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Title: Barack Obama: Radical or Windbag?
Source:
The Inverted World
URL Source: http://inverted-world.com/index.php ... rack_obama_radical_or_windbag/
Published: Nov 17, 2008
Author: Ian Jobling
Post Date: 2008-11-18 17:42:59 by X-15
Keywords: None
Views: 86
Comments: 4
Barack Obama has filled racial right writers, as well as many commenters on this website, with dire foreboding. Steve Sailer has called Obama a “man of the radical left, driven by racial animosity against the American majority,” and has written a whole book to prove his point. Pat Buchanan predicts the passage of amnesty within Obama’s first 100 days, as well as universal health insurance that would cover illegal aliens. Michael Hart thinks Obama “hates whites” and is favorable to communism. I agree that Obama’s election is a disturbing and possibly disastrous event, and I will no doubt find many occasions to rail against him in the future. However, what we need now is a sober assessment of what the man actually believes and how he will try to change America. I have not found evidence to support the claim that Obama is a radical leftist driven by a lust for racial vengeance. Certainly, Obama’s association with the appalling Jeremiah Wright, his past work as a community organizer and civil rights lawyer, and the college radicalism described in Dreams of My Father prove that he possesses a profound sense of racial identity and was steeped in academic leftism in his youth. However, these aspects of Obama’s history should not be exaggerated. The Obama of The Audacity of Hope, the campaign, and the transition is a moderate center-left politician, not a firebrand leftist, on issues of race and welfare. Moreover, the circumstances of Obama’s presidency will make it difficult for him to pass even a moderate leftist agenda into law. The memory of the Republican landslide in the congressional elections of 1994 haunts the Democrats. They will be wary of provoking a conservative backlash by pressing for unpopular liberal policies, as the Clinton administration did after it came in 1992. There is, after all, no evidence that American public opinion is shifting to the left. Rather, Americans appear to have voted Democrat out of discontent with an unpopular president rather than eagerness for radical change. Voters in 2008 were much more likely to call themselves conservatives than liberals, and the percentages were almost exactly the same as in 2004. Voters chose the conservative option on most ballot initiatives dealing with issues of race, immigration, and culture. Obama undoubtedly favors amnesty and other forms immigration liberalization, although not as passionately as John McCain does. However, Mark Krikorian, the foremost expert on American immigration issues, has convincingly argued that the new administration recognizes the unpopularity of amnesty and will not push for it in the foreseeable future. The incoming White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel has said that amnesty has “emerged as the third rail of American politics” and once told a Hispanic activist that “there is no way this legislation [comprehensive immigration reform] is happening in the Democratic House, in the Democratic Senate, in the Democratic presidency, in the first term.” Many of the incoming Democrats ran on an anti-amnesty platform; in fact, the next Congress will not move substantially to the left on immigration. Besides, the rationale for any kind of immigration liberalization will be even weaker for the foreseeable future than it was during the Bush years, when all such initiatives failed. America is entering a recession that will probably last for years. It would be suicidal for any politician to back legislation friendly to foreign workers in a time of high unemployment. When it comes to affirmative action, Obama is hardly a radical. Rather his position is vague and cautious to the point of incoherence. In The Audacity of Hope, he makes it clear that he thinks blacks still suffer from widespread discrimination and endorses racial preferences as a correction. He even calls for “goals and timetables for minority hiring” for corporations, trade unions, and government agencies that are insufficiently diverse.1 On the other hand, Obama says that he thinks policies designed to help the poor in general will do more for minorities than racial preferences. For example, he writes, “a plan for universal health-care coverage would do more to eliminate health disparities between whites and minorities than any race-specific programs we might design.”2 When Obama addressed the NAACP in July, he didn’t mention affirmative action at all, but spoke of the need to help out all of the poor, “whether they live in Anacostia or Appalachia.” Finally, Obama thinks poor white applicants to college deserve preferences