Now the left plays the race card for Obama

America’s golden age of race relations, which began when Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008 with a seven-point lead over Republican Sen. John McCain, came to a tragic end a couple of weeks ago in July 2009.

That’s when, according to the left, the country that had elected him awoke from its state of denial, or stupor, and realized, to its unrelieved horror, that the man it had chosen was ... black.

How else for them to explain why his poll numbers slipped from astronomical to just about 50 percent, his approval ratings for his pet projects fell even further and his golden-tongued eloquence failed to persuade?

To the saner among us, these developments were due to one of three things, or perhaps all three together: the inevitable end of the honeymoon period; the fact that hopes for him were so overblown that the soufflé was bound to sink sometime; and the large block of people seduced by his temperate manner came to believe there was nothing temperate at all about his agenda, which was far more extreme than they cared to accept.

On the left, however, it seems this is all a facade, and these issues are merely a familiar channel through which racial fears are diverted.

“They’re probably reacting less to what Mr. Obama is doing ... than to who he is,”

New York Times columnist Paul Krugman told everyone. Krugman says the American right is consumed by “racial anxiety.” And the American Prospect assures us that

“the mainstream right’s ‘Americanism’ ... implicitly rejects people who aren’t white.”

Right. That’s why it raised such unholy hell when President George W. Bush made Colin Powell and Condi Rice secretaries of state in succession, and tried to put Janice Rogers Brown and Miguel Estrada on the fast track to Supreme Court nominations. It’s also apparently why Republicans made Michael Steele their new national party chairman... [snip]

In fact, Obama’s deep slide isn’t the work of these terrible GOP bigots. It’s the fault of the wide swath of swing voters who boosted him in the summer, swung to McCain in the first weeks of September and swung back to the rookie when the stock market crashed. And they voted for him on Election Day, many because he’s not white, and they have no problems with that part of the package.

It’s the far-left ideological part, the spending and deficits, to which they object. Polls show that Obama himself is far more popular than his major proposals, and that if he’d only gone with a somewhat more moderate program he’d still be just fine with these folks.

But to avoid this inconvenient truth the left is now trying to convince America that the enlightened and race-neutral country that elected its first black president is really a tragically race-obsessed nation as proven by its disagreement with Obama.

I'd love to say 'good luck with that', but with the established media's backing the left's 'luck' has proven able to sell the American people just about anything...

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