As the current election cycle has worn on (or worn thin, if you like), I've been asked on more than a few occasions if I thought the Obama campaign would rely on the "race card" as much as it did during the 2008 campaign. My prediction was that this would not be the case, although Obama surrogates and the press could be counted on to fling race cards with such abandon that someone was liable to lose an eye.
Although my predictions have been wrong from time to time, this one certainly was not. To date, the campaign has contented itself with mythical tales of Obama successes and Republican evils.
Other parties … well, that's another story entirely.
There was a stellar piece in the online U.K. Telegraph on Sept. 1 by Janet Daley, wherein she cited the Romney/Ryan message as being deeply relevant to European Union nations. That message is the inherent impossibility of concurrently sustaining a free-market system and a democratic-socialist welfare system.
This is accurate, of course, but what caught my interest was one of the most poignant reader responses to Daley's column. This individual pointed out with great concern how the press and other Obama surrogates in America were engaged in a dedicated, frenzied effort to make the election about Obama's race and racism in general.
This is also accurate; we saw this effort increase in exponential proportions during the Republican National Convention last week, when the national press presented selective and biased coverage of the speakers and events. In particular, Republican and conservative observers noted that television networks deliberately failed to broadcast some of the ethnic-minority speakers, instead skipping them and covering subsequent white speakers, whom I imagine were easier for them to condemn with impunity.
This was but one example. During panel discussions, the subject matter regularly turned to Obama's race, accusations of "code-speak" on the part of the Romney campaign, and its appeal to American racists. Practically nothing at the GOP convention could be uttered without some journalist, politician, or celebrity interpreting it as racially tinged.
And it has continued. On Tuesday of this week, the morbidly vapid Hollywood icon and emotional child abuser Alec Baldwin asserted via his Twitter account that "If Obama was white, he'd be up by 17 points." This was not only inaccurate pandering, it was shallow and stupid as well.
Often when I mention these things, conservative friends will admonish that people such as these are merely ignorant at best, morons at worst. Little doubt that this is true, but unfortunately they're morons to whom other morons listen.
As will prove no surprise, one of the worst offenders among the press is the television network MSNBC. A week ago on its "The Cycle" program, resident ethnic hack Touré and conservative S.E. Cupp got into it over his shameless purveying of leftist racial orthodoxy. Earlier in the month, Touré made his now nearly legendary "niggerization" comment pertaining to the Romney campaign's treatment of Obama. Undeniably, the worst of the worst of this dubious news organization would be Chris Matthews, who (as pointed out by WND earlier this week) repeatedly lurches into the hypocrisy of his own racism like a drunkard.
This inflammatory drivel and invective has fueled public fires, as evidenced by the personal attacks that followed a speech by Republican rising star Mia Love. A black woman, Love is the mayor of Saratoga Springs, Utah, and the 2012 GOP nominee for the House of Representatives in Utah's 4th Congressional District. She's also a Mormon. Immediately after Love's rousing convention speech on Aug. 28, hordes of loving, compassionate, tolerant left-wingers took to cyberspace and went into battle. From essentially vandalizing Love's Wikipedia page, to blogs, to social media sites, liberals online called Love the filthiest and most degrading things one can imagine attributing to a black woman, no holds barred.
The message is already well-known to conservatives, even if the double standard is ignored by liberals: If you're a "good nigger," and march with the political left, you fall under their protection. If not, you are subject to the most vicious slings and arrows of abject racism that can be mustered.
Even if this "racialization" does little to affect the outcome of the election, the left has been extremely successful in directing the race narrative thus far, and this could wind up being a serious practical problem in the short term. The irresponsible oratory of countless talking heads, politicos, and career activists, coupled with real economic disenfranchisement of blacks by liberal policies, has given rise to populations of truly angry and resentful black Americans in key urban areas.
As a result, the attitudes expressed by some fist-pumping, pro-socialist young blacks contain all the vitriol of '60s black nationalists. And why shouldn't it? After all, it's 2012 – nearly 60 years after the Civil Rights Movement began – and there's a New Black Panther Party (NBPP) that openly advocates killing whites and talks as though nothing whatsoever has changed since 1955. And they're not the only ones.
All of this race rambling is diversionary, to be sure; this week's Democratic National Convention has been replete with prominent speakers touting issues that are wholly irrelevant to those things with which Americans at large are concerned. The rhetoric across the board has consisted of that which appeals solely to fist-pumping pro-socialists.
The election cycle itself is the impetus for the surge of racial rhetoric; even in this area, the left has nothing of relative substance – like the Trayvon Martin shooting – to glom onto. If they did, they may have fomented race riots by now.