It is no surprise the media is going full throttle on the racism issue in this final week of the campaign. There seems to be concern among liberals that usual democratic voters will pull the lever for John McCain. NY Daily News writer Denis Hamill wrote an article today illustrating his concern that his white liberal contemporaries were defecting to McCain. Hamill emphasizes in each example that these Democrats are voting McCain because of Obama's race. (my emphasis added):
But we're nervous. We're Jewish and I spoke to my parents down in Florida today. They're voting for McCain."
"Because he's white," said the wife. "Same with my parents."
"They just won't vote for a black man," the guy said. "And they're Democrats! Never voted Republican before!"
If it were an isolated incident, I wouldn't mind.
But the woman at my table added that the only one of her three sons who was a registered Democrat was voting for McCain because he was white.
And I've been hearing stuff like that for the past few months. What I hear banging around Queens is not, of course, a scientific survey. It's anecdotal. But after a while you feel a disturbing vibe.
"Most of the guys at my law firm are voting for McCain," said a lawyer I know. "Not for any specific issue. Because he's white. No, make that because he's not black. It's scary because these are educated people."
He said his own wife was voting for McCain for the same reason. And she's a teacher.
Other educated white people have told me that "it's too soon" for a black man to be president. Or, "I thought it would happen in my kids' lifetimes, not mine."
And this is in Queens, the most ethnically, racially, and religiously diverse county in America, in "liberal" New York City.
In a previous Newsbusters post, I pointed out the left would no longer call Colin Powell an "Uncle Tom" so long as he endorsed liberals like Barack Obama. It works the other way around too. Hamill continues to compare the hatred against Jackie Robinson to those who are voting against Obama.
He finds this analogy when talking to his 9-year old son:
But many whites, including Democrats, can't see past his skin color, which is so ignorant that I have a hard time explaining it to my 9-year-old son, a baseball fanatic who just read a book about Jackie Robinson.
"I still don't understand why they spit on Jackie and called him all those bad names," he said as we drove on the Jackie Robinson Parkway to a batting cage on Metropolitan Ave. last week, 61 years after Robinson broke the baseball color line.
I tried to explain that it was a sick hangover from a terrible chapter of American history called slavery, when white people owned black people as if they were farm animals. "Some white people still think they are better than black people because of the color of their skin," I said.
He shook his head and said, "I think the real reason they hated Jackie Robinson is because he was so much better than most of the white people he played against."
He could have been talking about the presidential election.
Obama is no Jackie Robinson. Robinson had more major career achievements than Obama by age 35, and he did not need a fancy ivy league degree to do this.
Hamill also sees that it is not just Obama but his wife Michelle who is turning off voters normally voting Democrat:
"It's Michelle Obama who really bothers me," he said. "She just has a face that really looks to me like she doesn't like white people."
I didn't quite know how to respond.
I asked him how he would feel if someone said that Cindy McCain had a face that looked like she hated blacks.
He shrugged, acknowledged that his statement might seem irrational, but said he sometimes got the same "read" from the faces of certain black citizens he has to deal with on the job.
Lost in all of this, of course, is that Barack Obama is half white and was raised by a white mother and a white grandmother. But none of that should even matter. Obama hasn't run as a "black" candidate.
Hamill conveniently forgets Cindy McCain has never been a polarizing figure the way Michelle Obama has been. To say that Obama has not run as a "black candidate" is as next to laughable as making a big deal about Obama being raised by his "white grandmother."
Hamill needs to be reminded that Obama threw his sweet grandmother underneath the bus. The NY Daily News, in fact, reported Obama said the following:
In the speech, he sought to calm the fury surrounding the controversial remarks of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, saying he could no more disown Wright than he could his grandmother, who helped raise him.
Obama said his grandmother "on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."
Obama made things worse when he said this:
... .. The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity. She doesn't. But she is a typical white person who, uh, if she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know there's a reaction that's been been bred into our experiences that don't go away and that sometimes come out in the wrong way and that's just the nature of race in our society. We have to break through it..."
Hamill and the rest of the liberal media would like us to think that people who vote for the Democratic presidential candidate look beyond gender or race. In 1984, GOP voters were sexist because they rejected Democrat Geraldine Ferraro for vice president.
Today, the media says GOP voters must be racist if they reject Barack Obama for president. Imagine the accusations hurled at these same voters when the GOP presidential candidate is not white.
