It's Race, Stupid

Clinton campaign strategist James Carville coined the term "It's The Economy, Stupid" to keep his famously distractible employer on-message during the 1992 presidential elections. The economy was key to understanding American politics back then. But now the key issue could be summed up with "It's Race, Stupid". Much as the right may deny it, politics today has devolved into some kind of antebellum power struggle to keep the summit of America's power pyramid WASPy white.

Sure, they'll deny it and make every effort to hide their racism behind decoy issues like immigration reform, national security and unequal rights for minorities whose status is safely not defined by race (i.e., gays, women, non-Christians and secularists). But it's white power versus diversity, tradition versus demographics and reaction versus change. And it doesn't take a genius to figure how a black president leading a party whose electability depended on its appeal to minority voters was sure as hell gonna kick things up a notch.

So it's almost laughable to hear conservatives pretend race doesn't matter to them. Who do they think they're fooling? Certainly not the 75% of Hispanics or 85 to 90% of black people who won't vote for them.

It's also a massive stretch for the Re-Palin-can teabaggers to claim non-racism when, despite being 98% white, they still insist on calling themselves the "Real America". What then would they call the vast majority of 'other' folks who aren't with them? By implication, they must be the "False America"... more than that, the "Non-White America".

Yup. You might have thought the civil rights era struggles were over - even down here in the South. But it seems the conservative time machine wants to skip right past the 1960s to the 1860s when the citizenship and rights of minorities were still moot and very much under the big white thumb of "Real America".

How else can Arizona's anti-immigrant bill be explained? How else can the continued popularity of Pat-Buchanan-in-drag Palin be explained? How else do you explain party purges of moderate Republicans and fringe talking points about birth certificates, Socialism and Obama's 'otherness' going mainstream?

It's Race, Stupid.