One of the ways in which President Obama was able to win states such as North Carolina and Indiana in 2008, was through an unprecedented turnout among blacks, who were obviously and understandably inspired to vote for America’s first black president. But today, with his approval ratings stubbornly stuck at 47 to 48%, Obama knows he’s going to need a similar explosion of black support if he’s going to have any chance at all for a second term.
But when you’re a failed president whose only impact on black Americans has been to increase their unemployment rate and side against them on the issue of same-sex marriage, this is not a group Obama’s going to be able to inspire as easily. So, as we’ve seen for months now and during the last two nights of the Charlotte convention, Obama is running a base campaign, a “devil you know” campaign that says, “If I can’t get you to come out and vote for me, I can damn well get you to vote against the other guy.”
In any number of cynical moves, Team Obama has appealed to the worst in the Democratic base through the waging of a campaign of bitter divisiveness. We’ve seen the phony War on Women, the demagoguery of class warfare, the unilateral decision to stop enforcing certain immigration laws for a special demographic (Hispanics), and now we’ve learned that Democrats have gone so far as to manufacture an Orwellian rewriting of history on the DNC Website. 20 paragraphs of nonsense are in support of this opening sentence:
For more than 200 years, our party has led the fight for civil rights, health care, Social Security, workers’ rights, and women’s rights.
The idea that Democrat Party has led the fight for American civil rights for over 200 years is nothing more than a bald-faced lie. Even the Washington Post’s fact-checker found the claim too preposterous to ignore:
The Web history mentions the leadership of President Woodrow Wilson in helping pass the 19th Amendment, without noting that he was a racist or that he repressed civil liberties — even to the point of jailing one of his rivals for the presidency in 1914 (socialist Eugene Debs).
The history also highlights the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Certainly President Lyndon Johnson, a Texas Democrat, played an essential role, but it is worth remembering that 80 percent of the “no” votes in the Senate came from Democrats, including the late Robert Byrd (W.Va.) and Albert Gore (Tenn.), father of the future vice president. Republican votes, in fact, were essential in winning final passage of the bill.
And let’s not forget that The Great Emancipator, the president who spent his legal and political career making some of the most persuasive, moral, common sense, and elegant cases against slavery in our nation’s history — was a Republican. Oh, and he freed the slaves.
And since that time, we have always been the Party of Lincoln:
In the 26 major civil rights votes after 1933, a majority of Democrats opposed civil rights legislation in over 80 percent of the votes. By contrast, the Republican majority favored civil rights in over 96 percent of the votes.
For a contrast of how low Obama is stooping to divide and conquer, the Washington Post reminds us how the history of the Democratic Party and civil rights was presented during Bill Clinton’s 1992 convention:
[I]n the 1992 book, “Of the People,” which Democrats distributed at the convention that nominated Bill Clinton. That book, written by real historians, obviously has a slant, but it found the space to mention such historical blemishes. For instance, it acknowledged that before the Civil War the party “played both sides of the slavery issue” and after the Civil War, the party “reached out a welcoming hand to returning Confederates, not to blacks.”
And have you noticed lately how we keep hearing about these so-called gaffes — these racially charged gaffes?
We’ve had three instances in almost as many convention days of Democrat officials hurling Nazi references at Republicans; we had a sitting vice president tell a crowd filled with many black Americans that Mitt Romney would put them in chains; we had a sitting president light a stick of racial dynamite under the body of a dead teenager; and we’ve had the media scream racism at every serious criticism of Obama, ranging from the record number of people currently on food stamps to his gutting of welfare reform.
But on a less shrill and more subtle and disturbing scale, what we see almost every day in the media and from Democrats is unceasing chatter about how Romney can’t win enough of the minority vote to win the election — how he can’t appeal to these groups and how that somehow proves there’s something wrong with him.
On the flip-side, however, even though Romney is winning a smaller percentage of the white vote than Obama is the minority vote, the fact that a majority of whites are polling with Romney is also presented by the media as a Romney/Republican flaw. The subtext and sometimes outright text is that if Obama loses it will be because of racist whites who vote against him.
Naturally, though, the media won’t even speculate on the idea that there might be a sinister racial motivation behind a black and Hispanic community that will only give a small percentage of its votes to a white candidate.
The double standard here is shameless.
But what we’re seeing in ways that are subtle (the rewriting of history) and not-so-subtle (“chains”), is a reprehensible campaign of racial division that the media is complicit in — unless you want to argue that NBC News choosing not to broadcast a single speech made by a minority speaker at the Republican convention that first night was just an accident.
Moreover, do you think it was an accident that Chuck Todd, NBC’s Chief White House Correspondent, walked the floor of the RNC convention hall and dismissed the presence of non-white faces before the cameras as nothing more than token window dressing?
Because he’s failed so miserably, Obama can’t win on his record, so he and his media minions have launched a campaign of resentment and part of that campaign is to — if you’ll pardon the expression — whitewash Romney, the Republican Party, and the convention in Tampa into something it’s not: lily-white and without a proud history on the front lines of the civil rights movement.
Worse still, this campaign of resentment is determined to make Romney and those of us who support him look racist and maybe even feel racist for making what we believe is the best decision for our country.
Sometimes you have to pull your head out of the news cycle and take a 30,000 foot look over the landscape to see the big picture of what’s really going on. And what I see are not isolated events or “gaffes,” but rather pieces of a vicious gameplan methodically being rolled out by a desperate and divisive president and the race-baiting media that worships him.
Follow John Nolte on Twitter @NolteNC