How Not to Run a Government

Race and Politics in America

By Alan Caruba

Politics in America has always been about race. It began with the writing of the Constitution and the compromises made by the Founding Fathers in order to keep the southern states in the fold.

It can be found in the very first Article that makes reference to the “respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of ten years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons.”

Those “other persons” were black slaves.

On June 21, 1788, the Constitution became effective when New Hampshire became the ninth state to ratify it. In 1861, seventy-three years later, the Civil War began and lasted until 1865. Despite amendments passed after the war to enfranchise the freed slaves, it was not until 1964 that a comprehensive Civil Rights Bill was passed that ensured the enforcement of measures to bring about a measure of actual equality.

Then President Lyndon Johnson reportedly said to his then aide, Bill Moyers, that in signing the bill, the Democrats had forfeited the South and he was right. In the years that followed, the southern States became red states.

When Republican Majority leader, Trent Lott, revealed his inner racist while celebrating Sen. Strom Thurman’s 100th birthday, the calls for his resignation were loudest among Democrats and now, another Senate Majority Leader, Harry Reid, is in trouble for calling the President a “Negro” and complimenting him on the fact that he does not have a dialect widely associated with the black community. Sadly for Reid, leading race-baiters, Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, both have run for the presidency in the past and have dialects that are easily imitated.

Racism in America is not a one-way street, nor is it restricted to the black-white divide. In the “melting pot” of America, we all mock each other to the endless amusement or annoyance of the groups involved.

One of the classic Saturday Night Live segments pitted Chevy Chase against Richard Pryor in an exchange of racially charged slurs. It probably did more for race relations than all the laws on the books because it revealed that racism is part of the fabric of our society.

The revelation about Sen. Reid may get him dislodged from his position as Senate Majority Leader even though the White House immediately made it known that President Obama had forgiven him and accepted his apology. It is no small irony that Hispanic Americans now outnumber black Americans, ensuring its minority status for the future.

The election of Barack Hussein Obama was initially seen as indication that the bad old days of racism were behind us. While more than 90% of the black community understandably voted for him, he needed a significant margin of white/Hispanic votes to get elected.

Voters were so obsessed with former President Bush’s two terms that they ignored the fact that he selected Colin Powell to be the first black Secretary of State and that Powell was succeeded in that office by the first black woman, Condoleeza Rice. Bush’s father had elevated Powell to the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

By comparison, President Obama’s selection of Eric Holder as the first black Attorney General has generated a huge backlash for his decision to extend the full rights of the Constitution to admitted enemy combatants.

I am not given to predictions, but I will suggest that Barack Obama will be the last black President for a very long time.

Obama has performed so poorly in his first year in office that he has made it impossible for future generations of Americans to disassociate his race from the disappointment he has engendered.

If it turns out that Obama was never eligible to run for and hold the office, he will have compounded his failures and harmed the interests of black Americans in public life for a very long time to come.

The Race is Now About "Race"

By Alan Caruba

It doesn’t matter how many times Sen. Barack Obama or any politician in America says that the national race for the presidency is not about race. It will be about race.

This nation has a long history of elections in which the issue of race was at the core of who would win or lose, dating back to the beginning of the Republican Party when Abraham Lincoln ran on a platform of not expanding slavery into new states. He did not run to abolish slavery although it was clearly abhorrent to him. As we know, a Civil War ensued during which slavery was the core moral issue, surrounded by many economic ones and, for the South, dominated by that of state’s rights.

In my lifetime, Gov. George Wallace, running for the presidency was severely injured in an attempted assassination. Earlier, Sen. Strom Thurmond had broken with the Democrat Party to run independently as a Dixiecrat. After President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act, he correctly predicted the South would become a Republican domain.

So let’s not kid ourselves here. With the likelihood that Sen. Obama will be the Democrat nominee for the presidency, the election is going to split, as it has often throughout the primaries, along White, Black, and Hispanic lines. To date, Sen. Obama has garnered easily 90% of the Black vote as might be expected and nearly 50% of the Hispanic vote.

It is likely that the 40% of the White vote from within the Democrat Party is attributable to a large turnout of younger voters who did not experience the turmoil of the 1960s civil rights movement and who are entranced by Sen. Obama’s rhetorical skills.

There is no doubt that he is a powerful speaker, but as others have pointed out before me, he speaks in platitudes and vague thoughts about “change” and the “future.” His political record is that of a far-Left liberal and his personal associations with men like Rev. Jeremiah Wright and former Weatherman Bill Ayers cannot and will not be lightly dismissed in a national election.

