The anti-Obama Democrats

In the last two weeks, a stunnning 40 percent of Democratic primary voters in Arkansas, Kentucky, and West Virginia have voted against Obama. Democratic spokesmen and columnists are saying (naturally) that the anti-Obama voters are racists who are voting against Obama because he is black. To which John Podhoretz has an apt reply:

Wait a minute. Haven’t I been told for 30 years now—and by such media eminences as the longtime Washington Postie Thomas B. Edsall—that dastardly Democratic racists in Southern states had left their party for the more cruelly Caucasian climes of the GOP and had thereby turned Dixie into a Republican stronghold?

Indeed. It is one of the foundational assertions of modern liberalism that the post-1960s Republican Party in the South consists of racists who abandoned the Democratic Party in response to the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the Great Society. Yet now, when it serves the Democrats’ wicked and demagogic purposes, it suddenly turns out that 40 percent of their own party in Arkansas (the state that elected Bill Clinton three times as governor), Kentucky, and West Virginia (which came into existence by seceding from secessionist Virginia) is still made up of racists. So in the Obamacrats’ eyes, 40 percent of Democrats (at least in the South), plus all Republicans, are racists.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at May 25, 2012 07:50 AM | Send