For all the whining and complaining and accusing the Democrats and their liberal base are partaking in about Hillary supposedly “playing the race card” by pointing out a very obvious and potentially critical trend among Democratic voters (that white, working-class voters prefer Hillary over Obama), it’s amazing that none of Obama’s fans seem to be seeing the forest for the trees.

Race is such a touchy topic to liberals that an even-handed examination of demographic voting patterns cannot be undertaken because to do so is tantamount to “race-baiting”. Making the factual statement that white voters prefer Hillary, that about 75% of Americans are white, and therefore Hillary Clinton has an advantage over Barack Obama is concisdered so politically incorrect and unseemly that the liberal media and Obama’s fan club would rather keep their eyes tightly shuttered than to suffer through the cognitive moonwalking required to fit reality into their contorted world-view.

So enmeshed are they in this mind-numbingly unspoken and tragically-applied social norm that they have shackled their minds with, that the liberal voters have handcuffed the Democratic Party. Rather than recognize the different voting trends of black and white Democratic voters, Obama’s campaign has instituted a policy of demonizing anybody who mentions the elephant in the room, and the millions of voters so in love with Obama that rational thought is no longer capable are perfectly happy to assist in such demonizing. In the past year we have seen Bill Clinton, “the first black President”, turned into a foul-mouthed racist, and his wife (the liberal feminist) turned into an hateful agitator trying to keep a black out of the White House. The world is upside down.

So, Obama’s fanclub will continue to deny reality and close their eyes to a massively important, extremely problematic trend in Democratic voting patterns: white, working-class Americans just don’t seem to like Barack Obama - and they are a massive voting black that the Democrats absolutely need in order to win in November. Rather than recognize the problem and try to solve it by addressing the concerns that those white voters have, the media and the Obama campaign are diligently laying the groundwork needed to blame an Obama loss on white America’s racism. Rather than transcending race, Obama’s media darlings will be fomenting racial unrest in a few short months by blaming white voters for being racist when in reality they didn’t want to vote for Obama because Obama just plain didn’t represent them at all. As if the only reason a white person wouldn’t vote for Barack is because they are small-minded racists! Sadly, no one in the media or Obama’s fanclub is currently able to imagine any idea not to vote for him other than racism.

Hillary is making an excellent point, she really is. She is making this painful point because it’s a good point and it obviously helps her sell her case as a more reasonable choice for the Democratic nominee. She knows that white voters will be the savior of Obama’s campaign, or they will be the doom of it. By bringing it up she is making it even more of an issue, like a self-fulfilling prophecy. Blaming her for pointing out reality is juvenile and counter-productive. No matter how cunning and Machiavellian her motive might be, she is right on the money.

The same morally blind liberals that prefer to call head-chopping terrorists “freedom fighters” are the same liberals who reflexively portray white voters as racist rather than look to the less vile reason for them voting for Hillary. The terrorists get the benefit-of-the-doubt, white America clearly does not.

While Saddam didn’t plan or execute the attacks, he certainly took pleasure in Islamic extremists killing thousands of Americans.

The BIG PICTURE tells the real story.

Beginning NOW I will be posting images from the past, mostly media graphics, quite often, starting with the next post. Hopefully, I will be providing bloggers with some ammunition in whatever argument they are making.

If Clinton and Obama were both male and white, they’d be judged unremarkable, inexperienced and blunder-prone.

Tim Blair is right

We have two absolutely unworthy candidates vying for the most powerful position on Earth, and they are clearly not the best candidates around by any measurement. Yet, we are stuck with them as some sort of lame, guilt-induced, psychologically-based, semi-conscious attempt of proving our willingness to accept those who look different than ourselves. Unfortunately, we are getting blinded by the differentness and we are opening the door for a feminist who is still married to her womanizing husband and a post-racial black guy who associates with radicals and thinks we have 57 states.

I’d rather that we stick to judging people by their characters, like MLK said.

It’s not that complicated. Here’s my prediction:

Do you see the purple part of that pie chart? The units are in percentage of US pppulation.