In a national election, a significant portion of White Democrats is going to desert Sen. Obama, crossing over to a safer candidate, the center-right Sen. John McCain. It may be a close election as has been the pattern of the past, but as President Bush proved in his first election, a win is a win, no matter how narrow.

The withdrawal of troops from Iraq has already begun. Some will and must remain to protect Iraq against an unpredictable Iran. The economy will be a major issue, but it continues to demonstrate how resilient it is and any improvement will favor Sen. McCain.

In the end, the election will be won and lost on the issue of race. Saying it won’t doesn’t change that immutable American reality.

Does History Repeat Itself?

By Alan Caruba

For those who do not believe that history repeats itself, I give you the words of a U.S. Senator who died in 2001. At the end of selections from the original text I will reveal who spoke them and the year in which he spoke them.

“The Democratic Party has abandoned the people…It has repudiated the Constitution of the United States. It is leading the evolution of our nation to a socialist dictatorship.

“The Democratic Party has forsaken the people to become the party of minority groups, power-hungry union leaders, political bosses, and big businessmen looking for government contracts and favors…

“The Democratic Party has invaded the private lives of the people by using the powers of government for coercion and intimidation of individuals.

“The Democratic Party has rammed through Congress unconstitutional, impractical, unworkable, and oppressive legislation which invades inalienable personal and property rights of the individual…

“The Democratic Party has established and pursued for our government a no-win foreign policy of weakness, indecision, accommodation, and appeasement.

“The Democratic Party has demonstrated a callous disregard for sound fiscal policies and practices.

“The Democratic Party has encouraged, supported, and protected the Supreme Court in a reign of judicial tyranny, and in the Court’s efforts to wipe out local self-government, effect law enforcement, internal security, the rights of the people and the states, and even the structure of the State governments…

“The party of our fathers is dead…If the American people permit the Democrat Party to return to power, freedom as we have known it in this country is doomed, and individuals will be destined to lives of regulation, control, coercion, intimidation, and subservience to a power elite who shall rule from Washington…

The year was 1964. Lyndon B. Johnson had replaced the assassinated President, John F. Kennedy, and the war in Vietnam was raging. The Republicans would nominate Barry Goldwater as their candidate for President. After a landslide victory, Johnson would serve through 1969, but, mired in the Vietnam War, would forego running for a second full term. His Vice President, Hubert Humphrey, would run for the office, but be defeated by Richard M. Nixon.

The Senator who spoke in 1964 was Strom Thurmond of South Carolina. He and his fellow “Dixiecrats” had fought the Civil Rights Act until JFK’s death and the Civil Rights movement, led by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., succeeded in his wake.

Forty-four years later, Sen. Barack Obama, an Afro-American, is likely to be the Democrat Party’s nominee unless the super-delegates take it away and give it to Sen. Hillary Clinton. Obama is acknowledged to be the most politically liberal of candidates since Humphrey’s day.

The Democrat Party wants to take over the health care industry in America, imposing yet another entitlement program, not unlike the bankrupt Social Security and Medicare.

The Democrat Party wants to withdraw from Iraq and abandon it to the mercies of Iran and other Islamists.

The Democrat Party is a driving force behind all manner of legislation and regulation based on environmental goals and a belief in global warming, a scientifically discredited hoax.

Strom Thurmond threw his support to Barry Goldwater who was decisively defeated in 1964. Thurmond had switched parties and become a Republican. The South would follow suit. A segregationist, much earlier in his life Thurmond had fathered an illegitimate black daughter. The nation each left behind has since embraced conservative principles even if the White House and Congress have ignored them.

Does history repeat itself? Yes, it does, but often in ways no one can predict.

Black Statistics

By Alan Caruba

The speech Barack Obama gave on the subject of race in America has received all kinds of congratulatory statements. I saw news reports showing Obama on a stage full of American flags behind him and, perhaps cynically, thought that this is what every politician does in moments of crisis. Get out the flags!

Since I cannot address any of the points he made, let me refer you to the National Urban League’s annual State of Black America report, issued in April 2007.

“Empowering black men to reach their full potential is the most serious economic and civil rights challenge we face today,” said Marc H. Morial, the Urban League president, adding that is necessary, not just for blacks, but for the entire American family.

Here’s what the Urban League had to say in 2007.

African-American men are more than twice as likely to be unemployed as white males while earning 74% as much per year. Unemployment for black men was 9.5 percent, as compared to 4 percent for white men.

