “If Obama were not black, if he were the same man (man, not woman) in white skin, he would most certainly be far ahead in the polls,” is “an uncontroversial assertion.” I agree. That statement is so thoroughly false that it’s hard to imagine any (reasonable) controversy about it.

First, if Obama weren’t black he never would have been selected to give the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic convention, which is where he captivated everyone (including a number of us who are no longer captivated) with his appeal to a post-racial, post-partisan America. Next, had he been a white guy otherwise identical to the current Obama he would not have stood out from the crowd of other candidates for the Democratic nomination; he would not have secured a lock on the black vote, one of the largest if not the largest block of Democratic base voters, and thus never would have won the nomination against Hillary. Finally, a white Obama never would have excited the young voters to the degree that he has, never would have been projected to increase the turnout enough to turn some red states blue.

Do any of these people who are laying the groundwork for blaming racism for Obama’s defeat (should he lose, of course; it’s hard for it to explain his victory) really entertain any doubts that Colin Powell as the Republican nominee would have wiped the floor with Dukakis or Gore or Kerry?

UPDATE [19 Sept.]

From the Great Minds Think Alike dept.: Roger Clegg also argues that

For starters, it really cannot be seriously contended that Obama would have been nominated in the first place had he been white. A key part of his attraction, which is his charisma, is his race. Does anyone really believe that he would have attracted the same passionate support had he not been African American, or that any comparably qualified white state legislator would find himself the presidential nominee less than four years later? You don’t have to be Geraldine Ferraro, you don’t have to call this affirmative action, and at this point you don’t even have to oppose Senator Obama, to admit that this happens to be true.

Second, and for similar reasons, while there are those who will not vote for Obama in the general election because he is black, there are many who will be voting for him precisely for that reason....

Look at it this way: If Senator Obama magically became white, is it at all clear that at this point it would improve his electoral prospects? And if, at the same time, Senator McCain magically became black, does anyone think that the white Obama would then have a prayer of winning?.... Colin Powell beats John Kerry (minus 20 years political experience and a war record) any day.

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In my post yesterday I was unsure whether a glaring omission in a CNN news story was based on “sloppiness or bias.” But after looking at Jack Cafferty’s CNN article today, I’m not even sure what CNN is. I always thought it was a news organization, but this piece is much more like a bad opinion piece than news.

Cafferty can’t understand why Obama is not walking away with the race, unless....

Race is arguably the biggest issue in this election, and it's one that nobody's talking about.

The differences between Barack Obama and John McCain couldn't be more well-defined. Obama wants to change Washington. McCain is a part of Washington and a part of the Bush legacy. Yet the polls remain close. Doesn't make sense…unless it's race.

Well, you know those racists. They never pay attention to “issues.”

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Gianna Jessen survived a botched abortion in 1977. Now she is featured in an independent ad criticizing Obama’s four votes against legislation protecting infants, like her, who were accidentally born alive. “If Barack Obama had his way,” she says, “I wouldn't be here.”

In its article today about the ad, CNN states that the ad was sponsored by an anti-abortion organization “founded by Jill Stanek, a columnist for the Web site World Net Daily, who has made controversial statements in the past expressing her opposition of abortion rights.”

Either because of sloppiness or bias, CNN neglected to mention that Stanek is the former nurse whose testimony before Congress is widely credited with bringing the plight of babies born after botched abortions to light. Largely as a result of her compelling testimony Congress passed, with virtually no dissent (it passed the Senate 98-0), even from committed pro-choice legislators, the Born Alive Infant Protection Act. It was an identical Illinois version of that act that Obama blocked, claiming that it would have tended to undermine Roe v. Wade.

But I suppose you could say, if you’re CNN, that Stanek “has made controversial statements in the past.” And she continues to make them.

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About two weeks ago I noted (following Drudge) the prediction of Fatimah Ali, Obamanut and Philadelphia Daily News columnist, that

[i]f McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring crime, homelessness — and hopelessness!

I stand by the column - but after all of that backlash, I realize I was dead wrong. We don’t have to wait until after the election for a race war. We’re in one now.

I know that putting the words “race” and “war” together is like hurling an incendiary device. But I wasn’t issuing a call to arms, it was a metaphorical prediction.

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The reliably liberal Walter Shapiro has an interesting article in Salon today on the race (and the role of race in the race) in Ohio. But I don’t want to discuss most of his evidence or argument now.

Instead, consider he says here:

A striking feature of the University of Cincinnati's Ohio Poll, which was released Friday, was that while McCain is winning the support of 90 percent of Republican voters, Obama is only picking up 82 percent of the Democrats. These differing levels of party loyalty — which might (note the conditional tense) be attributed to Palin for the Republicans and Obama’s African-American heritage on the Democratic side — partly explain why McCain leads 48 to 44 percent in the survey....

Now that we’ve made Shapiro less tense and put him in the right mood, let’s consider his suggestion that “Obama’s African-American heritage” may be costing him votes in Ohio. Really? Does Obama even have an “African-American heritage?”

Everyone knows by now that Obama was born in Hawaii (unless he was born in Indonesia, as some conspiracy theorists believe) of an African father and a white woman from Kansas. He was raised primarily in Hawaii by his white Kansas grandparents, who, he insists in his ads, taught him “values straight from the Kansas heartland where they grew up.”

Obama did not become “black” until his teenage years, or later, and that was by choice. He certainly is free to choose to identify himself as black (and others no doubt would even if he didn’t), but he’s not free to choose his “heritage.”

Insofar as there are people who who will vote against him because he’s black, I suspect that’s not because of the color of his skin or his alleged “African-American heritage” but largely because they’ve been persuaded over the years that “black” is synonymous with race-preference supporting liberal Democrat. They suspect — correctly, given Obama’s continuing support for race preferences — that he will give preferential treatment to people like him, not them.

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On Friday the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a public briefing on affirmative action in the STEM fields — science, technology, engineering , math. I attended, but rather than subject you to a report based on an attempt to make sense of my notes I will refer you instead to two summaries published this morning — this one, by Peter Schmidt in the Chronicle of Higher Education, and this one, by Jack Stripling on InsideHigherEd.

Richard Sander, the UCLA law professor whose “mismatch” theory has agitated defenders of race preferences, has begun gathering data on the performance of minorities in the STEM fields to see whether mismatch applies there as well. You will recall (if not, refresh your memory here and the posts linked there) that Sander has argued in a number of articles that racial preferences have actually tended to reduce the number of black lawyers by placing black law students in institutions where their qualifications are significantly lower than their non-preferentially admitted peers and where as a result they cluster at the bottom of their classes, fail to finish law school, and fail the bar exam in highly disproportionate numbers.

Although his research is still preliminary, Sander is finding similar patterns among minorities in STEM. Drawing on data regarding graduation rates at the University of Michigan, for example, Sander found (I’m quoting InsideHigherEd here)

that for black students who entered Michigan in 1999, 73 percent who were given “no preference” graduated in four years compared with 70 percent of white students with the same credentials. But for black students who were given “large preference,” just 21 percent graduated in four years....

Citing unpublished data from the [University of California] system, Sander noted that black and Latino students have far greater success rates in science when they enroll in the California’s less selective campuses. Minority students were about half as likely to earn bachelor’s degrees in science at Berkeley or UCLA, for instance, as they were to earn science degrees from five of the of the other six campuses in the system, according to Sander’s study of those entering between 1998 and 2000.

argued that the expert list lacked balance. “There are many people who are not part of this panel who would not agree that mismatch does occur,” Mr. Yaki said.

“Ultimately,” he said, “what we are talking about here is the potentiality of human beings.” How well people will end up doing in a given field cannot be accurately measured just by the grades and test scores on their college applications, he argued.

Another common but, in my view, questionable assertion came from Robin Willner, vice president for Global Community Initiatives (and other high-sounding matters) at IBM.

In a blunt assessment, Willner said IBM would be headed for big trouble if colleges fail to produce a diverse pool of talent with knowledge of the needs and desires of a growing global consumer base.

“IBM would go into the toilet immediately,” she said, “because we won’t be able to make products for our customers.” [Quoted from InsideHigherEd]

Finally, let me note in passing (I’ll come back to it later) a new critique of Sander’s “mismatch” theory. Prof. Jesse Rothstein of Princeton (last encountered here) and Albert Yoon of the University of Toronto argue, in a study I have not yet read, appears to support some of Sander’s findings and dispute others.

The new analysis — with the sort of detail normally used by critics of affirmative action — backs Sander’s claims on the substantially different qualifications, on average, between black and white law school applicants. And it also finds gaps in performance in law school.

