All in good fun.

And if you think the post is a bit much, I just re-edited that comment about six times. Seven. I really need to meet someone.

Okay, your response nicely breaks down your theses so far as I can see into these two separate propositions:

A.) That Obama’s/the Dem’s economics have been as bad as the Republicans and Bush’s.

B. Essentially, that Obama is a race warrior.

Again as to A. I’d say not, and again if for no other reason than it has been the Democrats who it turns out were more right as to the need for vigorous regulation of things and that, along with Buchanan for instance, they have not so fully fallen under the spell of the words “free trade” no matter what.

And as to B. I note once again that despite his not insignificant amount of time in public life now you still are unable to cite anything from the lips of Obama themselves supporting your point.

Yes I agree there’s the circumstantial evidence that the waters he sprung from and swam in are polluted with the kind of racialist thinking you note. But it’s still only circumstantial, which is seemingly contradicted by great masses of the direct.

Put it this way, even if one could come up with some racialist-type comments Obama made when he was a “community organizer” or etc. I think one would have to grant that politicians and budding politicians are always prone to saying what their constituencies want; that people get carried away; that it would be unfair to hold anyone to every offhand comment they made; every comment or thought they had when they were young; every comment made in the course of casual talking, and etc., and so forth.

And yet here I at least haven’t really even seen any such “non-serious” comments attributable to Mr. Obama, which I admit surprised me given his waters and given that one can hardly expect that he always knew he was going to be in the Presidential spotlight some day.

And then there’s any number of things to the contrary he’s said while he *has* been in the spotlight and campaigning. Seems to me if anything in his major speeches he’s gone out of his way to distance himself from being a fundamental racialist. And then look too at when it was in his interest to portray himself as one: E.g., when he was still so unknown and Hillary was still collecting the vast majority of the African-American votes. Did he go onto some racialist pandering spree? Pretty clearly not it seems to me, not even to any degree that I know of. And think of how significant that would seem to be.

Forget being fair to public figures, it seems to me just in terms of trying to get history right that in assessing them that you have to look at what they have done or said when things were *serious*. When it wasn’t just little offhand actions or statements concerning something but big actions and serious speeches. And so far at least since he’s not had any chance to do anything yet I think Obama’s serious, deliberate words about race so far have been about as anodyne as possible. Seriously, deliberatively so. And indeed amazingly so not only given the political environment he sprung from and swam in, but also in contrast to the kinds of racialist talk that damn near every other African-American in public life today feels they are obligated to utter.

Thus, all I’m really saying is this: Given the kind of racial politics and rhetoric that’s so common today, wouldn’t you admit that Mr. Obama hasn’t just been *relatively* innocent of same, but indeed has been freer of same than absolutely every other Democratic alternative would have been? Including all the white ones too?

I do, and think it’s pretty amazing. Surprising too because of all that circumstantial evidence you note that for a long time had me suspecting exactly what you do. But then I watched and listened pretty hard and … I’ll be damned; if anything I suspect the guy feels that there’s been too *much* racialism that’s gone on a la that brilliant, brave McWhorter fellow. And at any rate the direct evidence just simply hasn’t been there to the opposite so all I can say is … let’s keep our fingers crossed, no?

Cheers,

I do intend to take time at some point to praise President Obama’s intent to dismantle the worst of Bush’s foreign policy and civil liberties excesses. But as for economics, neither of these men has the wherewithal to conceive of a significant change, much less the political freedom of movement to institute one.

Other than your mistaken impression that I’m contrasting Obama with Bush or Limbaugh (may the name never darken this blog again), or defending the corporatism that has recently passed for free market ideology, nothing in your commentary contradicts what I’ve written here.

As for Barack Obama’s demagogy, read the Rev. Wright’s speeches (quite entertaining), read the president’s books (less so) and read the text of his grand speech on race, the utter vacuity of which was only punctuated by the one clear point made therein: slavery is America’s “original sin”, therefore black Americans will not only always hold a greivance against her, they are morally bound to it.

The converse of this is that each white American forever carries the cardinal sin of slavery. We’re angry and we’re always going to be angry; you’re guilty and you’re always going to be guilty.
This is demagogy, not “unity.” It is furthermore founded upon a lie; the lie being that a black American is unfortunate to be born an American, when in fact he is blessed by the circumstance, for the unique opportunity and freedom it affords him. That this is the result of a historical sin does not lessen that; it is merely one more of history’s morally confounding random twists.

But this is only the beginning. There is a more immediate lie with far more immediate and tangible consequences: the lie that black economic underacheivement is the result of white racism. Barack Obama’s entire career has been devoted to exploiting and perpetuating this misconception. That’s for another long, rambling post.

