On Tuesday, Obama delivered a speech calculated to extinguish the fire which has ignited over his minister's now-very-public anti-white and anti-American statements. I wrote a post about the speech here.
Geraldine Ferraro, one-time Vice-Presidential candidate for the Democratic party, offered this view of Obama's actions and speech, on John Gibson's Fox News show, as seen here on YouTube.
Shelby Steele wrote this editorial in the Wall Street Journal on the day of Obama's speech. In it, he opined,
"Geraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama would not be "in his position" as a frontrunner but for his race. Possibly she was acting as Hillary Clinton's surrogate. Or maybe she was simply befuddled by this new reality -- in which blackness could constitute a political advantage.
But whatever her motives, she was right: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Barack Obama is, of course, a very talented politician with a first-rate political organization at his back. But it does not detract from his merit to say that his race is also a large part of his prominence. And it is undeniable that something extremely powerful in the body politic, a force quite apart from the man himself, has pulled Obama forward. This force is about race and nothing else."
But whatever her motives, she was right: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Barack Obama is, of course, a very talented politician with a first-rate political organization at his back. But it does not detract from his merit to say that his race is also a large part of his prominence. And it is undeniable that something extremely powerful in the body politic, a force quite apart from the man himself, has pulled Obama forward. This force is about race and nothing else."
Ferraro was and is being excoriated by the press and Democrats for her remarks, while Steele, a distinguished black historian now at the Hoover Institute, has received absolutely no reaction to his editorial of which I am aware.
In an attempt to fend off charges that he called his own grandmother a racist, Obama made these remarks later in the week on a radio talk show. The YouTube video has take the audio track and used it as the centerpiece of a very judgmental video, but the audio is, nonetheless, real.
I have heard this unedited comment by Obama about four times on Fox News in the last two days, and I believe he also said something to the effect that the reaction he attributes to his white grandmother is 'bred into' whites. I may be wrong on this, but I don't think so.
Never the less, as the video notes, he clearly stereotypes whites with the phrase "typical white person."
Does anyone believe that a white candidate for President of the US who used the phrase "typical black person" would still be in the running?
It's my guess that this entire issue has spun in a manner totally unforeseen and unwanted by Obama and many blacks unrelated to him. Just when race was fading as an issue for mainstream America, Obama has brought radical blacks like Jesse Jackson and Jeremiah Wright, whose positions depend upon continued exploitation of imagined racism in America, (back, in Jackson's case) into the limelight.
As Shelby Steele noted in his editorial, Obama doesn't really offer America much beyond a vote to assuage guilt over prior generations' involvement in slavery.
As a Caucasian American, I must say that I feel absolutely no guilt over prior generations' actions. What happened, happened. I cannot change it, and I did not partake in it.
If I, and many other millions of Americans feel likewise, and would prefer to vote for any minority on their qualifications, rather than their being a member of a minority, where does that leave Obama?
Nowhere.
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