Race Has Become Democratic Issue

Barack Obama will now surely be his party’s nominee, but not president-elect. It’s all because he and his racist pastor have made race the issue.

Those realities became inescapable thanks to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s repeated, lengthy, video-taped, vulgar, blasphemous harangues and Obama’s stammering, bumbling, belated failure to disassociate himself convincingly from his spiritual mentor’s vehement black-racist, anti-Semitic hatred of America.

The irony is that Obama, who sought to position himself as the race-neutral candidate, has by that failed strategy indelibly identified himself as preeminently racial. Instead of making issues the issue, he trademarked by default all issues as racial. With no discernable daylight on policy positions between him and his intra-party rival, Hillary Clinton, he has emblazoned race as his identifier.

The voracious panther of racism at last out of the bag, there is no turning back. Self-imprisoned into awarding Obama the nomination, the Democratic Party will be the Black Party, for it has become whatever Obama is. He now owns it.

That is exactly as it should be. Obama has worked hard for, and earned, that nomination. In the Democratic primaries and caucuses he captured the majority of the popular vote and convention delegates, to the mathematical exclusion of his opponent’s ability to reverse their positions.

Were the Democratic National Convention to deny Obama the nomination and award it to the rival he trounced, it would unleash a firestorm of racial rebellion. In comparison, the immediate penalty it will pay for turning the Democratic Party over to everything it once stood against is as nothing. So the party is doomed to walk the very plank it built.

Too late, Obama and Democratic spin-artists are struggling feverishly to sell the absurdity that the preacher is nothing more than a harmless, nutty uncle no one need take seriously. It’s not working.

The American people are, on the whole, a compassionate, tolerant lot. They were willing to give Obama a serious listen, race or no race. When he asked to be accepted as someone who wanted to rise above racial ugliness, he was welcomed with enthusiasm, even pandemonium. He would unite the disunited.

Then he tripped on his own disingenuousness. Having bonded himself — for the past 20 years! — to that nasty-mouthed demagogue, there was no credible way Obama could brush him off like an incidental flake of dandruff. The time to sever ties was before seeking office, but he needed the rabble-rouser’s base of support to start in politics. Better never to have struck that Faustian bargain.

By denying the undeniable, Obama only ratified it. He had already publicly morphed with his malevolent counselor. His profuse, tardy disavowals simply could not pass the Chicago stockyards smell test.

Now, the Democratic Party cannot possibly disown Obama. It is welded to him right up until the general election — and thereafter.

Has Obama a realistic chance of becoming president? Only if you believe most Americas actually want to buy into black racism, after having come such a long way toward the goal of shedding the deserved shame of white racism.

Even if he once had a plausible shot at the presidency, that’s gone. Those awful images of racist hatred being screamed from the pulpit of Obama’s church by his mentor, the same pastor who married him and his wife and baptised their children, can never be erased from memory as voters go to the polls Nov. 5.

It’s one thing to capture a political party’s nomination. Getting elected by a national electorate is something entirely different. Until his preacher, like Mrs. O’Leary’s cow, kicked over a lantern in the barn, Obama was talking as if the Democratic primaries were the national election. That illusion has gone up in smoke. The Great Chicago Fire of 1871 pales.

What this has done to the Democratic Party is truly a crying shame. It’s bad enough the party of Harry S Truman, Averill Harriman, Scoop Jackson, Stewart Symington, Adlai E. Stevenson, Roy Wilkins, Bill Fulbright, LeRoy Collins, William O. Douglas, Martin Luther King Jr., Gene McCarthy, Jack Kennedy, Thurgood Marshall, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Sam Nunn, Barbara Jordan, Mo Udall, Zell Miller and Andy Young was taken over by a crew of latter-day Marxists and Hollywood radical nihilists. Now, it’s become the Black Party.

Is that too strong? Consider this. The national Democratic Party leadership, in and outside Congress, has made leftist issues the litmus test of whether a black person is authentically black. Those blacks who do not go along with the white leftists’ agenda are derided as Uncle Toms. Being black has come to be synonymous with being leftist and, thus, with being a Democrat.

What is more condescending than for white leftists to take for granted that blacks are in their pocket? Yet, it works. Blacks who don’t vote Democratic are scarce. No Democrat can be elected president without a lock-step black vote.

Obama was supposed to lift everyone — white, black, whatever — above all that. Instead, he has trapped blacks into the Democratic Party, and the Democratic Party into the radical-black agenda, which has become the far-left agenda for the whole national party. Perhaps that’s what he has meant all along by “unity.”

Millions of white Americans would be proud to see a black elected president of the United States. But not just any kind of black, certainly not a black with a racist agenda. Supporting such a black is as wrong as supporting a white simply because he, or she, is white. It should depend on the kind of white or black.

Instead of bringing closer the day when a black could be elected president, Obama, due to his duplicity and his racist mentor’s demagoguery, has pushed that day further into the future. Thus, he has robbed his own race.

This is cruel to blacks. It is dangerous for the United States. It is ruinous for the Democratic Party. It places a heavy burden upon the Republican Party.

Here’s why: This republic cannot long endure a two-party system in which one party is primarily of blacks, the other party primarily of whites. The Republican Party is the only institution left standing that can undo this unspeakable wrong. Through Barack Obama, the Democratic Party has blown its big opportunity.

The Republican Party will have to open wide its fold to both whites and blacks. It can do this on the basis not of their respective races but of their common commitment to issues that transcend race and reflect lasting American values.

Americans of decency are entitled to at least one party not lashed to racism, white or black. Thank God, they’re in no mood to turn the United States into an Obama-nation.

John L. Perry, a prize-winning newspaper editor and writer who served on White House staffs of two presidents, is a regular columnist for NewsMax.com.

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