We Get It: Only Idiot, Reactionary, Aging Racists Don’t Support Him

In predictably entertaining intellectual Indy fashion, Leonard Doyle is closely following the ongoing saga created by a Democratic party nominating process which has enabled Sen Obama to approach the nomination:

…If Mr Obama cannot break through the submerged racial prejudice of older white voters, the argument of many Democrats goes, he cannot win the White House.

Interestingly, older white voters’ “racial prejudice” is deemed a given. It is doubtless because they are not rioting in the streets that their bigotry must be, by default, “submerged”. Although how it can be discerned to be “submerged” when one doesn’t know precisely if it is actually there is, shall we say, somewhere Mr Doyle doesn’t choose to tread.

And that is a terrible shame. Still, sensing already as we well-do of a predictable tendency on the part of many — especially journalists — easily to be dazzled by “royalty”, one can hazard a reasonable guess. Naturally, because those voters aren’t flocking to Sen Obama, what, honestly, other reasons might there be not to support renaming the national capital Obamaton unless one is harboring “submerged” racial animosity towards him? Any are utterly inconceivable.

On the other hand, it is common knowledge now that Sen Obama regularly gets around 90% of the black Democratic primary electorate vote, and that, all too often, there is nothing much “submerged” about the racial prejudices of his own pastor, and those held by numbers of those black voters. Yet their overwhelming preference for the black man has nothing to do with Sen Clinton’s being a white woman. Indisputable is that their support for him is rooted solely in the transcendental, existential, indeed interstellar, appeal of his politics.

So it is a tremendous relief to discover “submerged” racism doesn’t trouble everyone out here. And while Joe Klein doesn’t scribble for the Indy, his being quoted herein doesn’t lead one to bat an ideological eye. The for a time submerged anonymous author of the anti-Clinton “Primary Colors” informs us that, as if “Obama deniers” being unconstructed racists wasn’t bad enough, not to be blinded by Sen Obama’s aura is de facto to mark one out as constituting an (if I can somehow summon up the brains to remember how to spell this) imbecile:

Time magazine’s commentator Joe Klein said poorly educated white voters have grave doubts “about a young, inexperienced African-American guy with an Islamic-sounding name and a highfalutin fluency with language”…

It must be mentally exhausting being so intelligent, while trying somehow to reckon with the perpetually cockamamie opinions emanating from that myriad of undereducated white trash voters. They just don’t get it. Or they simply refuse to.

Thus they stagger on, reactionaries possessed of under-informed bigotries. Yes, only the village idiot could possibly have concerns over the likes of handing the White House to a U.S. senator who has been in office all of three years, who in 2007 was credited with that body’s most left-wing voting record, one whom the more he speaks publicly the less he says, who possesses such a thin (political) skin that to disagree with him on almost any subject is to question not just his honor but your own moral center, and whose clearly Arab-rooted middle name is, for some reason, never to be uttered in public. (Yet all necessary to reassert the lost right to speak one’s mind freely, as we know.) They really do need some “hi-er edgumacation.”

…Mr Obama tried gamely to make a connection with working-class white voters, downing beers and large quantities of greasy food. He was mocked for his incompetence on the bowling alley, but far more damaging in the eyes of white voters was his association with his hot-headed former pastor Jeremiah Wright…

More intriguing than either writer’s anthropological interpretations of the essentials of white, working-class Americanism is, particularly, Mr Doyle’s studied characterization of the Senator’s pastor. “Hot-headed”? Huh. So that is how we are to describe a minister who thunders that the U.S. government invented AIDS in order to engage in a genocidal campaign against “people of color”? A man whom Sen Obama stands by, and therefore seems likely to grace an Obama White House with his regular presence?

That’s before one even gets to the Senator’s having also been willing — quite pensively, as we know — to toss his own (white) grandmother to the political/racial mob. But wait, there’s more — “…the Obamas’ cozy relations with Weather Underground terrorists Bill Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn…” — which is hardly of the slightest concern in terms of a presidential nominee. Yet another baseless assault on his honor, clearly. (Which the WaPo in February noted had not emerged into the “mainstream” until unjustifably outted in the muckraking British press by “the right-wing brother of the left-wing firebrand turned Iraq war supporter“: a description which itself is entirely relevant to the issue at hand, undoubtedly, given that that “right-wing brother” never supported the Iraq war.)

The New Black Panther Party’s recent endorsement of Sen Obama somehow went unmentioned by Mr Doyle. Also, the Hamas terror group’s (and even the EU labels it so) swooning over Sen Obama as another JFK — which, for some unfathomable reason hasn’t been headlined on Sen Obama’s campaign site — may have been made public just too late for Mr Doyle’s article. Yet one suspects Mr Doyle (and Mr Klein) finds both to be quite heartening, at least in terms of demonstrating the Senator’s stunning ability to bring together a truly diverse, thoughtful, global coalition.

So as to just why so many imbeciles white voters — and not just beer-downing, greasy food consuming, bowlers — might be a tad uneasy about a President Obama? Frightened cowerers, fearful of plunging into the future (opiated by their religion and keeping their gunpowder dry), they must be; it is their provincial shortcomings keeping them from failing to fall at his feet, worshipfully. (Or, put another way, their fear of “…the change that Obama offers…”, in the words of The Times’s ever-astute Simon Jenkins.) The real issue they should face is, how can they not embrace the “movement” that he embodies? After all, one prominent, white “lowfalutin” windbag political philosopher and social commentator does.

…David Axelrod, Mr Obama’s senior political adviser … sought to play down the importance of working-class voters, saying they had largely abandoned the Democrats in recent elections. Mr Obama’s appeal among black people, young voters, independents and even some Republicans would be more significant. “Let’s understand – the white working class has gone to the Republican nominee for many elections,” said Mr Axelrod. “This is not new. Democratic candidates don’t rely solely on those votes.”…

We have perhaps there gotten a quick peek at the excellent coming general election strategy Mr Axelrod’s helping formulate: he thinks Sen Obama can secure a presidential victory from a base built upon left-wing college students (and, lest we forget, faculty), 90% of 12% of the population, (MENSA member, white) “independents” and (how many?) wayward (white) Republicans. He is either preparing himself to win which four states exactly, or he must have forgotten those millions he now flippantly dismisses who stuck by Democrat William Jefferson Clinton in two elections and through an impeachment. Or perhaps I’ve just forgotten: what were the names again of the other Democratic presidents elected since 1980, without backing from those reactionary, racist imbeciles white voters?