But the new research — using simulations of admissions without affirmative action — finds that race-neutral policies wouldn’t send black students to law schools where they would do better. Rather there would be a huge falloff in black law enrollments — far more than might be counteracted by some black students doing better on bar exams. The elimination of race-based admissions policies, the authors write, would lead to a 63 percent decline in black matriculants at all law schools and a 90 percent decline at elite law schools, the paper says. Even if some positive impact took place in the experience of black students who did enroll, there would be at least a 50 percent reduction in the production of black lawyers, they write.

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Bob Herbert of the New York Times is scared, and he thinks we too should be very afraid.

While watching the Sarah Palin interview with Charlie Gibson Thursday night, and the coverage of the Palin phenomenon in general, I’ve gotten the scary feeling, for the first time in my life, that dimwittedness is not just on the march in the U.S., but that it might actually prevail.

An Arctic blast of action has swept into the 2008 race, making thinking passé. We don’t really need to hurt our brains studying the world; we just need the world to know we’re capable of bringing a world of hurt to the world if the world continues to be hell-bent on misbehaving.

Oh, wait....

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Have I mentioned lately that much of the mainstream press is not only biased but also incompetent?

A few days ago I did criticize an article in the New York Times for claiming that

[a]t the Democratic convention in Denver, the party’s platform was indeed expanded to embrace anti-abortion views.

Now comes the Christian Science Monitor, stating in an article yesterday that

[t]his year, Democrats for the first time wrote language into their platform to reduce the number of unintended pregnancies through care and education efforts – while still staunchly supporting Roe v. Wade.

Our goal is to make abortion less necessary and more rare, not more difficult and more dangerous. We support contraceptive research, family planning, comprehensive family life education, and policies that support healthy childbearing. For four years in a row, we have increased support for family planning. The abortion rate is dropping. Now we must continue to support efforts to reduce unintended pregnancies, and we call on all Americans to take personal responsibility to meet this important goal.

Our goal is to make abortion less necessary and more rare, not more difficult and more dangerous. We support contraceptive research, family planning, comprehensive family life education, and policies that support healthy childbearing. The abortion rate is dropping. Now we must continue to support efforts to reduce unintended pregnancies, and we call on all Americans to take personal responsibility to meet this important goal.

We will defend the dignity of all Americans against those who would undermine it. Because we believe in the privacy and equality of women, we stand proudly for a woman's right to choose, consistent with Roe v. Wade, and regardless of her ability to pay. We stand firmly against Republican efforts to undermine that right. At the same time, we strongly support family planning and adoption incentives. Abortion should be safe, legal, and rare

I realize that whole large swaths of the mainstream really wants to believe (or at least to have its readers believe) that Obama represents something new and fresh from the Democrats, that he's "reaching out," etc. But wanting to believe something doesn't make it true.

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[NOTE: This post has been Updated ... again and again]

I’ve just had a very bad experience, and the worst part of it is that I asked for it. Twice. Last night I watched MSNBC’s Chris Matthews spend an entire hour on Hardball last night defending Obama’s innocence of any innuendo in his “lipstick” remark and attacking McCain and the Republicans for making an issue of it. And, obviously not having learned my lesson, this morning I watched the same thing for an hour or so as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough and Democratic guests did the same thing (with the notable exception of Mort Zuckerman of the New York Daily News and US News and World Report) on Morning Joe.

Too bad. I used to like Joe. Now it’s as though the whole of MSNBC is reading from Keith Olbermann’s script. Maybe from now on we should start referring to MoveOn.NBC. Even Chuck Todd, the normally sensible NBC polls and numbers guy, was totally out of it. He said Obama couldn’t possibly have been thinking of Palin when he made his lipstick remark because his campaign had decided to ignore Palin. Really? Does the head NBC political guy really not, say, read Politico? Jim VanDeHei and Mike Allen reported there that “Obama, Dems sharpen personal attacks on Palin.”

Barack Obama and his Democratic allies are intensifying their attacks on Sarah Palin, as her sustained and surprising central role in this race is upending Obama’s strategy and often overshadowing McCain.

Democratic Congressman Russ Carnahan on Tuesday — introducing Joe Biden at a campaign event — ripped into Palin’s record and punctuated it with this snarky jab. “There’s no way you can dress up that record, even with a lot of lipstick,” he said. Later in the day, Obama used a variation of the lipstick line, though he was clearly talking about the McCain-Palin reform rhetoric. "You can put lipstick on a pig," he said. "It's still a pig."

Former New York Mayor Ed Koch, as part of his endorsement of Obama, said Palin “scares the hell out of me.” And Obama hit Palin in nearly a dozen different press releases — one day after drawing laughs at a campaign stop by calling her a “moose shooter.”
....
The Obama campaign is calculating that it must reckon with Palin and the big public boost she has provided McCain in the past week. When Palin was first named, the Obama staff attacked, then he pulled back. Now, reflecting the threat posed by Palin, Obama is taking the unusual route of attacking the opposition’s No. 2, a job that would more typically be left to Biden, who focused more on McCain and President Bush

Tennessee Rep. Steve Cohen riled Republicans Wednesday after he compared Barack Obama to Jesus Christ and suggested Sarah Palin is akin to Pontius Pilate.

The Tennessee Democrat, who supports Obama, was on the House floor giving a one-minute speech when he offered the comparisons.

“If you want change, you want the Democratic Party,” Cohen said. “Barack Obama was a community organizer like Jesus, who our minister prayed about. Pontius Pilate was a governor.”

Imagine, if you can, the volcanic uproar that would have come from the Obama camp if Republican operatives had likened McCain to Jesus and Obama, or Biden, to his murderer. Or, while you’re imagining, imagine if, say, Rush Limbaugh or Sean Hannity, calling Obama’s opposition to drilling in ANWR and elsewhere part and parcel of his socialistic environmentalism, had said something like, “Obama is a classic watermelon man: green on the outside; red on the inside.” Or if McCain, criticizing Obama’s billion dollars in earmarks, had said something like, “For. Sen. Obama to criticize Gov. Palin on earmarks is a classic case of the pot calling the kettle black (especially because she Gov. Palin's record on earmarks is a shiny copper kettle).”

Your imagination may vary, but I don’t think the responses of the Obamanuts would have been mild. Just as they weren’t mild, if you recall, when Linda Ramirez-Sliwinsk, a suburban Illinois Obama delegate, was thrown under the bus and forced to resign when she innocently told two neighbor children “to quit playing in the tree like monkeys.” The kids were black, and “monkeys” was taken to be a racial slur. If Obama had uttered his lipstick remark as a delegate to his convention instead of as its nominee, presumably he too would have been forced to stay home.

I have watched the tape of Obama’s lipstick/pig /stinking fish comment several times, and I think it’s clear beyond cavil (unless, of course, you’re an MSNBC commentator) that Obama knew perfectly well what he was saying and how it would be interpreted. He paused after the first part — “You can put lipstick on a pig...” — and waited for the expected laughter and applause before giving the punch line, “but it’ll still be a pig.” The laughter and applause was clearly at the Palin reference, not the inherent humor of the well-worn and well-known line.

The defense of Obama and his MSNBC flacks — that he and even McCain had used that expression several times before Palin — is so irrelevant as to be risible. Those occasions were all before Gov. Palin in effect trademarked all political references to lipstick and made it the best known joke in the country for the six days before Obama tripped over it.

So, no, unless Obama is dumber than a barnyard post, which he isn’t, I don’t think there’s even a remote possibility that he was doing anything other making the equivalent of a bad, off color joke at Gov. Palin’s expense. That doesn’t mean he was calling her a pig, and I think the Republicans have overreacted by charging that’s what he did. But neither do I think his expression was “innocent,” and I think he lacks the capacity to admit a mistake or apologize.

Those are not admirable qualities in a would-be leader.

UPDATE

Discussing what he superciliously calls “the silly lipstick flap,” the Washington Post media writer, Howard Kurtz, asks:

Does anyone seriously believe that Barack Obama was calling Sarah Palin a pig? What about the fact that McCain has used “lipstick on a pig” before?

For my part, as I’ve said, I don’t believe anyone could “seriously believe” what Kurtz appears to believe, which is that Obama’s use of the offending expression was what he approvingly quotes Obama saying it was: “an innocent expression.” He was trying to crack humor at her expense, and it blew up in his face.

But let’s move on (if you’ll pardon the expression) and deconstruct what SLATE calls this “porcine proverb” a bit to tease out any hidden meanings that may lurk beneath the surface. What Gov. Palin said, now famously, is that the only difference between a soccer mom and a pit bull is ... lipstick. But according to Obama and his riposte with the porcine proverb, adding lipstick doesn’t really change anything. So, perhaps the deep, inner meaning of Obama’s comment was that all soccer hockey moms are essentially pit bulls.

