Video: No stimulus money for white males

I doubt the Obama Administration is foolish enough to go ahead with something like this, even protected by subtle euphemisms. The hardcore Obamabots are only a small part of his electorate, and all those blue-collar middle class swing voters would become very, very angry if their vote for racial harmony was thrown in their faces by a blatant racial spoils system, tied to the very financial crisis that spooked them into voting for Hopenchange. That would make them feel stupid, especially this early in the new administration, and the last thing a socialist government needs is an incipient tax revolt brewing. The trick to successful socialism is making the programs seem reasonable until after the bills come due.

I think it’s more likely that Obama will be forced into passing some measure that weakens racial preferences, somewhere down the line, much as Clinton was pushed into signing welfare reform. Just as Bush’s success in the War on Terror vaporized it as a major issue for the voters, and made it possible for them to support someone they would have laughed at in November of 2001, so Obama’s perceived improvements in race relations – secured by the very fact of his election – will make a sizable chunk of the electorate wonder why we can’t start peeling back some of those affirmative action policies. All of the people that voted against Obama, and quite a few of the people that voted for him, will be ready to go ballistic at the first sign that he’s turning into Jesse Jackson, just as Clinton had to do all that “triangulation” to avoid being dismissed as Michael Dukakis.

Besides, the Democrat machine doesn’t really need hardcore racial preference programs to hold its base together any more, just as they didn’t really need welfare any more in the 90s. What percentage of the minority vote would Obama lose by making some gesture against affirmative action programs in 2011? .00001%? And how much of the white middle class vote would he gain from such “triangulation?”

Doctor Zero on January 22, 2009 at 1:38 PM

LOL. Don’t you think it’s gone past understanding each other? One group will win, and one will lose. The sides are drawn. I think it goes without saying that the feelings you express are already understood, and are mutual. That’s no longer the point.

JiangxiDad on January 22, 2009 at 4:28 PM

People throw around the term “political realignment” a lot, but I think the last election was not such a realignment, but rather the prelude to one. The sides are indeed drawn, and now we get to see who joins up with each side. Realignments aren’t a result of one party winning a lot of seats in the government – they’re measured by how the votes are cast in the next election.

We had a significant realignment leading up to the 2006 election, based on scurrilous behavior from the Republicans, including that fabled drunken-sailor spending, and various weird unforced errors like the Mark Foley and George Allen kerfuffles. Coupled with weak politics from the leadership, including Bush, it led to a sizable number of voters wandering over to the other side. I don’t think it was a major realignment, on the scale of the tectonic shifts that brought in Reagan or the ill-starred Gingrich Congress, because somehow the Risen Christ only managed to eke out 52% of the vote, running against a boring candidate with weak support from within his own base, and bolstered by the effect of a financial crisis that his party was (remarkably) able to twist to their advantage.

Soon the voters will begin dividng themselves into teams for the 2010 dodgeball championships, the midterm elections. Realignments come when sizable chunks of the electorate begin to seriously question where they stand on the political spectrum. Reagan’s big break was the massive shift of blue-collar whites toward the Republicans, after they found themselves completely alienated from the Democrats. It wasn’t a single vote, or a single misbegotten bill, that moved them – it was the crushing sense of accumulating hostility and neglect from the Carter Democrats, coupled with the remarkable sense of incompetence radiating from the Carter Administration. Likewise, the voters of 2009-2010 aren’t going to get into squabbles about the exact wording of a particular bill, or the precise percentage of a tax shift. Instead, they will respond to the overall atmosphere of the parties, the collective sense of how well they feel represented. A season of prominent Democrat politicians and advisors musing about locking middle-class whites out of the stimulus bills they’re paying for will do wonders to get that entire segment of the electorate thinking about how they felt great about themselves when they elected the first black president, but they don’t feel any compelling urge to re-elect him.

Doctor Zero on January 22, 2009 at 5:23 PM