But above all, collective guilt is a tyrannical lie that brings power to the few, strife among the many and, if too long exploited, bloodshed. That it is widely accepted does not change that. Shame on President Obama and the whole corrupt consensus that holds this appalling, primitive notion self evident.

Firstly, as to what seems its most damning detail, you wrote:

“There is also the deliberate stoking of fear and anger; the purposeful manipulation of white neurosis and black grievance …. This is the leer beneath his already iconic smile.”

But nowhere in your rather bleak and multi-dimensional denunciation of Obama did I at least see even one word of his cited to support this charge.

And as regards your comment’s more general thrust, okay, it seems fair to agree that his economics to date have been those of the governmental elites in terms of profligate public spending, but what evidence if there of any worse than, say, George Bush and his party’s war or prescription medication plan? Or worse than Ted Stevens and all the other Republican pork-barrelers?

And how exactly is his announced intention to continue with the present bailout program (albeit with some undefined changes) and institute a new stimulus program all that different from what Bush did?

Moreover of course it appears that it really isn’t *public* debt that’s brought us to this crisis at all. It’s been *private* debt, and under whose watch has this happened? So even speaking generally under whose party has the regulation all these financial speculators been the most scorned and spurned? Mr. Bush’s, not Mr. Mr. Obama’s. And whose party is the one more known for the favoring of regulation? The latter’s, of course.

And yet on the other hand whose party has mustered more opposition to what’s been so conventionally called “free trade” such as contained in the NAFTA treaty and etc.? Seems to me it’s been the Democrats who have had at least some members trying at least some times with some subjects to pierce the hypnotic veil of that phrase and insist—like Pat Buchanan—that some *other* measures such as fairness ought to be insisted upon as well so that we don’t flush our old industries down the toilet.

Do I dislike highly activist governmental involvement in the private sector? Yes. But I think what’s happened has moved the chains of the economic debate. Or perhaps to use a more accurate metaphor, it has shifted the very tectonic plates underlying same.

Who now really wants to go to bat for the giants of the private sector and argue how much more responsible they are than government? How much more astute they are? How there’s no argument against the dangers of governmental “over-regulation” because “under-regulation” can only lead to this or that little problem or this or that sole company having problems?

Or, to put it on a grander scale, it was one thing before to decry the admittedly huge inefficiencies of “socialism” or “socialist”-type measures when it seemed that the alternative thereto was the efficiency of free-markets marred only by the uneveness of their benefits. But what about now when the free-market alternative to the inefficiency of socialism includes possible catastrophe? Given how extreme and scary the present situation is do you really thing that Limbaugh and his ilk are right that calling Obama a “socialist” is even scarier? Indeed, didn’t they already lose that bet in the election?

To an even greater degree than Bush has ravaged the Republican/conservative brand our capitalists have destroyed the amazing level of trust the public had in them before to at least not be crazy. And that’s saying something.

It’s a new world economically I think. Almost totally new because what arguments against almost any proposed governmental action aren’t going to seem simply laughable in the face of what’s happened? That it’s somehow immoral or wrong to tax or otherwise diminish or encumber the sacred profits of American business? Those same gigantic businesses of today that are awash in their own irresponsibility and who are sitting with their gigantic maws open gorging on untold billions of slugs of money from the taxpayers? That it’s wrong for government to be “redistributionist” when Mr. Bush and the Republicans are the ones who almost literally have run fire-hoses of money out the doors of the Treasury and the wallets of the taxpayers down the gullets of the executives at Goldman-Sachs and AIG and Citibank and so forth and so on?

It’s a new day I think, and if non-liberals or Leftists want to say anything on economic subjects and not be laughed at they need to start thinking differently. Something different than their old refrain that regulations hurt business at least, and perhaps instead suggesting some *smarter* kinds of regulations.

For instance instead of all these “process” regulations which have so totally failed what about a simple regulation giving someone (the Fed?) the power to henceforth simply declare that an economic concern is getting too big to fail without endangering the entire U.S. economic system and that it must stop its growth or divest itself of some of its portions or etc.? If after all businesses want to be as free as possible of “process” regulations well then what’s wrong with the public insisting that in exchange for same that they don’t get so large that they can then essentially blackmail us into saving them when they indulge in the kind of grotesque stupidities we now know they are so capable of doing? What possible objection to this can they have in the face of what’s going on now?

I think I’m as rock-ribbed a believer in capitalism as anyone, but that doesn’t make me blind from seeing that the fundamental terms of the economic debate have just shifted forever. And if I’m right the question then is who is going to get ahead of the curve on this change, and who is going to make themselves seem irrelevant by trying to deny it?