I suspect Gov. Palin might take that as a compliment.

UPDATE II

Tom Bevan of RealClearPolitics gets this exactly right, i.e., he said what I said.

I give Obama credit for being a smart guy and, after nineteen grueling months on the trail, also being well versed in choosing his words carefully and understanding their meaning - either real or implied. My sense is he knew what he was doing when he chose that particular phrase - and the reaction of the crowd indicated they knew what Obama was saying as well. That said, it stretches credulity to jump to the conclusion and/or the accusation that he was directly calling Sarah Palin a pig. Of course he wasn’t.

Obama probably thought it was a clever play on words to take Palin’s signature line and turn it on its head. Irrespective of what he might have been trying to do, however, the words he said are the words he said....

Imagine for a moment if John McCain had used a similar shopworn phrase in reference to Barack Obama’s policies. Suppose he said, “Obama says he’s going to cut your taxes but he’s really going to raise them. My friends, it’s time for some straight talk about taxes, it’s time to call a spade a spade.”

Do you think for a second the Joe Kleins, Andrew Sullivans, and Josh Marshalls of the world wouldn’t scream from the rooftops that McCain had used a racial slur against Obama? Of course they would - and they’d scoff at the notion that McCain was somehow unaware of how that phrase would be interpreted. Anyone who tried to argue that McCain was simply using a well known phrase that predated the current presidential race would be tagged as an apologist for racism. Even if McCain hadn’t meant it that way, it wouldn’t matter.

And now here’s Susan Sarandon, reading from the same script:

SARANDON: Jesus was a community organizer and Pontius Pilate was a governor. That's all I have to say!

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The Journal of the American Medical Association has an article summarizing a new study lauding the benefits of “diversity” in medical association.

The study set out “[t]o determine whether student body racial and ethnic diversity is associated with diversity-related outcomes among US medical students.” And — you will no doubt find this shocking — the authors did find that student body racial and ethnic diversity is associated with a “diversity-related outcome.”

What outcome was that, you ask? It’s a real shocker: white students at schools with more “diversity” rate themselves better able to care for “diverse” patients than white students at less “diverse” schools, at least when and if their school emphasizes the importance of caring for diverse patients.

Really. Here’s the results summary from the article:

White students within the highest quintile for student body racial and ethnic diversity, measured by the proportion of underrepresented minority (URM) students, were more likely to rate themselves as highly prepared to care for minority populations than those in the lowest diversity quintile (61.1% vs 53.9%, respectively; P <.001; adjusted odds ratio [OR], 1.33; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.13-1.57). This association was strongest in schools in which students perceived a positive climate for interracial interaction. White students in the highest URM quintile were also more likely to have strong attitudes endorsing equitable access to care (54.8% vs 44.2%, respectively; P < 001; adjusted OR, 1.42; 95% CI, 1.15-1.74).

Student body URM proportions were not associated with white or nonwhite students' plans to practice in underserved communities, although URM students were substantially more likely than white or nonwhite/non-URM students to plan to serve the underserved (48.7% vs 18.8% vs 16.2%, respectively; P <.001).

In his trademark fair and balances manner, Peter Schmidt of the Chronicle of Higher Education also implicitly raises a nunber of questions in his article about the study today. The authors acknowledge, he writes, “that the outcomes observed in the study may have not been the result of diversity on campuses.”

“It is possible that students more interested in diverse and underserved populations chose schools with greater student body diversity and that these pre-existing attitudes rather than the medical school experience accounted for the observed outcomes,” the article says. “It is also possible that schools that recruit a diverse student body are committed to improving diversity-related outcomes and that this type of school commitment rather than diversity per se accounted for our findings.”

Noting that their study was unable to measure the racial and ethnic composition of the patient population to which students were exposed, the researchers said it is also possible that those medical schools with the most diverse student bodies also serve the most diverse patient populations, and that exposure to patient diversity is what brought about the educational outcomes reported.

In an interview on Tuesday, Dr. [Somnath] Saha [lead researcher and associate professor of medicine at the Oregon Health and Science University] said the study’s findings correlating positive educational outcomes with medical schools’ promotion of interracial understanding led him to believe that such outcomes were the result of something occurring at the schools, independent of students’ backgrounds. “How is this operating? We need more work to figure it out,” he said. “We only have the 30,000-foot view here.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:23 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Speaking in Virginia Beach last week, Sen. Joe Biden charged that Republicans

believe prosperity depends on the Federal Government providing national defense and raising money for that purpose only....What happens in your back yard is your problem and your problem alone.

By contrast, Joe Biden obviously believes that the federal government, at least when it’s under the control of the Democrats, can manage your back yard better than you can.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:07 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The Old (Young) Biden vs. The New (Old) Biden I has been Updated.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 8:06 AM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Today it was New York Governor David Patterson’s turn to enter the sweepstakes for the most inane sighting of racism in criticism of Obama.

New York Gov. David Paterson said Tuesday that there were racial overtones in the Republican presidential ticket’s criticism of Democrat Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer.

“There are overtones of potential racial coding in the campaign,” Paterson said at an event in New York City.
Paterson said that while Republican candidates John McCain and Sarah Palin haven’t directly talked about race, it’s strongly implied in comments Alaska Gov. Palin and others have made about Obama....

“The Republican party is too smart to call Barack Obama ‘black’ in a sense that it would be a negative,” Paterson said. “But you can take something about his life, which I noticed they did at the Republican convention. A ‘community organizer,’ they kept saying it, they kept laughing, like what does this mean?

The McCain campaign was quick to respond.

... Peter Feldman, a spokesman for Mr. McCain and his running mate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, called Mr. Paterson’s remarks “disappointing.”

He said that Mr. Paterson was “playing the race card” by suggesting that Ms. Palin’s comments about Mr. Obama’s career as a community organizer were a kind of coded racial appeal.

“This is a tactic that the Obama campaign has used before, and which McCain campaign manager Rick Davis correctly called ‘divisive, shameful, and wrong,’ ” Mr. Feldman told The News.

He continued:

Governor Palin’s remarks about Barack Obama’s work as a community organizer was in response to the Obama campaign’s belittling of her executive experience. There is certainly a place for community activism, as demonstrated by Sarah Palin’s own record of civic involvement. But Barack Obama’s role as a community organizer pales in comparison to Governor Palin’s demonstrated experience.

Mr. Feldman added that Mr. Paterson’s comments were “a sure sign of a flailing campaign that is bordering on desperation.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:25 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

At 7:00 A.M this morning Victor Davis Hanson made a perspicacious prediction:

Expect Obama/Biden to get a little desperate and resort to more and more negative campaigning....

In this cycle of the see-saw race, expect Obama to take a risk and go really negative as he falls into a gripey, cranky mode.

First, as reported by CBS, here’s Joe Biden in Columbia, Missouri, this morning:

I hear all this talk about how the Republicans are going to work in dealing with parents who have both the joy, because there's joy to it as well, the joy and the difficulty of raising a child who has a developmental disability, who were born with a birth defect. Well guess what folks? If you care about it, why don't you support stem cell research?

Was Joe Biden referring to Sarah Palin, a mother of a child with Down syndrome, when he made this comment?

Obama, not to be outdone in the negative department, joined the race to the bottom in Lebanon, Virginia. Reports Politico:

Obama poked fun of McCain and Palin’s new “change” mantra.

“You can put lipstick on a pig,” he said as the crowd cheered. “It’s still a pig.”

The crowd apparently took the “lipstick” line as a reference to Palin, who described the difference between a hockey mom and a pit bull in a single word: “lipstick.”

UPDATE

For much more on this slime/gaffe, including the reference to McCain as an “old fish,” which I didn’t quote above because I missed the connection, see InstaPundit’s discussion and links here.

UPDATE II

Since I am one of the guilty ones Victor Davis Hanson mentions here, I will print his persuasive take on Obama’s fishy pig-latin:

In all the furor over the Obama “pig” quote, commentators forgot to examine his entire attack:

“You can put lipstick on a pig. “It’s still a pig.”

“You can wrap an old fish in a piece of paper called change. It’s still gonna stink.”

When read in the entire context you can see what he seems to mean with his dual animate male/female references and why he probably evoked two metaphors: most would think that Obama is talking about both on the ticket and his anger how each has expropriated his change motif.

So in that sense he appears both to insult the 72-year old McCain as the “old fish” that is still going to “stink”, and to refer to Palin, who had famously evoked the metaphor of lipstick in a nationally televised address, as still the pig despite the lipstick.

