Remember: ‘Ra-a-a-cism’ is spelled with three A’s

[aadler]

 
I love the reasoning.

Barack Obama is half-white, his skin a sort of café-au-lait shade. He is African-American only in one sense: his father was African, his mother was American. (He has African-American ancestry, but no African-American ancestors.) He grew up in multiracial, laid-back Hawaii. He was raised by his white grandparents, and mentored and sponsored, in college and in his political career, by white liberals. He has to do a transparent put-on of droppin’ his G’s to even unconvincingly approach ‘sounding black’.

Herman Cain was born in Georgia, of two black parents, his complexion almost shiny-black. His parents were domestic workers, and he made it through college by scholarships and his own labor, before going on to become a stupendous success in every endeavor he ever attempted. He speaks with the cadences and accents of the black people who lived and worked around me when I was growing up. Barack Obama has to resort to mimicry even to try to ‘sound black’; Herman Cain, so far as I can tell, has never so much as made the attempt to ‘sound white’.

And yet, liberals consider Herman Cain to not be ‘authentically’ black … and conservative support for Cain is supposed to be a camouflage for conservatives’ racism in opposing a black President.

Hmm. Conservatives support a black candidate who agrees with their politics, against a black office-holder who disagrees with their politics. Wait: in the Florida polls, conservatives supported a black candidate who agreed with their politics, against a roster of white candidates who weren’t sufficiently convincing that they supported conservatives’ politics.

That makes it sound as if, in a political contest, a certain set of prospective voters is throwing its support behind a candidate because of — gasp — his politics.

Oh, the horror.

Comments

[aadler]

Actually, I’m not altogether certain about Cain. His “9-9-9” proposal disturbs me in that a national sales tax just gives the government more power to steal from the public, and Hoover’s tenure shows that success in business is no guarantor of success in governing. (Hoover’s problem was that he was convinced that he could ‘run’ an economy more efficiently than if it was left to itself, an attitude by no means restricted to businessmen.)

I do like the man, though, and I love the way he’s shaking things up. I might or might not favor him over another of the Republican contenders — I think more attention should be paid to Santorum, and am interested in what we’ll learn once more is — but I’m happy with his presence in the race. And, if he should become the Republican nominee, he’d have to work HARD to keep me from voting for him over the current occupant of the White House.

[ozma914.livejournal.com]

I usually hate when other people say things like this, but I'll vote for *almost* anyone over Obama. I can't say anyone; after all, the Republicans could always pick Jimmy Carter, and then I'd have a rough time deciding.

Still, while I have my own problems with Cain in some areas, since Daniels decided not to run Cain is the one I'm leaning toward. That's likely to change, though: I don't usually study the candidates in depth until time gets closer to the Indiana primary, because there's no point spending a lot of time learning the positions of people who aren't going to be on the ballot by the time they get to me.