Great post

In a reply to a column in our local online paper. Not sure if it was his or copied, but dead on.

Obama's America, the book by Dinesh D'Souza, is the basis of the film "2016: Obama's America". D'Souza describes Shelby Steele's theis that from the 1960s to the present, Americans HAVE regretted the racism of yesteryear and ARE turned away from it, that white Americans feel guilt about even those things they had no direct part of, things occurring even before they were born.

White guilt, writes Steele, is a black politician's most powerful too. The allegedly reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton have effectively used white guilt to shake down white America. But because these gentlemen are angry, make outrageous and easily disputable claims, white Americans denied them any chance to be president. Obama, on the other hand, came across as affable, with a standard Midwest accent, great oratorical gifts, and a veneer of likea...b...ility. As D'Souza explains, white Americans who backed Obama found a sense of absolution for past wrongs; for blacks backing Obama, he offered the possibility of redemption.

The emotional support for Obama is not about his supporters feeling good about him; it's about those supporters feeling good about themselves. Any criticism of Obama threatens those voters' senses of self-esteem, and the person criticizing is harshly attacked. One found this same kind of frenetic, see-no-evil adoration in certain European countries in the 1920s and 1930s.

Once the Romney and Republican, conservative supporter realizes this, he or she can well handle the slings and arrows thrown by the likes of Chris Matthews and Laurence O'Donnell. Such emotional devotion has a tough time handling criticism (some of us, after all, had similar feelings about a certain peanut farmer in Georgia in 1976; it was painful to think we could have been so betrayed).

But the debates offer Obama's day of reckoning. He couldn't find any material about Romney. And Romney did not have seven years of torture and humiliation like McCain. McCain is a hero who deserves our respect, but those learned behaviors of accommodation allowed Obama to play McCain like a violin. Romney is a businessman accustomed to the real world, and as a debater, he had Edward Kennedy on ice (there simply weren't the conservative votes in liberal Massachusetts). He will drive the point home, and the thin-skinned Obamiac will stand on stage, stripped and found wanting.

 

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