The fact that he used two metaphors to attack the two, and used expressions referring both to age and Palin’s recent use of “lipstick” don’t seem to be accidents and that’s why the cooing crowd got the old fish=McCain;lipsticked pig=Palin immediately.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:10 PM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It is not news that Clarence Thomas opposes affirmative action, but he does seem to be even more outspoken about it now.

WASHINGTON (AP) - Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas said Tuesday that African-Americans are better served by colorblind programs than affirmative action.

Thomas, addressing leaders of historically black colleges, said affirmative action “has become this mantra and there almost has become this secular religiosity about it. I think it almost trumps thinking.”

“My suggestion would be to stop the buzz words and to focus more on the practical effect of what we’re doing,” he said Tuesday.

“I can tell you when you have fudge words, it leaves a lot of room for mischief,” he said. “People have a tendency to read their personal opinions into fudge words. You want, when it comes to the issue of race, absolute words.”

ADDENDUM

Regarding “absolute words” vs. “fudge words,” consider the following dramatic finding from a recent Rasmussen survey:

During his acceptance speech last night at the Republican National Convention in Minnesota, John McCain told the audience, “We believe in a strong defense, work, faith, service, a culture of life, personal responsibility, the rule of law, and judges who dispense justice impartially and don't legislate from the bench.” Most American voters (60%) agree and say the Supreme Court should make decisions based on what is written in the constitution, while 30% say rulings should be guided [by] the judge’s sense of fairness and justice. The number who agree with McCain is up from 55% in August.

While 82% of voters who support McCain believe the justices should rule on what is in the Constitution, just 29% of Barack Obama’s supporters agree. Just 11% of McCain supporters say judges should rule based on the judge’s sense of fairness, while nearly half (49%) of Obama supporters agree.

In explaining his vote against Roberts, Obama opined that deciding the “truly difficult” cases requires resort to “one’s deepest values, one’s core concerns, one’s broader perspectives on how the world works, and the depth and breadth of one’s empathy.” In short, “the critical ingredient is supplied by what is in the judge’s heart.... We need somebody who’s got the heart, the empathy, to recognize what it’s like to be a young teenage mom, the empathy to understand what it’s like to be poor or African-American or gay or disabled or old — and that’s the criterion by which I’ll be selecting my judges.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 6:46 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

An Irish-Catholic politician, born in Scranton, Pa., blessed with the gift of gab, an influential leader of his party with a very progressive record but someone with a strong appeal to Reagan Democrats, union members, blue collar workers.... You might think I’m describing Joe Biden — selected as Obama’s VP, according to the Los Angeles Times and others, because of his “potential appeal to white, blue-collar Democrats” — but I’m not. I was actually describing someone with whom it is quite useful to compare both the old (young) and the new (old) Biden: Bob Casey, the former governor of Pennsylvania.

Here is an affectionate description of Casey written by the liberal journalist Nat Hentoff in The New Republic shortly after Casey’s death in 2000:

As governor of Pennsylvania from 1987 to 1994, Casey created model school-based child-care programs that offered infants and preschoolers--including poor children--full-day services and before- and after-school programs. That way, teenage parents could stay in school and poor adults could go to work knowing their children were safe. He lobbied unsuccessfully for universal health care in his state, but, failing that, as The New York Times reported in its May 31 obituary, “he did sign a bill providing health insurance for children whose families were too poor to pay for it but whose incomes were too high to be eligible for public assistance.” Before breast cancer became a political cliche, Casey invested $1 million in awareness and screening for the disease and required HMOs to pay for annual mammograms for women over 40. Harvard University pediatrician T. Berry Brazelton described Casey’s multidimensional health care programs for women and children as “a model for the rest of the country.”

The son of a coal-miner-turned-lawyer, Casey believed in the party of Franklin D. Roosevelt, and he doggedly rebuilt it in Pennsylvania....

The Democratic Party, writes Hentoff, treated Casey “with disdain.”

As the 1992 Democratic Convention in New York approached, Casey told me he expected, in light of his policy accomplishments and political loyalty, to be a speaker, maybe even the keynote speaker. But he wasn't the keynote speaker. The honor of nominating Clinton went to New York Governor Mario Cuomo, who ignited the crowd by declaring, "Bill Clinton believes, as we all here do, in the first principle of our Democratic commitment: the politics of inclusion."

Casey was not asked to speak. In fact, he and his Pennsylvania delegation were exiled to the farthest reaches of Madison Square Garden — because Casey was pro-life. It didn't matter that, under his leadership, state contracts to minority- and women-owned firms had increased more than 1,500 percent in five years, or that he had appointed more female Cabinet members than any Democratic governor in the country, or that he had appointed the first black woman ever to sit on a state Supreme Court. Ron Brown, chief convention organizer and the Democratic Party's symbol of minority inclusion, told Casey, "Your views are out of line with those of most Americans."

Casey had the misfortune of being present during a great shift in the Democratic Party. A mere six years earlier, on September 26, 1986, then-Governor Bill Clinton of Arkansas had assured the head of his state’s chapter of the National Right to Life Committee, “I am opposed to abortion and to government funding of abortion.” But, by the early ‘90s, the Democrats, seeking the votes of upper-middle-class Republican women, were de-emphasizing economic protection and stressing cultural libertarianism. And, just to make sure everyone got the message, Democratic strategists invited Kathy Taylor, a pro-choice Pennsylvania Republican who had helped defeat Casey’s progressive tax reforms, to the New York convention. She appeared onstage pledging the National Abortion Rights Action League’s allegiance to the Clinton-Gore team. Then DNC officials sent Taylor, with a camera crew in tow, to find Casey in “Outer Mongolia,” as he put it, to further humiliate him. Tipped off, he declined the national exposure. Shortly before Casey left the convention, Al Gore called him to apologize for any embarrassment. The governor told me dryly that he doubted Gore was speaking from the heart.

.... Casey's politics were simple, but they were so heretical that in the language of ’90s American politics they quite literally didn't have a name. And so last week, in a final slap, the Washington Post, New York Times, and CNN obituaries identified the former governor as a “conservative Democrat.”

James Carville worked on Casey’s 1986 and 1990 reelection campaigns. In a June 1 interview with National Review Online, Carville said of his former boss: “You have no idea what a deep sense of probity he had.... He was just the kind of person that made the whole Washington establishment completely uncomfortable.... They could never understand him.” Carville also called his former partner, Begala, ... “a Casey protégé.” I wonder how they felt, and what they did, while Casey was being humiliated in 1992. As Bob Casey was being driven from the Democratic Party because he refused to sacrifice his beliefs, they ascended further up the party ladder, going to work for a politician who didn’t have such problems. And, when Casey died, President Clinton said he admired the governor’s “commitment to principle.”

He has had to explain his evolving position a number of times, and has done so with varying degrees of success. Here is a typical attempt, from a Meet The Press appearance on April 29, 2007:

Q: You have changed your position on abortion. When you came to the Senate, you believed that Roe v. Wade was not correctly decided and that you also believed the right of abortion was not secured by the Constitution. Why did you change your mind?

A: Well, I was 29 years old when I came to the US Senate, and I have learned a lot. Look, I’m a practicing Catholic, and it is the biggest dilemma for me in terms of comporting my religious and cultural views with my political responsibility.

Q: Do you believe that life begins at conception?

A: I am prepared to accept my church’s view. I think it’s a tough one. I have to accept that on faith. That’s why the late-term abortion ban, where there’s clearly viability.

Q: You supported the ban on partial-birth abortions or late-term abortions.

A: I did and I do.

Q. And the Supreme Court came and basically upheld that ban, and you criticized the Supreme Court. [JSR: The case in question was Gonzales v. Carhart, decided April 18, 2007]

A: They upheld the ban, and then they engaged in what we lawyers call dicta that is frightening. You had an intellectually dishonest rationale for an honest justification for upholding the ban. I know this is going to sound arcane--they blurred the distinction between the government’s role in being involved in the first day and the ninth month. They became paternalistic, talking about the court could consider the impact on the mother and keeping her from making a mistake. This is all code for saying, “Here we come to undo Roe v. Wade.” What they did is not so much the decision, the actual outcome of the decision, it’s what attended the decision that portends for a real hard move on the court to undo the right of privacy. That’s what I’m criticizing about the court’s decision.

