Some additional thoughts on the Geraldine Ferraro controversy…

Thirty years of hypersensitivity and racial pandering have turned otherwise intelligent minds into mush on this score. Everything is what it is, nothing is gained by a confusion of terms.  David Duke is a racist and a bigot; yet, so too is Louis Farrakhan. Discussing the political advantage to Obama by being partially an African-American is not the same conceptually, philosophically or morally as being a racist. A policy championed by Democrats for decades that discriminates against whites indefinitely into the future for past discrimination against blacks is racism. Liberals may have comforted themselves over the years with their presumed moral superiority on this issue, but most have never acknowledged the inherent and uncomfortable reverse-racism presupposition that underlies affirmative action as practiced and implemented today.

I have yet to hear Obama declare that he will no longer support policies that apportion societal benefits on the basis of one’s skin color. But, as his supporters might say, Hope springs eternal…

Does acknowledgment of the fact that Obama, in recent Democratic primaries has garnered upwards of 80% of the black vote suggest African-Americans are voting along racial lines. African-Americans are voting for Obama in large numbers for the same reason Catholics overwhelmingly voted for John F. Kennedy in 1960. I would suggest there is nothing insidious or sinister about this political phenomenon. By casting their lot with Obama, African-Americans are merely expressing their pride that one of their own has a real chance of capturing his party's nomination —if not the White House. This fact of political life hardly constitutes racism on the part of African-American voters.

In a very real sense, the flocking of African-Americans to Obama represents a welcome and significant shift away from the degrading and sanctimonious paternalism of liberalism. Through the vehicle of Obama's candidacy, African-Americans have ditched their white overseers of the Democratic Party and have left the "liberal plantation." The only people who view this as a tragedy are those who are galled that this upstart didn't wait his turn. Old line feminists are particularly miffed by Obama not waiting his turn so that Hillary could capture the gender prize. I find certain aspects of Ferraro's recent comments as indicative of this frustration. Many in the Democratic Party view his candidacy as a petulant expression of ingratitude. The plantation analogy again, is striking. It's almost as if they are pleading:  We have clothed and fed you all these years and you've sabotaged our noble efforts to sanctify our feminist creed by Hillary's ascent to the presidency.

Another example of liberal's desire to find racism under every rock is the attribution of the "Bradley Effect" to help explain Obama's unforeseen loss of New Hampshire. Many mainstream media commentators and pundits, in an example of intellectual lethargy, were quick to explain the unexpected halt in Obama's momentum as being solely responsible to whites telling pollsters that they were going to vote for Obama, but then changed their minds in the voting booth. Memo to proponents of the Bradley Effect Theory, we indulge you: are whites permitted to cast a vote against Obama because they don't agree with his policies? Or are they obligated to vote for him solely for fear of being characterized by you as racist?

The condescending paternalism of the Democratic Party's policies on race have now come back to haunt them. Is it any wonder that many within the party are predicting a coming and inglorious implosion?