THE OTHER SHOE DROPS: Updates To Previous Posts
† Reax To Biden Pick: According to the Gallup daily tracking poll from Aug. 23-25 - the three-day period following the Obama campaign’s 3 AM Saturday announcement that Sen. Joe Biden will be his running mate – Sen. Barack Obama has gotten zero bounce in voter support. In fact, Sen. John McCain is ahead of him in the Gallup daily tracking poll for the first time: 46 percent to 44 percent. Not only there was no bounce, but one could say Biden cratered.
† A Purpose-Driven Interview: When Rick Warren asked John McCain (R-AZ), “Does evil exist, and if it does do we ignore it, do we negotiate with it, do we contain it or do we defeat it?” he got this answer:
Defeat it. … If I’m president of the United States, my friends, if I have to follow him to the gates of Hell, I will get Osama Bin Laden and bring him to justice. … No one should be allowed to take thousands of … innocent American lives. Of course evil must be defeated. My friends, we are facing the transcendent challenge of the 21st century – radical Islamic extremists. Not long ago in Baghdad, al-Qaeda took two young women who were mentally disabled and put suicide vests on them, sent them into a marketplace and by remote control detonated those vests. If that isn’t evil, you have to tell me what is.
This is what McCain was talking about: A teenage girl in Baqouba, an Al Qaeda stronghold in Iraq, turned herself into police and told them that female relatives of her husband of five months had outfitted her against her will with a suicide vest stuffed with 33 pounds of explosives. Warning: The photos are graphic and chilling.
† Hate Crime or Home-Grown Terrorism? Either Way, CAIR Doesn’t Care.: Mohammed Reza Taheri-azar,25, a naturalized citizen from Iran who grew up near Charlotte, NC, has been sentenced to as much as 33 years in prison for deliberately mowing down a group students with his jeep at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in March 2006 to “avenge the deaths of Muslims around the world,” reports The Associated Press. Prosecutors consolidated the charges into two counts of attempted murder, and Taheri-Azar was sentenced to between 13 and 16 1/2 years in prison on each count.
† Updates To Previous Posts (fourth item, Now Is Not The Time To Talk About Race): Matt Bai, a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine, rebuts those who claim that whites are too racist to vote for Barack Obama:
The thinking among leading Democrats, and perhaps even inside the campaign itself, was that Mr. Obama needed a running mate who was also a validator, some earthy white guy who could say, effectively, of the party’s presidential nominee, “This dude’s as American as I am.” …
While it’s entirely possible that Mr. Obama’s race is costing him some support, it’s also true that the electorate that voted in the last two presidential elections was almost symmetrically divided between the two parties. It would defy the laws of politics if, at this early stage of the campaign, moderate Republicans and conservative independents were to reject Mr. McCain (a candidate many of them preferred back in 2000) simply because they don’t like George W. Bush. …
[T]he danger for Democrats is that dark prophesies of prejudice could be self-fulfilling.
Ever since 2000, a lot of so-called progressives have proudly displayed a healthy contempt for less-educated white voters who cast ballots in defiance of their “economic self-interest,” as Thomas Frank argued in “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” (The widespread acceptance of Mr. Frank’s thesis is how John Kerry largely escaped the scorn that is ritually visited upon losing Democratic presidential nominees; the members of his party directed their exasperation at the voters instead.) But surely caricaturing a large subset of voters as ignorant has made those voters even less inclined to pull the lever for the Democrats this time around. All this talk about racism isn’t likely to help.
It’s a safe bet that most whites are sick and tired of being pre-judged racists because of the color of their skin instead of the content of their character.
But you don’t have to take The Stiletto’s word for it. Check out the comments and letters to the editor about New York Magazine columnist John Heilmann’s recent article, “The Color-Coded Campaign” (here’s the money quote: “Call me crazy, but isn’t it possible, just possible, that Obama’s lead is being inhibited by the fact that he is, you know, black.”)
Here’s how the magazine’s editors sum up the general tenor of the reader reaction:
A powerful theme emerged in the responses … and it goes something like this: Well, I don’t like Obama, and I’m not a racist. My opposition is based on his inexperience and/or his radical liberalism. Some added a heavy dose of sarcasm, such as: “May I grovelingly apologize for being exposed as a vicious white racist because I openly mock Mr. Obama for having a résumé thinner than an anorexic supermodel, but with all her foreign-policy chops.” [Emphasis, original source.]
Bottom line: Heilmann, you’re crazy.
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