Black men are nearly seven times more likely to be incarcerated, with average jail sentences about ten months longer than those of their white counterparts.

Black males between 15 and 34 are nine times more likely than whites to be killed by firearms.

Black males are nearly eight times more likely than whites to suffer from AIDS.

After attending elementary school, blacks “begin to fall behind on standardized tests.” (President Bush’s heralded No Child Left Behind). The Urban League reported that in fourth grade blacks perform at a level of 87 percent of whites. By the time they reach twelfth grade, their scores are at 74 percent of whites.

By high school blacks are more likely to drop out—15 percent, as compared with 12 percent for whites.

There’s no point laying out more statistics because none of this should come as any surprise to anyone in the black community and are understood by whites as a kind of cultural contagion, a pathology that defeats black males and presumably their female counterparts.

This nation went through a Civil War in the 1860s that cost hundreds of thousands of lives in order to keep the southern states from succeeding and whose great moral cause was to end slavery. After the war the states passed the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments to the Constitution to insure that slavery would never again exist in America and that blacks would be granted the rights of all citizens.

In the 1960s, a century after the Civil War, yet another struggle was waged to end the indignities of segregation, Jim Crow laws, and other impediments to blacks. President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act into law.

Here we are nearly fifty years since those days and a black man, Barack Obama, is competing to be the nominee of the Democrat Party against yet another historical breakthrough, a white woman, the first to be taken seriously as a contender for that high office.

I would suggest that whites in America have thoroughly reformed themselves, though often because of the laws that broke the back of institutional racism. They have cheered the ascendancy of many blacks to positions of honor in this nation.

I would suggest, however, that there is a deep, frequently unspoken sadness and even anger among whites that the statistics cited by the Urban League in 2007 represent a black population that, in general, has failed to live up to the opportunity that America has provided, opportunity that people died to provide.

I know the exceptions to this and I count them to be as dear as my own family, but they are the exceptions.

Official Apologies as Empty Gestures

By Alan Caruba

The front page of the Star-Ledger, New Jersey’s largest circulation daily, had a story on January 8, “Jewish Cemetery Vandalized.” In its New Jersey news section inside the paper, among the “Action in Trenton” roundup, was a short item, “Apology for slavery sails through legislature.”

I wonder if there will be an apology for the damage done to the graves of dead Jews? Not likely. Perhaps it was just some teenage vandals or perhaps it was some kind of Islamofascist message being sent?

Germany has made significant efforts to apologize for the Holocaust, but anyone who lives there will tell you that considerable anti-Semitism exists among the generations born well after that event. In many Middle East nations, the Holocaust—the deliberate murder of some six million Jews—continues to be denied.

In the United Nations, there’s a resolution condemning acts of hatred against religions, but the only one specifically named is Islam. Condemning Islam as the source of the atrocities that have been occurring in recent decades is apparently a bad thing.

These thoughts, however, are not about anti-Semitism. They are about the efficacy of apologies. This is particularly true of apologies for events in which the current residents of New Jersey or any other State did not participate. In short, why bother? What good does it do?

Slavery had been part of America’s history almost from the beginning. It was widespread throughout the world and was (and is) a mark of man’s inhumanity to man. The Founding Fathers found the issue of slavery so intractable they concluded that it should be ignored while fashioning the world’s oldest living Constitution.

A century later the northern and southern states fought a war in which slavery was the moral cause, but other issues such as state’s rights and tensions over economic issues were the driving forces. In 1800, there were 12,422 slaves in New Jersey. The 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments clarified issues of citizenship and rights of former slaves after the Civil War. This was then followed by a hundred years of segregation and the denial of those rights until, in the 1960s, these wrongs were laid to rest.

All of which is to say that history often is a very long and frequently painful journey to achieve a moral and legal resolution to societal wrongs. Today, a mulatto with an Islamic name is running for President. The U.S. Secretary of State is Black. Her predecessor was Black. There’s a national holiday in honor of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., who led the struggle for racial equality. Some people would call that progress.

Some people, however, have to demand apologies. Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, and Maryland have issued apologies. There are similar bills pending in Massachusetts, New York, and Arkansas.

I cited the desecration of the Jewish cemetery to remind us that hate never really goes away. There will always be people who hate Jews. There will always be people who hate Blacks. Official apologies for past wrong will not change this. They are vacant gestures and, in my opinion, an affront to those who did not participate in, nor condone, past wrongs.