In Promises to Keep, a campaign autobiography written for his current run for president (and, as it turned out, now for vice president), Biden described his predicament as follows (pp. 104-105):

I remember vividly the first time, in 1973, I had to go to the floor to vote on abortion. A fellow Senator asked how I would vote. “My position is that I am personally opposed to abortion, but I don’t think I have a right to impose my [view] on the rest of society. I’ve thought a lot about it, and my position probably doesn’t please anyone. I think the government should stay out completely. I will not vote to overturn the Court’s decision. I will not vote to curtail a woman’s right to choose abortion. But I will also not vote to use federal funds to fund abortion.”

I’ve stuck to my middle-of-the-road position on abortion for more than 30 years. I still vote against partial birth abortion and federal funding, and I’d like to make it easier for scared young mothers to choose not to have an abortion, but I will also vote against a constitutional amendment that strips a woman of her right to make her own choice.

To increase funding for the vigorous enforcement of a prohibition against taking minors across State lines in circumvention of laws requiring the involvement of parents in abortion decisions consistent with the Child Custody Protection Act

I’ve discussed the “I’m personally opposed, but...” rationale offered by Biden and other pro-choice Catholic Democrats several times, at length and, I hope, depth — here, here, and here — and I urge you to read (or better yet, re-read) those posts now. Here’s a small taste (more like distaste) of my view of that argument from the most recent of those posts, back in 2004:

I have already said quite a bit ... about the tension — and I believe ultimate incoherence — of liberal Catholics’ attempt to have their cake and eat it too on the abortion question, an attempt that rests on the device of stressing their “personal” opposition but their refusal, ostensibly because of their respect for the wall of separation between church and state, to impose their personal religious belief on others. Now Kerry, speaking last weekend to editors in Dubuque, joins Cuomo and Califano with, characteristically, a rather blunt, unsubtle version of that argument that goes farther than they did, affirming that he believes life begins at conception.

I oppose abortion, personally. I don’t like abortion. I believe life does begin at conception. But I can’t take my Catholic belief, my article of faith, and legislate it on a Protestant or a Jew or an atheist . . . who doesn’t share it. We have separation of church and state in the United States of America.

Astute readers will have noticed that I haven’t myself taken any position on abortion itself. It is a wrenching issue, and I believe reasonable, principled people can disagree about it. I am also not unsympathetic to the bind pro-abortion Catholics find themselves in. Still, I believe that trumpeting both “personal” opposition but active political support is an unsuccessful, pusillanimous, straddling cop-out, reminiscent as I argued in my earlier posts of Stephen A. Douglas’s “personal” opposition to slavery while working as hard as he could politically to enable its expansion. Can you imagine Cuomo/Califano/Kerry saying they “personally” don’t like slavery, would never themselves own a slave, but don’t feel they have the right to legislate that belief “on” an actual or would-be slaveholder?

I’m a practicing Catholic, and it is the biggest dilemma for me in terms of comporting my religious and cultural views with my political responsibility.

That compromise, if that’s what it was, worked, and now Biden has ascended to the pinnacle of his party, or only one step (or, possibly later, one heartbeat) away from the pinnacle. So now the question is, will this work politically for the party? That is, can a functionally pro-choice Irish Catholic Democrat successfully appeal to Catholic, blue collar voters?

So far, apparently not. The most recent Zogby poll finds McCain-Palin leading Obama-Biden by just under 4%, and according to John Zogby “[t]he striking thing here in this poll is that McCain has pulled ahead among Catholics by double-digits.”

That finding must have caused a shock in the Obama campaign. I wonder if that’s why an article appeared in the New York Times yesterday under the headline, “As a Matter of Faith, Biden Says Life Begins at Conception.” It begins:

WASHINGTON — Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr., the Democratic nominee for vice president, departed Sunday from party doctrine on abortion rights, declaring that as a Catholic, he believes life begins at conception. But the Delaware senator added that he would not impose his personal views on others, and had indeed voted against curtailing abortion rights and against criminalizing abortion.

The position Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. gave Sunday differs from party doctrine.

While Mr. Biden’s views may not be new to Democrats in his circle, his comments, in an interview on “Meet the Press” on NBC, came at a time when his party is confronted with a new face: Gov. Sarah Palin, the Republican vice-presidential nominee, whose anti-abortion stance and decision to give birth just five months ago to a baby with Down syndrome have revved up the conservative base of her party.

In the interview Sunday, Mr. Biden tried to walk the line between the staunch abortion-rights advocates in his party and his own religious beliefs. While he said he did not often talk about his faith, he said of those who disagree with him: “They believe in their faith and they believe in human life, and they have differing views as to when life — I’m prepared as a matter of faith to accept that life begins at the moment of conception.”

There were two other items in this Times story that I found odd. First, in acknowledging that his answer to Rick Warren’s question about when life begins — “above my pay grade,” he had said — “was a little too flip,” Obama went on to say:

“All I meant to communicate was that I don’t presume to be able to answer these kinds of theological questions.

“What I do know is that abortion is a moral issue,” Mr. Obama continued, “that it’s one that families struggle with all the time, and that in wrestling with those issues, I don’t think that the government criminalizing the choices that families make is the best answer for reducing abortions. I think the better answer — and this was reflected in the Democratic platform — is to figure out, how do we make sure that young mothers, or women who have a pregnancy that’s unexpected or difficult, have the kind of support they need to make a whole range of choices, including adoption and keeping the child.”

Second, there may be another example of the Times itself simply serving as an Obama echo chamber. Consider this sentence, which follows the above passage:

At the Democratic convention in Denver, the party’s platform was indeed expanded to embrace anti-abortion views.

The Democratic Party strongly and unequivocally supports Roe v. Wade and a woman’s right to choose a safe and legal abortion, regardless of ability to pay, and we oppose any and all efforts to weaken or undermine that right.

The Democratic Party also strongly supports access to comprehensive affordable family planning services and age-appropriate sex education which empower people to make informed choices and live healthy lives. We also recognize that such health care and education help reduce the number of unintended pregnancies and thereby also reduce the need for abortions.

The Democratic Party also strongly supports a woman’s decision to have a child by ensuring access to and availability of programs for pre- and post-natal health care, parenting skills, income support, and caring adoption programs.

I wonder if anyone has told Joe Biden that the Platform he’s running on advocates what he claims to oppose — government funding of abortions.

[The more astute among you will have noticed a “I” following the title of this post. Yes, that does indeed imply there will be a “II” coming along presently, featuring a similar conflict between the old (young) and new (old) Bidens.]

UPDATE

The Catholic Church, speaking through Cardinal Justin Rigali of Philadelphia, chairman of the U.S. bishops' Committee on Pro-Life Activities, and Bishop William Lori of Bridgeport, Conn., chairman of the bishops' Committee on Doctrine, was not pleased with Sen. Biden’s foray into theology.

The statement from Cardinal Justin Rigali and Bishop William Lori said Biden, who appeared Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” is the latest case of the U.S. Catholic hierarchy correcting a Catholic politician.

Asked on the program about when life begins, Biden said: “Look, I know when it begins for me. It’s a personal and private issue. For me, as a Roman Catholic, I am prepared to accept the teachings in my church.”

He added that while he believes life begins “at the moment of conception,” it would inappropriate to impose that view on others in a pluralistic society.

The bishops said Biden was right to say human life begins at conception. But the church “does not teach this as matter of faith; it acknowledges it as a matter of objective fact,” they said.

“Protection of innocent human life is not an imposition of personal religious conviction but a demand of justice,” they added.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:42 AM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Obama continues to complain that Republicans will try to make voters afraid of him with false and even ridiculous descriptions and accusations. Thus at a recent campaign appearance in Duryea, PA:

“I know that I’m not your typical presidential candidate,” Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., told executives and employees of the Schott glass company Friday afternoon, “and I just want to be honest with you. I know that.”

“And I know that the temptation is to say, ‘You know what? …The guy hasn’t been there that long in Washington.,’ You know, ‘he’s got funny name,’ You know, ‘we’re not sure about him,’” Obama continued. “And that’s what the Republicans, when they say, ‘This isn’t about issues, it’s about personalities,’ what they’re really saying is, ‘We’re going to try to scare people about Barack. So we’re going to say that you know, maybe he’s got Muslim connections or we’re going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals or he’s not patriotic.’

“Just making stuff up,” Obama said, “or that he never’s gotten anything done even though over the last 20 years I’ve given health care to kids who didn’t have it.”

Of course, Davis was not saying the election would be about “personalities.” As ABC News reporter Jake Tapper in his report of Obama’s remarks, Davis had told the Washington Post that “this election is not about issues, this election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”

Even that summary of Davis’s remarks is not quite clear, however, as this exchange between Davis and Chris Wallace yesterday on Fox News Sunday makes clear.

