Gotta love
this one:
The key thing is that Obama is angry, and he’s talking not in his normal voice but in a “black dialect.” This strikes at the core of Obama’s entire political identity: a soft-spoken, reasonable African-American with a Kansas accent. From the moment he stepped onto the national stage, Obama’s deepest political fear was being seen as a “traditional” black politician, one who was demanding redistribution from white America on behalf of his fellow African-Americans.
He doesn't have a Kansas accent, perhaps because he never lived in Kansas. He grew up in Hawaii and Indonesia, remember?
And second, who says that's Obama's greatest fear? It may have been his greatest potential liability; that he would be seen as just another in the long line of grievance black politicians.
For hilarity, it's hard to top this
offering from Tim Noah:
In the Aug. 1 Wall Street Journal, Amy Chozick asked, "[C]ould Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability?" Most Americans, Chozick points out, aren't skinny. Fully 66 percent of all citizens who've reached voting age are overweight, and 32 percent are obese. To be thin is to be different physically. Not that there's anything wrong, mind you, with being a skinny person. But would you want your sister to marry one? Would you want a whole family of skinny people to move in next-door? "I won't vote for any beanpole guy," an "unnamed Clinton supporter" wrote on a Yahoo politics message board. My point is that any discussion of Obama's "skinniness" and its impact on the typical American voter can't avoid being interpreted as a coded discussion of race.
I mean, seriously. When you hear skinny, do you think "black"? And anyway, I hadn't thought a lot about Obama being unnaturally thin. Among recent presidents, most have been reasonably trim; only President Clinton battled his weight. But, you see, to Noah, any discussion of Obama being physically different inevitably reminds people of the skin color difference:
It might be argued that body weight differs from certain other physical characteristics (apart from skin color) in that it has never been associated with racial caricature. Chozick wasn't asking (and, I feel sure, would never ask) whether Americans might think Obama's hair was too kinky or his nose too broad. But it doesn't matter. The sad fact is that any discussion of Obama's physical appearance is going to remind white people of the physical characteristic that's most on their minds.
Well, what about Obama's ears? Surely any discussion of those jug-handles (or use of them in caricatures of the President) must be a subtle form of racism, right?
I've already talked about fatman (he's white, and therefore overweight)
Mike Lupica's ridiculous take:
There will be so many things to talk about with Obama vs. Romney from
here to November, but the one that nobody will want to talk about very
much in polite society, even in what has a chance to be the meanest
presidential campaign for all times, is race.
It works against the President this time, in a big way.
Last time, there were just weren’t enough reasons for enough white
voters to vote against the black guy, as much as they wanted to. This
time there are plenty.
What
more reason does a racist need to vote against a black guy, than the fact that he's black? It's absolutely insane to suggest otherwise:
Racist 1: I ain't voting for no n****r.
Racist 2: Me neither. But what other choice is there?
Racist 1: You're right. But I'm gonna hold my nose when I vote for him.
Michael Medved, no surprise, has
the right take:
How is it that candidate Obama
managed to overcome racism so handily in 2008, only to feel crippled by
its renewed ravages in 2012? Did a big group of bigoted Americans only
belatedly wake up the shocking discovery that the nice young man with
the pretty wife and daughters who had recently moved into the White
House was actually (shudder!) black?
Or
do Democrats want us to believe that voters only temporarily overcame
their biases in response to the euphoria of the hope-and-change campaign
and then fell back into their nasty old prejudices at some point during
his first term?
In fact, if anything, Obama benefited from his race, as many people voted for him simply to make the statement that they weren't racist.
