Guess who’s the happiest man in America today? No, it isn’t Barack Hussein Obama. It’s John McCain.
While it is unquestionably historic and even redeeming that a major political party would be poised to nominate a black man as their candidate for President, that does not change the dynamics or demographics of the voters who will go to the polls in November.
Obama may be all about “change”, but when the voters discover the specifics of change he has in mind, they are going to fall out of love with him. This is why Hillary is being heavily recruited to fill in the gaps among Hispanics and blue collar voters by accepting the vice president slot.
There is no question that the America of my youth, the America of separate water fountains, segregated schools, the back-of-the-bus America, is over. There are laws guaranteeing equal rights and even some laws that offered special status if you were the member of a minority.
It took a hundred years from the end of the Civil War in 1865 before America put its house in order, eliminating the Jim Crow laws and other abuses. We have all seen a lot of change, but it need be said that a lot has not changed for blacks in America. Large numbers remain in poverty. Large numbers fill the jails. Large numbers drop out of school.
Progress tends to be made in baby steps.
One baby step is named Barack Hussein Obama. His nomination is going to make a lot of liberal Democrats feel very good about themselves, but the liberal lens through which they view the nation and the world is the same one that previously nominated George McGovern and Michael Dukakis. It is the same one that selected Al Gore and John Kerry. Whether they lost by large or small margins, the fact remains that they lost.
That is why John McCain, the presumptive Republican candidate for president, is very happy today. He knows what anyone paying any attention whatever to voting patterns will tell you. The voters have tilted to the right since the days of the Reagan Democrats in the 1980s. Not a lot, but just enough to get the likes of George W. Bush elected, not once, but twice.
The voters, some of them Democrats, remember that the Clinton years were not all the rosy scenario the party would have them recall. There were suicides and scandals. There were wholesale pardons and the attempted theft of White House furniture.
Change sounds good when a nation is experiencing economic troubles and it sounds good against the background of an unpopular war, but the real question in the minds of voters will be change to what?
Do voters want change that involves insane proposals like the “Climate Security Act” being debated in the Senate, a piece of legislation that will destroy what’s left of our battered economy? Change that will end the tax cuts? Change that will grasp defeat from the jaws of victory in Iraq?
There is something symbolic in the announcement by the worst President in the modern era, Jimmy Carter, that he is endorsing Barack Obama. There is something predictive in it, too.