64% of eligible voters took part in the 2004 election (report here). I think that even more people will be voting this time around. 72% of the people old enough to vote and allowed to vote were in fact registered to vote. In 2004, less than half (47%) of the 18-24 age group exercised their right to vote. Nearly 3/4 of older voters (72% of 55 and older) were sufficiently ambulatory and made it to a nearby polling station.

Breaking it down a little further, 88.5% of the total registered population votes. Nearly 9/10 voters who were able to vote did in fact vote in 2004. Of the different “ethnicities”, whites were the most-likely to be registered and to have voted. Blacks were not far behind, while other groups were even less likely to have voted. Clearly, whites are also the majority of US citizens and voters.

So, If Hillary really is winning the white votes and the old votes decisively then Obama’s campaign could be in big trouble.

I’ll make some assumptions: white people are split between Republican and Democrat, Latinos trend Democratic (although the Cubans go Republican), and African Americans vote Democratic.

My point is this: if the black vote was most likely going to the Democratic candidate already, how much general election “oomph” is he going to be able to deliver?

All McCain really has to do is campaign like a Democrat for a few months and then switch up his style in November. That’s probably his plan! Conservatives won’t vote for Obama (unless it’s that Sullivan guy) and they probably won’t even think about staying home and not voting Republican. Hillary and Obama are both less palatable to conservative voters than McCain.

Disclaimer: I only like McCain marginally more than these other two numbskulls.

A post at Instapundit:

A RACIAL-HARASSMENT NIGHTMARE: “In November, I was found guilty of ‘racial harassment’ for reading a public-library book on a university campus.” The book was an anti-Klan book, but the $106,000-a-year affirmative-action officer didn’t want to hear the truth from the janitor who was reading it. Race and class on the modern university campus . . . . Excerpt:

A friend reacted to the finding with, “That’s impossible!” He’s right. You can’t commit racial harassment by reading an anti-Klan history.

For months, I felt isolated and dejected. Yet I knew that most of the faculty, staff and students at Indiana University were good people. The campus is a growing, thriving part of Indy, where people of all colors and religions come to study.

But the $106,000-a-year affirmative-action officer who declared me guilty of “racial harassment” never spoke to me or examined the book. My own union - the American Federation of State, County and Municipal Employees - sent an obtuse shop steward to stifle my freedom to read. He told me, “You could be fired,” that reading the book was “like bringing pornography to work.”

Shame on the affirmative-action people and my union for displaying their ignorance and incompetence. Their pusillanimous actions, in trying to ban Tucker’s anti-Klan history book, played into the hands of the hateful KKK.

After months of stonewalling, the university withdrew the charge, thanks to pressure from the press, the American Civil Liberties Union and a group called the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, or FIRE.

F.I.R.E. does good work. And congrats to the ACLU and the press here, too.

UPDATE: A reader emails:

Can you believe that this school spends $106K/year on a “diversity” officer and they’re so starved for work that they prosecute this case???? What other career options could a diversity offer have to drive up their pay so high?

If you want to know where higher education can trim the fat, there’s a start. You can hire a pretty good neuroscience researcher for that kind of money.

[Please don’t use my name. I may need a job someday.]

I recommend switching fields to diversity-enforcement. it seems lucrative, and not terribly burdened with accountability or due process.

but I was running behind on my hosting bill (oops!) and the site was offline for a couple days.

In a conversation with Sean Wilentz and George Will about Ronald Reagan’s legacy, liberal professor Wilentz opines on what turned the more conservative Democratic voters to overwhelmingly switch allegiance in 1980, sweeping Reagan into power:

WILENTZ: To add to that, I would say that what made it fiercer and more passionate was the ways in which the liberal Democrats interpreted the resistance to their policies, which was always to blame the people who were resisting for being narrow-minded or racist, not up to their own enlightened idea of the way Americans ought to be. There was a contempt, there was an elitism that was not a part of the Democratic Party of Harry Truman that came into play in the aftermath of the black-power movement and Vietnam. It’s not to say there wasn’t racism in America or small-minded people. But you don’t go about winning people’s votes by saying, “You’re a small-minded racist.”