WALLACE: And let’s put [Davis’s remark] up on the screen again. “This election is not about issues. This election is about a composite view of what people take away from these candidates.”
....
WALLACE: Rick, do you want to focus on personality or a composite view of the candidates, not issues, because of the fact, for instance, that we’ve got 6.1 percent unemployment, the highest in five years?

DAVIS: No, Chris. And what you didn’t — what you didn’t show on the screen was the next sentence, which is the composite view is made up of people’s values. It’s made up of their opinions. It’s made up of their judgment and their principles.
And so then I let — then the next sentence says, “And of course, issues will play an important role in people’s final decision.”

Obama has tried to inoculate himself against expected Republican attacks. He has repeatedly criticized a comment by McCain’s campaign manager, Rick Davis, who said last week that the election “is not about issues” but instead is about the candidates’ personalities - “their values, their character, their opinions, their principles.”

At a Scranton, Pa., stop on Friday, Obama said, “When they say this isn’t about issues, it’s about personalities, what they’re really saying is, ‘We’re going to try to scare people about Barack. So we’re going to say that, you know, maybe he’s got Muslim connections, or we’re going to say that, you know, he hangs out with radicals, or he’s not patriotic.’”

Obama first attended a Catholic school for almost three years. However, his mother registered him in the school as a Muslim. As such, he was required to spending time each week praying with Muslim students and studying the Koran.

In the wake of the controversy over Obama’s Muslim upbringing, The Los Angeles Times sent a reporter to Jakarta to ferret out the truth.

The Times report, published on March 16, 2008, revealed:

• A close boyhood friend of Obama, Zulfin Adi, said Obama “was a Muslim. He went to the mosque.”

• Obama’s first-grade teacher at a Catholic school, Israella Dharmawan, said: “Barry (Barack’s nickname) was Muslim. He was registered as a Muslim because his father was Muslim.”

• In the third grade, Obama transferred to a public school, where he was also registered as a Muslim. At the school, Muslim students attended weekly religion lessons about Islam....

Earlier this year, Obama spokesman Robert Gibbs claimed: “Senator Obama has never been a Muslim, was not raised a Muslim, and is a committed Christian.”
....
After The Los Angeles Times conducted its own investigation, Gibbs amended his previous statement on behalf of Obama, telling the Times: “Obama has never been a practicing Muslim,” the key word being “practicing.”

More recently another possible connection emerged from a TV interview with Percy Sutton, the former Manhattan Borough President, who revealed that he was asked to write a recommendation for the young Obama by Khalid al-Mansour, whom Newsmax describes as “a key adviser to a Saudi billionaire who had mentored the founding members of the Black Panthers.”

I don’t know whether these alleged Muslim connections are true or whether, if true, they amount to anything or not. Nor do I think it makes any sense to assert that Obama “is not patriotic,” as he continually warns Republicans will do. (Has anyone accused Obama of being unpatriotic? If so, please send cites.) But Obama goes further, asserting angrily that Republicans will also charge that he “hangs out with radicals.”

Now that, of course, is in fact true, unless you don’t regard Bill Ayers, Father Pfleger, and Rev. Wright as radicals, although it’s also true that he has tried to distance himself from these connections recently.

Still, the perfidy of those evil Republicans can hardly be overstated. Pretty soon they’ll probably stoop so low as to start accusing Obama of being a liberal.

UPDATE

Glenn Reynolds quotes an emailer who makes the above point clearly and concisely:

... [Obama] keeps saying things like:

My opponents say I'm Muslim, I'm friendly with terrorists, I attended some bizarre church for decades.

Trouble is, though A is false, B and C are arguably true (B probably, C certainly true). Claim A is used to assimilate the false and irresponsible rumor with (much more important) questions that Obama has never come clean about.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 10:23 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Sometimes “diversity” doublespeak is so extreme it’s a wonder the diversiphiles don’t choke on their words. They would be ashamed and embarrassed, I think, if they realized what they were saying, but of course they aren’t because they don’t.

A good example is a recent decision by the University of Virginia to limit the housing choices available to incoming first year students, a decision dictated by the demands of “diversity” since two of the first year dorms had developed unfortunate (which means accurate) racial “stereotypes.”

Resident Staff Co-Chair Ian Flanagan explained the change, implemented this fall, is part of an “ongoing process” in which housing is “gradually narrowing” the options students have in selecting their first-year housing. He said that in previous years, students could go so far as to choose the building and floor where they wanted to live. As a result, Flanagan said, “artificial communities” were created....

“One of the goals [of the change] was to provide a much more diverse community in which to live,” Flanagan said, noting that much of what students learn in college comes from the community around them and not just the classroom experience.

He noted that stereotypes about the types of people living in McCormick Road versus Alderman Road developed over time and are “part of the reason the change was made was to eliminate the ability for those stereotypes to exist....”

But if true learning requires the proper amount of “diversity,” why stop with the dorms? Since individual choice obviously now plays second fiddle (if that) to the necessity of “diversity,” why not engineer the racial mix of classes and majors as well?

For that matter, why should the state of Virginia continue to support public colleges that are overwhelmingly black. Virginia State Universiy, for example, in 2007 was 93.1% black, 3.3% white, 0.7% Hispanic, and 0.4% Asian/Pacific Islander. In 2006 Norfolk State University was marginally more “diverse,” with blacks making up 86% of the students and whites 7%.

By contrast James Madison University, another public university in Virginia, lists its “On-campus Enrollment by Ethnicity” as follows:

African American: 3.98%
Asian American/Pacific Isle: 4.93%
Hispanic: 2.40%
Total: 11.31%

Posted by John Rosenberg at 11:32 PM | Permalink | Say What? (1) | TrackBacks (0)

When I was a boy growing up in south Alabama the passion of my life was quail hunting. (And when I say quail, I mean the classic American bobwhite quail, of course.)

It was, and I suppose still is, a sport characterized by ritual and clearly defined rules for all participants — hunters, dogs, and birds. The dog or dogs find the birds, creep up on them as though walking on egg shells, and then point. The birds can run from the dogs (though they are not allowed to fly away once the dogs had their scent) until the dogs pointed, sometimes only inches away. Then they freeze in place. Sometimes, if the dogs point far away from the hunters, this tableau can stay in place for long periods of time. After the point (sometimes, as I say, well after), the hunter approaches from behind the dogs, walks into the covey of hunkered down birds, at which time the whole covey blasts off the ground with an almost explosive roar of beating wings. If you are a good shot, keep your nerves about you instead of firing blindly at the sound of the covey taking flight, and are lucky enough to have relatively open lines of sight (not usually the case), you can down two birds as they rise and before they get too far away or dodge behind a tree or brush.

But “away” was not usually very far. Bobwhites are more runners than flyers, and the rules called for the covey to spread out in a nearby field (though woods were also allowed) and begin regrouping. The job of the dogs at that point — after first retrieving your two downed birds, of course — was to find these “singles” before they regrouped, point them one or two at a time (same rules as before), allowing the hunter to take a few more birds out of that covey before moving on to find another. Moving on, leaving that covey behind, was required, because it was clearly against the rules to take too many birds out of one covey (the number being dependent on the size of the covey). Not doing so, shooting the covey down too low, was rightly regarded as being as despicable as shooting them on the ground.

These “rules” had evolved over generations, even centuries, and were clearly understood by all communicants in the quail hunting religion. But rules are often broken by those of little faith (as well as by backsliders of even great faith, not to mention visiting Yankees who didn’t know better), and Mother Nature doesn’t always co-operate. Thus, whether for reasons of human or natural malfeasance, there came a time when the Alabama quail population became dangerously low.

In its wisdom the state game and fish department responded to this deepening crisis by fatefully deciding to import a large number of Mexican quail, who were smaller, wirier, tougher, to interbreed with the locals, both to increase their number and, so it was thought, to strengthen the locals, toughen them up, make them better able to adapt and survive.

It worked, sort of, but as with most experiments in social engineering there were some highly unanticipated consequences, most of them flowing from the obvious fact that these recent immigrants simply did not know, and hence did not play by, the rules. Before long not only they but their new hybrid cousins and half-breed descendants almost ruined the sport. Coveys would fly instead of run when the dogs approached. If pointed, they wouldn’t wait for the arrival of the hunter before taking off. Once flushed (or more-often, self-flushed) they would fly into the next county instead of flying a short distance and waiting to be hunted as singles. Or they would actually land in trees instead of on the ground! (Until the arrival of the Mexicans a quail in a tree was, to convert an old feminist line, rather like a fish on a bicycle.)

