I am not calling the presidential race just yet, because I honestly don't know who will win. But I honestly can't see how McCain pulls it out. The RCP average has Obama up by more than seven points, 49.7 to 42.4. No recent poll has McCain closer than six points. Short of some unforeseen big event, or a really massive "Bradley Effect," McCain is going to lose by about a hundred electoral votes.
Republicans are already busy making excuses. The biggest one is that the current economic crisis put the election out of reach. That's plausible, but it ought not to obscure the fact that Republicans were in big trouble already. The rather amazing thing about the race is that McCain has been competitive for most of it.
I will note a couple of things about the current campaign that bode well for America. First, and perhaps paradoxically to conservatives, the fact that America is about to elect the most leftist candidate ever to head a major party is a sign that our foundations are solid. Why did Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers not sink Obama? Is it because the connections weren't significant? No. The answer is that Americans just aren't that worried about Obama's radical inclinations, assuming he has them. We trust the system to reign those inclinations in. Bill Clinton tried to give us Canadian style health care when his party had a majority in Congress. The only significant result was a Republican majority in both house of Congress. That's how the system works. President Obama will be more liberal in his policies than George W., but he won't be radical, or he will be reduced. Maybe we are naïve to trust in our constitution, but I think not.
Second, Obama's election will show, beyond any reasonable doubt, that racism has been largely overcome in the political process. This year it has been the Democrats, and only the Democrats, who have been using the race card. The Clintons used it against Obama, and thereby probably lost the Black vote permanently. It's been used recently against McCain/Palin by the Associated Press. Here is Debra Saunders from the San Francisco Chronicle:
After GOP running mate Sarah Palin criticized Obama for seeing America as "imperfect enough that he's palling around with terrorists who would target their country," an Associated Press story suggested that "her attack was unsubstantiated and carried a racially tinged subtext that John McCain himself may come to regret."
A racially tinged subtext? Palin may have exaggerated about Obama "palling around" with William Ayers, a founder of the Vietnam War-era Weather Underground, which was responsible for a number of bombings across the country including quite possibly a 1970 explosion that left a San Francisco police officer dead. I don't think Obama and Ayers were pals so much as co-believers of a trendy left-leaning and standards-hostile philosophy on education.
And, Ayers is white. So it's hard to figure out how the AP writer construed Palin's remarks as "racially tinged," unless you see race in absolutely everything.
Using race against McCain in the silly way the AP did is just as pernicious as the infamous Willy Horton spot. To incite racial fears on the part of any group, without cause, is using the race card. And then there is this piece by Errol Louis in the New York Daily News:
Willie Horton has been summoned back to presidential politics - not as the frightening black rapist but as a legion of shadowy, easily demonized social outsiders.
Obama is being tied to - take your pick - Muslim terrorists, violent white hippies and even uppity "minority homeowners" who somehow, according to GOP spin artists, are among the top villains in wrecking the global economy.
McCain has begun harping on Obama's tenuous connection to William Ayers, an ex-radical who served with Obama on the six-member board of a Chicago charity.
This is noxious numbskullery of the worst kind. Tying Obama to Ayers may be fair or not, but only in Bizzaro world does it have anything to do with race. Likewise, pointing out that Congressional attempts to advance minority home ownership had something to do with the subprime loan crisis is perfectly legitimate point, if you care about causes and consequences.
The truth is that Republicans have been scrupulously respectful of Obama when it comes to race, and that matters. No doubt there are some Americans who won't vote for Obama because of his skin tone, just as there are a lot of African Americans who are voting for him because of that same reason. But most of us, obviously, are making our mind up on other grounds, and that matters.
If you think that Obama is a bad investment, I say I agree, but I also say: trust in the Constitution of the United States. It survived a civil war. It will survive this. And if Obama does win, can we not say that there is no office in the land that is not open to our African American citizens? Republicans have no inclination to use the race card. Maybe the Democrats will be forced to abandon it as well.
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