To hear a liberal admit it is certainly promising. The first step is to admit you have a problem, after all.

The entire discussion is here.

It’s almost as if I like Hillary. Then I look back and I see that I have come to just not like Obama anymore. Just 2 or 3 weeks ago Clinton was 100% unpalatable. And she still is! At the same time, Obama was too liberal and/or vague to ever get my vote. Even so, over the past few weeks I have just gotten sick and tired of hearing about Obama and his admired Reverend’s sermons have infected my formerly semi-positive views on Obama.

Clinton has always acted like a liberal and seemed like a sketchy liar while doing it. Obama, in his favor, seemed refreshingly honest and level-headed, although he was clearly just as bad, if not worse, in regards to his liberal ideology. At least he wasn’t full of shit, I thought!

Now we have this loony tune preacher of angst and opposition getting all the white people to contemplate Obama’s merits a little less superficially, and some of them are deciding that maybe Obama shares some of Wright’s views, despite Obama’s (belated) disassociation from the preacher.

While it might seem cool to me as a fan of small government to have the more liberal candidate under fire, it’s not especially cool that this is at the expense of more religious tensions and divisiveness. We were supposed to be transcending all that, isn’t that what Obama said? And now we have Obama’s influential pastor with his seemingly flagrant dislike for white Americans.

How long before we have Osama bin Laden issuing audio and video talking about Reverend Wright? OBL has already weighed in on global warming and the mortgage/credit crisis. Just a thought…any way, back to Obama…

I believe that Americans, on the average, are accepting the idea of an African-American President. By all measures, Obama has/had been garnering impressive support from whites, often ahead of Clinton and John Edwards among white voters. It’s Reverend Wright that is turning the tide. Even the hint of Obama being a fraud, or of Obama being weak-willed or slow-to-react, or of Obama associating with a man who espouses race-based, divisive political views - a wiff of it is all it takes to plant the seeds of doubt.

All you have to do is do a Google search and see that Obama admittedly admires and respects Wright, and that Obama has a long-time affiliation with and admiration for Wright. The idea that Barack Obama had no knowledge of Wright’s views and the content of his sermons is ludicrous and I would be a fool to accept that as truth. Either Obama knew the whole time and didn’t think it was a big deal until now, or he was utterly clueless the whole time, which would make him an idiot. It honestly is difficult to excuse Obama, irregardless of what Obama knew about Wright, when you think about the possible explanations - that he is dumb, or didn’t think Wright’s views would be this divisive, or thought his sermons wouldn’t be on youtube and talk radio, or thought ignoring it would make it ‘go away’, or that he shares Wright’s views and wanted to keep it hush-hush, and the list goes on!

The big BUT.

Black churches and black culture is not equivalent to white churches and white culture. It’s not necessarily a matter of one being better than the other. I don’t much buy into arguments of moral equivalence, BUT I can recognize and accept the obvious fact that cultural differences exist and will forever exist. Different cultures have different histories, different identities, and different religious attitudes. White people really didn’t do right by blacks for a long time in America, and while that is shameful and regrettable, it is also not my problem. I’m white, but I have never been personally responsible for any act of racism towards black people, and frankly the notion of racism seems archaic and ignorant to me. That’s why I will never accept power over me that views me as guilty for the racism of people who were dead before I was even born, and whom I likely have no relation to whatsoever. Likewise, I would fully support a black person who wishes to defy the government if the government appears to him to be led by people who view him as guilty of something he or she is not guilty of.

So, I can’t really say I understand where Wright is coming from, but I can say that his judgments on white people are as racist as anything, because he is judging white people monolithically and unfairly. Wright should judge me by the content of my character, there is no more awesome way to treat people. Rather, Wright is judging a majority of our country simply by the color of their skin, no? While I’m not going to try to say that his church and his views aren’t deserving of any sort of defense. They are his Constitutional Right to say whatever he wants, pretty much. I don’t need to like it. BUT I SURE DON”T WAT A GUY LIKE REVEREND WRIGHT WHISPERING IN MY PRESIDENT’S EAR.