The Great Divide

On May 7, 2008 at 11:41 PM, Jon wrote:

As of 10 pm CST, it looks like a dodge-the-bullet night for Obama. Hillary is squeaking by in Indiana, but Obama's has swept NC on the wave of the 92% of the black vote. This could haul him up over the great Democratic Party divide at last. He's probably got it close to nailed -- unless Hillary does go nuclear with a fight for Florida and Michigan at the convention in August. But for now, I think the circus we Republicans have been enjoying is about done.

No matter. What is startling to me is how utterly predictable it actually is that something like this would happen sooner or later. In a sense, it is exactly the pattern that first emerged fully in 1968, as the party of segregation -- a mere four years after its transformation into the party of civil rights -- became then the party of victimization, entitlement and vicious subgroup identity politics. It may be that Obama, with the nomination, can go on to beat McCain. This is the year for the Dems, and if they lose a general election in this year they may as well give it up as far as presidential politics goes. However, I still (marginally) do not think Obama can win the general election. His attempt to be a post-racial candidate has now collapsed in any case. He is entirely dependent on the black vote and the transnational new class, and in the case of blacks it is a black vote for a black man. In fact, within the Obama faction, it appears the Reverend Wright may even have helped him -- just as OJ also triggered racial solidarity in the age of paranoid victimology. The Obama victory is, in this sense, a tragedy for blacks, not a triumph. An enormous waste. Whites meanwhile, the bread-and-butter white Democrats, have (at least for now) abandoned Obama. What goes around comes around. Or as the Rev. Wright put it, the chickens are coming home to roost -- but for the Democratic Party. The Party cannot play the race card for 40 years and them pretend to have transcended the very life blood of what's kept it going.

Am I making too much of Obama's unique conundrum in seeing it as a mere culmination of his party's choice to mire us all in this idiotic group identity game for so long? I do not think so. Either he, or he and his wife (with her perhaps pushing hardest) chose Wright (and Ayers) because in the world the Democrats made it is not only okay to associate with leftwing racists and violence-infatuated fanatics, but it is almost mandatory if you are seeking to rise as a black Democrat. I doubt Obama buys much of Wright's poison, but he cleary was not bothered enough by it or if bothered did not see it as all that much of a threat to him. certainly not enough to trump expediency. His first words about Wright's words, in Philadelphia remember, were that Wright's views were "controversial." You can live with controversial. Only in a very rarified political bubble can you see someone of Wright's calibre as merely controversial.

So now we have the situation in which the black vote and the upscale academicized left-liberal vote, both of which the Clintons once owned, have been split from the white, lower middle and middle class vote, which they also owned. Over the past 40 years, the Clintons were the ONLY national candidates the Democrats have ever come up with who healed this split. Now, the split is opened up wider than it ever was before. Obama is not merely the vicitim of this, he is to blame for it as well. Had he truly been the post-racial candidate, he'd have disowned Jeremiah (and the odious Farakhan as well) long before this spring, and he'd had have honestly owned up to a mistake for ever having had anything to do with him. Had he done those things, he'd have weathered the storm, the biggest part of which now still awaits him. Instead he gave a speech in which he said he could NOT disown Jeremiah. In the course of that speech, he played so many double-meaning rhetorical games that many said he had given a great speech on a par with FDR, JFK and Lincoln at Cooper Union. I dare say, now not a word will be remembered of that speech in days to come. Obama will not be making campaign ads out of it, that's for sure.

The Clintons also bear some blame. Hillary until PA ran the worst campaign in history practically. She should have gone for those bread and butter voters with a New Deal pitch and a tough foreign policy pitch and an emphasis on all the ways she has reached out to Republicans and tried to get things done. The Scoop Jackson/Pat Moynihan role was beckoning. Instead, she at first acted with utter complacency as the annoited one. And who could blame her. In today's Democratic Party, Joe Lieberman is what happens to Scoop Jackson types. You can almost excuse Hillary for passing on that. Yet she could have pulled it off. In any case, after Obama unannointed the annointed one, she then panicked over his mesmerizing the Democratic left and tried for much too long to kow-tow to it herself. Had she said, instead, I will get those oil companies, get those terrorists, fix medicare, clean out the Augean stables, win the right way in Iraq and make you all proud to go out and lift a tall one for the good ole USA, she would have had it sewed up by now. Hell, I might even have voted for her.

Instead, the left, the moveon.org, George Soros, Daily Kos, smart alecky hip young Internet left and its pandering admirers in the media spooked her. The very people who created the great divide that she and her husband were the only ones ever to bridge. But she could not get to Obama's left. Her lurch left failed. That's because Obama telegraphs his leftism in such a subtle and devious way that that farther to it he moves, the more reasonable he seems. Until Jeremiah, that is. It's amazing. This man who talks about reaching out across the isle and healing the nation. The man with the most liberal voting record in the Senate. When it came to voting for Chief Justice Roberts, for instance - as McCain so well and aptly pointed out today - Obama was in a minority of 22 in a U.S. Senate of 100. Meanwhile, it was McCain who took part in the gang of 14, to the great annoyance of many conservatives, to get the SCOTUS nomination process back on track. That's reaching out. (By the way, Ruth Bader Ginsberg is easily as far to the left as Roberts is to the right. When she was up for nomination, she won 98-2. So who exactly is doing the reaching out Obama says only he will do, eh?)

Unfortunately for my side, I expect Obama to use his prodigious sophistic skills (I think he already is now) to paper this over and move the party into the Republican-demonizing, white-guilt tripping, patriotism-dissembling bamboozle in order to get everyone to again look the other way. But in fact, Obama is the candidate of a faction. Many of the best and brightest among us think it is a growing faction that will swamp all the old Bubbas out there who vote against Obama now by 60% plus. It can't. And so Obama will deal, and drink beer, and pretend to care about people who think they might, though they in fact will not, lose their jobs, and surely not because of NAFTA, but whose resentments are there for the taking. Many of the states in which Obama won big are states he cannot hope to win in the general election, however, so I expect the new Bubbaized Obama to be working overtime from now on to salvage Ohio, Florida, Pennsylvania, Massachusetts, etc. Do not expect too much of the "we are the ones we've been waiting for" high flying. Those who think this is Obama's real persona will have to wait and hope to see it resurface after November. The Democratic Bubbas are not alone, and it will take Obama a lot less talking down and a lot less talking past to win them over.

What could be at stake in the Obama campaign is a decisive U.S. turn toward the statism and defeatism of Europe, which is really what Obama and his transnational progressivist radicalism is all about. (You see, the guy really does have his "community organizer" ideology intact, and it is certainly not the bring us all together blather he has been selling.) Given the baby-boom wave now starting to crash onto the shores of the entitlement state system, that will probably mean very high taxes, regulation, regulation, economic stagnation, flabbiness and isolationism in the face of Islamic radicalism, and preening self-righteousness in cultural matters for the rest of my life. Oh well, I've got my books, so when the tax man comes to tax my feet I can still sit down.

But I will be giving my last hurrah for John McCain this year, you can bet. After that, I say to hip young we-are-the-worlders coming on now, it's all yours. Good luck.

My thoughts for the night.

Jon

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