In the end, the lesson of political psychology for Democrats is not to avoid nominating black candidates. It is simply to understand that America's racial history continues to influence the calculations of voters--sometimes near the forefronts of their minds, sometimes in the deep recesses of their unconscious.
For years on this forum I have been posting my belief that Tip O'Neill had it wrong: All politics is not local, and America all politics is racial.
the rest of the article confirms what I have said in post from last week, especially the part about the surviving rationale of liberalism is their belief that we are racist and they are not. Here the author betrays that liberalism will never let go of this notion no matter how deep they have to mine the subconscious to dig up pseudoscience to justify it.
Here is the bulk of my post from May 9. I reproduce it here while I consider whether I should accuse Mr. Judis of plagiarism of my idea:
Yes Obama is an empty suit but he is actually more than that, he is a candidate who is African American and this racial reality entirely disguises the fact that the suit is empty. In fact, it was always better for Obama's campaign for the suit to be empty.
The American left, indeed the international left, is a hodgepodge of mutually inconsistent plans and programs which history has demonstrated cannot work. Leftists persist in their leftism because they believe that they are smarter than everybody else. Which really means," I am smarter than all the leftists who've come before and failed with this idea." The glue which holds leftism together when it should splinter apart because of its mutually inconsistent precepts, because it has shopped the entire country to ravening special-interest groups, is their idea that Republicans/conservatives are racists and they are not.
As long as we are racists and they are not, the left need not face up to its own looniness. This is why the left reacts so vehemently to politically incorrect racist remarks.... The coin of this political race card is white guilt.
Now comes Obama. As one black writer has pointed out, he has made a tacit deal with white liberal America: you support me blindly and I will in turn refrain from rubbing America's nose in its history of slavery and segregation. You can expiate your white guilt by voting for me. But Obama has to hold up his end of the deal, he must not rub our noses in our sins like Jesse Jackson or Reverend Al. As long as he was seen to be an empty suit-offering no reproach to America-we were comfortable with him.
Now comes The Right Reverend Wright. He has broken the deal. This is why Obama had to disown him. Wright rubs our noses in racism. To a conservative his crazy allegations are so bizarre that it makes not much sense and doesn't change the equation. We don't buy into this AIDS in Africa business, for example. But for a liberal, Reverend Wright's allegations are not bizarre but actually within the realm of intellectual respectability. We can dismiss them, but the left cannot because much of it comes right out of their own catechism.
What about the great mass in the middle? The moderates, the undecideds, the people who don't follow politics until after Labor Day, the folks who permit the likes of Barbara Walters or Oprah Winfrey to persuade them, what about them, the people who actually decide our elections? These decent folks don't want to be racists. They are always looking for a savior because they will tell you, "I always vote for the man." They shrink from the very idea of voting based on ideology. So an empty suit is no problem for them as long as he is also a savior. Obama was a savior. More, he was an empty vessel into which we could pour all of our yearnings and our simplistic hopes about the political process.
Now this illusion has been shattered by the right Reverend Wright and it remains to be seen whether the mainstream media can put Humpty Dumpty's pieces back together again.
