The inauguration of Barack Obama indicates that an African American can be elected to the highest office in the land, along with multitudes of other blacks who have been elected or become high-profile bureaucrats to/in positions of prominence for decades. While the success of blacks has been increasing in intensity through those years, the constant charge of racism by blacks with respect to whites has never ceased.
In the January 18 issue of the Lexington Herald-Leader, Lexington, Ky., a black minister is quoted as attributing Obama’s success to a “more informed generation” whatever that means. Another black minister was quoted thusly: “I’m not sure America (would have elected a black president) if it were not for worldwide pressure.” Translation: They’ve run out of reasons for blaming today’s white people for all the woes endemic to the black community and are grasping desperately at straws.
What they hate to admit is that the swing vote in the 2008 election was not the black vote or the homosexual vote or the Latino vote; rather, it was the white vote. Ethnics did not elect Obama. White folks (actually an ethnic group, too, but not so vis-a-vis political correctness) elected Obama. According to the exit polls last November, the percentages of politically correct ethnics voting for Obama were: Blacks, 95; Latino, 67; Asian, 62, and Other, 66, or an average of 72.5%. By contrast, only 55% of whites voted for McCain.
Whites make up 74% of the population, so anyone caring to crunch the numbers will find that McCain would have won the popular vote if 56% of whites had voted for him. Thus, Obama won the popular vote because his white swing vote made the difference. This is not to speak disparagingly of Barack Obama, who ran a great campaign and deserved to win, but to only make the point that he has the white community to thank for his victory. If 72.5% of whites had voted for McCain, not to mention 95% (black voters), his win would have been by an astronomical margin and probably included the entire electoral-college vote.
But what did the minister mean by the “more informed generation?” He obviously was not referring to blacks, 95% of whom were already informed enough to vote correctly. Did he mean that whites have just naturally been ignorant? Did he mean that the generation of the 1950s-60s was dumb when it enacted laws guaranteeing everything from quotas in hiring to school-integration, but that today’s generation is eminently smarter? His “more informed generation” baloney is a racist slur.
One looks for the “worldwide pressure” that the other minister mentioned as a reason for Obama’s success. He would have done well to point it out since one is hard-pressed to find it. How did this awesome pressure affect the average voter? In the democratic primary, a black man with the experience of half-a-Senate term won over a white woman with three times as much Senate experience. How did the worldwide pressure figure in that circumstance?
Did “worldwide pressure” cause enough swing votes to cause Obama to defeat a white man with 22 years as a Naval officer, four years in the House of Representatives and continuous service in the Senate since 1987? Of course not! It’s hard for some blacks, who stick to the old ways, to admit that white people actually elected a black to the presidency, since now it’s necessary to find other people or institutions or “things” to blame for the discrimination, real or imagined. Hanging-chads, maybe?
It’s axiomatic that black leaders, both locally and nationally, have been and at present are ministers who wield a lot of power and influence, though, hopefully, that may be changing. It ill behooves them to continue the constant drumbeat of oppression, racism, discrimination and the like when even schoolchildren in schools not governed by revisionism are aware of the inordinate effort that’s been made by whites since at least the 1960s to guarantee equal rights to all. Too often, instead of being positive they insist on the “Rev. Dr. Jeremiah Wright approach,” which is that white people are the worst thing since the Black Plague...and must be informed...okay, reformed, too.
The extreme irony lies in the fact that Barack Obama – okay, as do all presidents-elect – speaks of “healing the nation,” whatever that means. He’s also in “rescue mode,” the saving of the good ship USA, as are all presidents-elect, while the ministers insist divisively that the vast majority of the people who elected him are finally smart but are susceptible to pressures by nations/people, most of whom they notice only cursorily if at all. Sad. Wouldn’t it just be easier to say that the voters – all of them – elected the man they thought could do the job? Well...yes, but it wouldn’t be as much fun.
And so it goes.
Jim Clark
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