more than his own daughters, which would be an odd position for anyone who hated white people to take. Obama will face considerable resistance if he tries to implement affirmative action policies or stock the courts with judges who are racial preference radicals. Affirmative action has never been popular among Americans, and Obama’s very success has convinced even more people that it is obsolete. An October poll found that 68 percent of whites and even 43 percent of blacks believed blacks and whites have an equal chance of getting ahead today, which was up considerably from 1997 and even from earlier this year. Moreover, suspicions that Obama is a race-baiting demagogue, stoked by his association with Jeremiah Wright, almost sunk his campaign. Since Obama will be eager to avoid reviving these suspicions, he may actually be less aggressive in promoting racial preferences than a white liberal president would be. Moreover, we don’t need to worry that Obama is a socialist or a Marxist or any such thing. Yes, Obama believes in greater government investment in and regulation of business; yes, he supports an increase in welfare spending, particularly for health care; yes, he wants to raise taxes on the wealthy. However, Obama believes in government as a supplement and partner to the free-market system, not as a replacement for it. In The Audacity of Hope, Obama speaks of the “bankruptcy of socialism and communism” and praises America’s “business culture,” which has resulted in “a prosperity that’s unmatched in human history.”3 There is good reason to believe, moreover, that Obama’s plans to increase welfare spending will founder. The government has already spent trillions on the bailout of the American financial sector, and now the Democrats want to bail out the automakers too. It will be difficult for the Democrats to justify increasing the size of the welfare state after this orgy of spending. Democrats will also find it hard to convince Americans that businesses should spend more on employee health insurance during a recession when business will be struggling. Finally, fiscal conservatives will be able to make a strong case that tax increases of any kind will retard economic recovery by lowering investment. All predictions about the course of a presidency are unreliable, of course. A single event can push a president in an unexpected direction, as 9/11 did Bush. All bets about the Obama presidency are off if the worst forecasts for the economy—those that call for an outright depression—come true. If unemployment reaches 20 percent, America may enter strange and turbulent times, when radical changes, whether for good or evil, become possible. Moreover, only a rapid Republican recovery can contain the left. The Democrats will grow more frightening the longer they retain the presidency and their congressional majority. The interpretation of Obama as a radical racialist and leftist mistakes the man’s basic motivations. As he made clear in his March speech on race, Obama thinks of himself not as an avenger, but a healer. As Obama sees it, blacks, whites, Hispanics, all of us are angry. We all need to come together and learn to understand each other’s anger so that we can forgive it and be healed, and Obama himself is the miraculous being who will make this transcendence possible. Obama’s image of himself is not just pompous and hackneyed, but downright insulting. After all, whites are suicidally indulgent to minorities already—how much more understanding and forgiving do we have to be? However, Obama’s vanity is less likely to result in hate-whitey legislation than in windy speechifying about a “the fierce urgency of now” and “unyielding hope” and such. So stay strong, keep the faith, and make sure your remote has a functioning mute button!
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#1. To: X-15 (#0)
Obama is going to play it safe because he wants to stay in power.
Turtle's secret Indian name is Two Stuck Dogs.
Trouble is, McCain would have done the exact same thing. Open borders are second only to Israel as a litmus test for "electability" to high office.
Ain't it so. What hope do the people have to elect a sensible citizen to national office when being honest will only get you a dagger in the back from the MSM and every social commentator who purports to speak "for the people"??
there is no hope, X. and what's becoming more and more apparent is that we'll never escape the bushes and clintons. obama's admin is shaping up to be clinton redux.
#2. To: X-15 (#0)
(Edited)
Pat Buchanan predicts the passage of amnesty within Obama’s first 100 days
#3. To: Rupert_Pupkin (#2)
Open borders are second only to Israel as a litmus test for "electability" to high office.
-Schweizerische Schuetzenzeitung (Swiss Shooting Federation) April, 1941
#4. To: X-15 (#3)
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