Well, you can imagine how this lawless, almost anarchistic behavior upset the natural order of things, turning good people bitter and good dogs crazy. One time I actually heard a frustrated old hunter (really; this is not apocryphal), sitting in front of a wood stove in a country store, complain about how “stupid” the Mexican birds were. Worse was the creation of a whole generation of guilt-ridden, neurotic dogs who blamed themselves for the birds’ bad behavior.

I was reminded of these “stupid” Mexican quail, and how they violated all the rules about how quail are supposed to behave, by the frustrated, angry response of our cultural betters to Sarah Palin’s nomination, and especially to her conservative Christian supporters. Listen, for example, to Alan Wolfe (actually an old friend, and an impressive scholar of American religion and politics), writing on a New Republic blog:

It may seem like ages ago but during the Clinton administration, conservative traditionalists were everywhere. The nuclear family is sacrosanct. Women should shun the workforce and become full-time moms. Kids should obey their parents and, if they choose not to, discipline, including harsh measures, ought to be applied. Sex outside of marriage is strictly forbidden. Our culture is spinning wildly out of control, and sexual liberation, the worst byproduct of the God-awful 1960s, is the cause.  And, by the way, abortion is murder and should be forbidden.

All that is left, if the Palin controversy is any indication, is abortion. Palin's defenders, far from being traditionalists, are moral relativists. We should not rush to judgment. It is important to understand the pressures that families face. Love is all you need. Forgive in order to forget. People are entitled to their privacy, even, if not especially, in the bedroom. The state should not be in the business of telling people what to do. It sounds like the language of the left, but it has also had long resonance on the libertarian right. When the McCain campaign said that Bristol Palin had a choice, it was correct. These days we all have choices. The fact that we do has always bothered conservative traditionalists.

Sarah Palin's nomination is a public service. No longer will we hear lectures from the likes of Newt Gingrich telling poor women on welfare how to conduct their sex lives. Focus on the Family will have to focus on a different kind of family.  William Bennett has no virtues left to write about. At long last our national nightmare over sexual hypocrisy has come to an end, and we can all thank John McCain for that.

And that is not all. In rushing to Sarah Palin's defense, the leaders of the Christian right have made it abundantly clear how they define a Christian. We don't care if you sin. We are not bothered if you put your ambition ahead of the needs of your children. If you have lied or broken the law, we will look the other way. It all comes down to your stand on guns and fetuses. Vote the right way, and you have our blessing. If any proof were needed that James Dobson is a political operative rather than a spiritual leader, his jumping on the Palin bandwagon offers it.

I’m not the only one to notice our cultural elite’s discomfort. Here is William Kristol in the current, or upcoming, Weekly Standard:

By the end of the week, after Palin’s tour de force in St. Paul, the liberal media were so befuddled that they were reduced to complaining that conservatives aren’t being narrow-minded enough. Thus, Hanna Rosin--who has covered religion and politics for the Washington Post, and has also written for the New Yorker, the New Republic, and the New York Times--lamented in a piece for Slate: “So cavalier are conservatives about Sarah Palin’s wreck of a home life that they make the rest of us look stuffy and slow-witted by comparison.” I suppose it was ungenerous of conservatives, in our broad-mindedness and tolerance of human frailty, to have let Ms. Rosin down, just when she was counting on us to bring out the tar and feathers. But she gives us too much credit when she suggests we make the liberal media look stuffy and slow-witted. They do that all by themselves.

As I was leaving the convention, a liberal reporter noted something I didn’t notice: that Palin made little reference to abortion and other cultural issues (and, though he didn’t mention it, none to same-sex marriage). Instead, she spoke in coded language. “But we are expected to govern with integrity, good will, clear convictions, and...a servant’s heart.” But she didn’t have to talk about these issues. She’s lived them. She gave birth to a son with Down’s syndrome she could easily have aborted. She has endorsed her 17-year-old daughter’s decision to give birth to a child conceived out of wedlock. She and, on the airport tarmac, John McCain embraced the father of the child. Liberal MSM journalists imagine that evangelical Christians cast out girls who have become pregnant without being married. Factually wrong: They provide counseling and support to them. And, as Sarah and Todd Palin’s statement shows, tell them that they will have to grow up and take on responsibilities sooner than they expected. The convention is cool with that. MSM has been trying to spin it as intolerance. They don’t understand. But the viewing public sees religious conservatives with a happy face.

I almost (but not quite) feel sorry for them. For as soon as they finally come to grips with the fact that not all conservatives, Christian or otherwise, are busybodies gleefully rounding up sinners to throw in a fiery pit they will have to confront the even more disturbing and unsettling fact that many whites are going to vote against a black candidate for reasons that have absolutely nothing to do with his race.

That might push them right over the edge. But whether it does or not, and even whether McCain wins or not, we conservatives already owe a large debt to Sarah Palin, our very own Mexican quail.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 5:50 PM | Permalink | Say What? (17) | TrackBacks (0)

Four days ago, half -way between Sarah Palin’s Friday debut as vice presidential nominee and her smashing Wednesday night address to the Republican Convention (and 37 million viewers), I wrote the following, in a post titled Change Who Can Believe In?:

It seems to me that if Obama is elected change (or should that be Change!) will consist entirely of replacing Republicans with Democrats. There’s nothing wrong with that, and if you’re a Democrat that’s probably all you want. But there’s nothing in Obama’s past (insofar as he has a past), in his campaign to date, or in his programatic acceptance speech to suggest there will be anything new or different about the nature of the Democratic agenda he will pursue.

McCain, especially with his selection of Palin, promises something completely different. If he is elected I think there’s a good chance radical and fundamental change will come ... to the Republican Party....

I’ve been thinking about that, and I’m still having a hard time seeing any change that Obama will bring except for exchanging Democratic policies and bureaucrats for Republican ones. I don’t mean to minimize the significance of that, but in my opinion the rumbles in Washington such “change” would produce would rank significantly lower on a political Richter Scale than the destruction (creative if you like it, disturbing if you don’t) that would follow in the wake of McCain and Palin blowing into the White House. (Think of Susan Page’s headline to her Sept. 4 article in USA Today: “Palin maes landfall in St. Paul.”)

But I might be wrong (there’s a first time for everything). If you think I am, give me some examples of “change” that Obama would produce in Washington that were not also advocated by Michael Dukakis or Al Gore or John Kerry or that stray in any significant way from traditional Democratic orthodoxy.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 4:33 PM | Permalink | Say What? (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Gathering after the speeches last night by Lieberman and Thompson, the CNN “political team” gathered to tell viewers what was wrong with what they said. No surprises there, except perhaps when Campbell Brown professed herself to be “surprised by the political nature” of the Bushes’ speeches. Imagine that! Political speeches at a political convention!

Regarding the speeches by Thompson and Lieberman, Brown then went on to say that she “still trying to get [her] arms around what they were hoping to accomplish and whether there was a real message” in what they said.

“Does all of that” — you know, the hero bit, the character, the experience, all that stuff —

convey to people that this is the man you want in the foxhole with you? There’s so much at stake in this election, you can’t take any risk. And ultimately what we find as this conversation continues, that he undermines that argument by his choice of vice president.

Even more striking, however, was a comment of Wolf Blitzer, the ostensible moderator. I assume CNN considers him an objective, neutral observer, and thus not a member of the “political team,” since his comments during this round table discussion are not provided on the CNN site linked above. Or perhaps there’s another reason why his comments don’t appear, since in discussing whether Lieberman’s appeal to Democrats and Independents would be effective he said (the following is from notes and memory, not a CNN transcript, since there isn’t one), “Since he praised Palin, why would anyone believe what he said about McCain?”

It’s not hard to imagine that many viewers, or non-viewers, ask a very similar question about Blitzer and his “political team.”

Posted by John Rosenberg at 7:56 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Jonah Goldberg reminds us that Obama supports the “horrid” Akaka bill, which would create separate race-based governmental programs for those, as I pointed out here and elsewhere, “with a drop of Hawaiian blood.”

Peter Kirsanow of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights has a good description of this bad bill, from last fall.

The House of Representatives is poised to pass the Native Hawaiian Government Reorganization Act (known in the Senate as the “Akaka Bill”), the apogee of an aggressive multiculturalism that has manifested itself in local, state, and federal legislation in the last two decades. The bill faces a certain White House veto, but it’s unclear whether there are enough votes in the Senate to sustain it. If the Senate overrides the veto, it will speed the country’s embrace of a form of post-nationalism (already held by many elites) — a confederation of various races, ethnicities and interest groups competing for special privileges, exemptions and recognition.

