[NOTE: This post has a new ADDENDUM]
Rasmussen reports today that President Obama “earns approval from 97% of African-American voters and disapproval from 61% of white voters.”
Looking at those with intense feelings, Rasmussen reports that “Seventy-four percent (74%) of African-Americans Strongly Approve along with just 19% of white voters.”
Barack Obama made his debut appearance on the national stage with his stirring keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention. The most memorable lines of that speech were his emphatic assertions that
there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America.
There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America….
We are one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the stars and stripes, all of us defending the United States of America.
Those lines led many gullible observers (including this one) to entertain the hope that this young man offered the possibility of a post-racial future.
Now, less than a year into his presidency, we are more racially divided than ever. The erstwhile post-racial president has elevated to the Supreme Court someone whose primacy claim to fame is her “wise Latina” identity politics. His Attorney General calls Americans cowards for not engaging in the sort of racial dialog he prefers. Racial preferences are more, not less, entrenched in government. Racial demagogues are more, not less, emboldened, so that just last week Jesse Jackson, attacking Rep. Artur Davis (D, Ala), proclaimed that “You can’t vote against health care and call yourself a black man.”
Perhaps our post-racial president distanced himself from Jackson’s remark, but if so I missed it.
ADDENDUM [26 November]
National Review Online’s The Agenda discusses the increasing racial divide in views of Obama, based on two other thorough discussions: one by Jeffrey Jones of Gallup, the other by Ronald Brownstein in National Journal. Brownstein concludes that the dramatic black-white divide suggests a more ominous color:
In the long term, it’s difficult to overstate the challenge either party would face in governing a country where the white majority and burgeoning nonwhite minority are moving in such diametrical directions. Red, as in “danger ahead,” is the color that should be flashing from these results.
Brownstein demonstrates a typical columnist’s trick: dangle some apocalyptic vision of impending catastrophe, leaving the reader to conjure, in this case, visions of racial discord ready to be exploited. He likely assumes the exploitation will take the form of Nixon/Wallace style southern strategy or naked racial appeal (ignoring the Jackson/Sharpton doppelganger of the same kind). However, centrists and statists (like Brownstein) could just as easily take comfort from an expanded role for a strong central government busily distributing benefits to various communities in the name of “equality”, social stability, or just oppressing everyone in the name of either. Let’s face it, the Habsburg Empire, Yugoslavia, USSR, etc. managed to keep the lid on ethnic conflict for a long time.