Republicans Can't Wait for President Obama, It's Goodbye to Affirmative Action

Even though Republicans aren't too smart, somehow they fine tune a message that strikes to the heart of racist Americans everywhere. They have always despised helping "minorities" get ahead with affirmative action. We should have seen it coming, when they would often bring up Condi Rice and Colin Powell, as examples of their "big tent" strategy. Once a few minorities make something of themselves, it proves all the others, even the ones in our inner cities, are getting fair treatment. They should be left alone with all the tools Republicans have left them.

Case in point, if Barack Obama becomes president, affirmative action goes out the window. According to the PBS program, To the Contrary, "The presumptive Democratic nominee is proof color can succeed without preferences."

Genevieve Wood, from the Heritage Foundation, tried to make her point about black success by pointing out how rich Oprah is. You know Oprah, your typical average next door neighbor.

The best moment came, when Ilana Goldman, from the Women's Campaign Forum, made what seemed like an apple to apples comparison. "We had the first black governor right after the Civil War. Well, it's been well over a hundred years, how many black governors have we had since then, 5?"

A good point. After all, the small number of black governors may have had something to do with discrimination. And perhaps that's why we haven't seen a black president yet.

What, it wasn't a good point? Tara Setmayer, comm. dir. for Rep. Dana Rohrbacher, lost the argument immediately when she said, "We can't have affirmative action in government. Where do you draw the line?"

Crazy isn't it. Conservatives can lay claim that Obama's success, in government, shows we don't need affirmative action. Yet you can't lay the same claim that due to very few elected minorities in government, that we still need affirmative action?

I predict this will be a big issue during an Obama presidency, unless he gets out in front of it first.




So is Racism in America Gone? Should we dump affirmative action?
According to the latest New York Times/CBS News poll. more than 80 percent of black voters said they had a favorable opinion of Mr. Obama; about 30 percent of white voters said they had a favorable opinion of him.

Nearly 60 percent of black respondents said race relations were generally bad, compared with 34 percent of whites. Four in 10 blacks say that there has been no progress in recent years in eliminating racial discrimination; fewer than 2 in 10 whites say the same thing. And about one-quarter of white respondents said they thought that too much had been made of racial barriers facing black people, while one-half of black respondents said not enough had been made of racial impediments faced by blacks.

The survey suggests that even as the nation crosses a racial threshold when it comes to politics many of the racial patterns in society remain unchanged in recent years. Nearly 70 percent of blacks said they had encountered a specific instance of discrimination based on their race, compared with 62 percent in 2000; 26 percent of whites said they had been the victim of racial discrimination. (Over 50 percent of Hispanics said they had been the victim of racial discrimination.) This month’s poll found that 55 percent of whites said race relations were good, almost double the figure for blacks.