The Akaka Bill creates a race-based government for native Hawaiians. Even its supporters don’t deny that the bill could lead to outright secession. In the meantime, the bill will produce a regime of racial preferences, reparations, and lawsuits fueled by ethnic grievance, victimhood, and entitlement....

The Akaka Bill is a legislative abomination on steroids. Its spirit runs counter to our animating principles and national ideal. As I’ve stated before, the bill is the worst piece of legislation ever analyzed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (that’s saying something)....

Posted by John Rosenberg at 12:07 AM | Permalink | Say What? (5) | TrackBacks (0)

Fatimah Ali, who is described as “a regular contributor” to the Philadelphia Daily News, writes today (HatTip To Drudge) that

If McCain wins, look for a full-fledged race and class war, fueled by a deflated and depressed country, soaring crime, homelessness — and hopelessness!

Posted by John Rosenberg at 3:54 PM | Permalink | Say What? (6) | TrackBacks (0)

[NOTE: This post has been Updated]

Here are the visions of equality contained in the new platforms of the Republican and Democratic parties. One of them is clear and principled; the other is gauzy, ambiguous, obfuscatory, and disingenuous.

See if you can tell which is which.

Here’s the equality language from the Republican platform.

Ensuring Equal Treatment for All

Individual rights — and the responsibilities that go with them — are the foundation of a free society. From the time of Lincoln, equality of individuals has been a cornerstone of the Republican Party. Our commitment to equal opportunity extends from landmark school-choice legislation for the students of Washington D.C. to historic appointments at the highest levels of government. We consider discrimination based on sex, race, age, religion, creed, disability, or national origin to be immoral, and we will strongly enforce anti-discrimination statutes. We ask all to join us in rejecting the forces of hatred and bigotry and in denouncing all who practice or promote racism, anti-Semitism, ethnic prejudice, or religious intolerance. As a matter of principle, Republicans oppose any attempts to create race-based governments within the United States, as well as any domestic governments not bound by the Constitution or the Bill of Rights.

Precisely because we oppose discrimination, we reject preferences, quotas, and set-asides, whether in education or in corporate boardrooms. The government should not make contracts on this basis, and neither should corporations. We support efforts to help low-income individuals get a fair shot based on their potential and merit, and we affirm the commonsense approach of the Chief Justice of the United States: that the way to stop discriminating on the basis of race is to stop discriminating.

A More Perfect Union

We believe in the essential American ideal that we are not constrained by the circumstances of birth but can make of our lives what we will. Unfortunately, for too many, that ideal is not a reality. We have more work to do. Democrats will fight to end discrimination based on race, sex, ethnicity, national origin, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, and disability in every corner of our country, because that’s the America we believe in.

We all have to do our part to lift up this country, and that means changing hearts and changing minds, and making sure that every American is treated equally under the law. We will restore professionalism over partisanship at the Department of Justice, and staff the civil rights division with civil rights lawyers, not ideologues. We will restore vigorous federal enforcement of civil rights laws in order to provide every American an equal chance at employment, housing, health, contracts, and pay. We are committed to banning racial, ethnic, and religious profiling and requiring federal, state, and local enforcement agencies to take steps to eliminate the practice.

We are committed to ensuring full equality for women: we reaffirm our support for the Equal Rights Amendment, recommit to enforcing Title IX, and will urge passage of the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women. We will pursue a unified foreign and domestic policy that promotes civil rights and human rights, for women and minorities, at home and abroad. We will pass the Local Law Enforcement Hate Crimes Prevention Act. We will restore and support the White House Initiative on Asian-American and Pacific Islanders, including enforcement on disaggregation of Census data. We will make the Census more culturally sensitive, including outreach, language assistance, and increased confidentiality protections to ensure accurate counting of the growing Latino and Asian American, and Pacific Islander populations, and continue working on efforts to be more inclusive. We will sign the U.N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities and restore the original intent of the Americans with Disabilities Act. That is the America we believe in.

It is not enough to look back in wonder at how far we have come; those who came before us did not strike a blow against injustice only so that we would allow injustice to fester in our time. That means removing the barriers of prejudice and misunderstanding that still exist in America. We support the full inclusion of all families, including same-sex couples, in the life of our nation, and support equal responsibility, benefits, and protections. We will enact a comprehensive bipartisan employment non-discrimination act. We oppose the Defense of Marriage Act and all attempts to use this issue to divide us.

But it is no good to be able to ride the bus when you can’t afford the bus fare. We will work to provide real opportunities for all Americans suffering from disadvantage; we will pioneer new policies and remedies against poverty and violence that address real human needs and we will close the achievement gap in education and provide every child a world-class education. We support affirmative action, including in federal contracting and higher education, to make sure that those locked out of the doors of opportunity will be able to walk through those doors in the future. As the late Ann Richards said, “We offer a vision where opportunity knows no race, no gender, no color, a glimpse of what can happen in government if we simply open the doors let the people in.”

ADDENDUM

The Republican position, as you can see, is both clear and firmly grounded in the “without regard” principle: distributing benefits or burdens based on race is wrong.

The only reference it contains that might not be completely clear (at least to non-DISCRIMINATIONS readers) is its opposition to “race-based governments within the United States,” which refers to race exclusive government programs in Hawaii that the Democrats support. (I have discussed various aspects of these programs here, here, here, and here.)

The Democratic statement, if you haven’t guessed by now, is the one with an ambiguous, amorphous, unprincipled core surrounded by flights of obfuscatory rhetoric.

It begins with a nod to the appealing notion that the “circumstances of birth,” presumably including the color of our skin and our ethnic identity (if we have one), should impose no constraints on our opportunities. Fine. Next, another nod in the right direction:

Democrats will fight to end discrimination based on race, sex, ethnicity, national origin, language, religion, sexual orientation, gender identity, age, and disability in every corner of our country, because that’s the America we believe in.

We all have to do our part to lift up this country, and that means changing hearts and changing minds, and making sure that every American is treated equally under the law....

• When they say they will “staff the civil rights division with civil rights lawyers, not ideologues,” they mean they will staff it with attorneys devoted to defending racial preference programs wherever they exist.

• When they say “We are committed to banning racial, ethnic, and religious profiling...,” they mean only by law enforcement or airport security personnel. They have no intention of stopping racial profiling by admissions officers, employers, or government contracting offices. Quite the contrary.

• When they say “We oppose the Defense of Marriage Act and all attempts to use this issue to divide us,” what they mean is that they favor forcing states to recognize same-sex marriages contracted in other states, that honoring the decisions of majorities in various states, expressed in their laws and constitutions, to define marriage as between one man and one woman is “to divide us.”

• When they say “it is no good to be able to ride the bus when you can’t afford the bus fare,” I assume they mean that all rights, to be real, must be subsidized by government.

• When they say “we will close the achievement gap in education and provide every child a world-class education,” they are either promising pie in the sky or just whistlin Dixie, or both.

• When they say “We support affirmative action, including in federal contracting and higher education, to make sure that those locked out of the doors of opportunity will be able to walk through those doors in the future,” they mean they support the status quo of all race preference policies currently in place. Not only do they present no evidence or examples of anyone who is currently “locked out of the doors of opportunity” on the basis of their race, they in fact turn a cold shoulder to those whom that description does in fact fit — applicants for jobs, college admissions, government contracts, etc., who would have been successful if their race, sex, or ethnicity were on the list of those receiving preferential treatment. That’s why they oppose all state efforts to prohibit preferential treatment based on race, ethnicity, gender.
  

Posted by John Rosenberg at 9:47 AM | Permalink | Say What? (3) | TrackBacks (0)

It seems to me that if Obama is elected change (or should that be Change!) will consist entirely of replacing Republicans with Democrats. There’s nothing wrong with that, and if you’re a Democrat that’s probably all you want. But there’s nothing in Obama’s past (insofar as he has a past), in his campaign to date, or in his programatic acceptance speech to suggest there will be anything new or different about the nature of the Democratic agenda he will pursue.

McCain, especially with his selection of Palin, promises something completely different. If he is elected I think there’s a good chance radical and fundamental change will come ... to the Republican Party. The most distinctive thing about McCain’s career is his willingness, even eagerness, to butt heads with his party, over issues large and small. And in Alaska Palin made her reputation, and no doubt endeared herself to McCain in the process, by rooting out Republican corruption and remaking the party.

Electing Obama/Biden will produce more of the same old partisan gridlock, with the only “change” being who’s in and who’s out. Electing McCain/Palin will reconstruct the GOP and reconfigure the partisan landscape.

Now that’s change you can believe in, whether you like it or not.

Posted by John Rosenberg at 2:11 AM | Permalink | Say What? (2) | TrackBacks (0)