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Wednesday, May 21, 2008
Barack McGovern
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Barack Obama’s now within a hundred delegates of securing the Democratic Party nomination to fulfill the legacy of George McGovern, Michael Dukakis, John Kerry and Al Gore.
John McCain’s spokesman Tucker Bounds set it up:
“This election is fundamentally about who Americans can trust to secure peace and prosperity for the next generation of Americans. Without a doubt, Barack Obama is a talented political orator, but his naive plans for unconditional summits with rogue leaders and support for big tax hikes on hardworking families expose his bad judgment that Americans can ill-afford in our next president.”
What he neglected to say is that four members of the U.S. Supreme Court are likely to retire over the next eight years. And since Democrats control both the House and the Senate, a left-lock on the White House, Congress and the Supreme Court should be enough to complete the march to the welfare state.
The stakes this November, then, could not be higher.
Throughout the primary season, the end-of-day story in every state has been how blacks and whites voted. It happened again in reporting exit polls in Kentucky and phone surveys in Oregon, the two states voting Tuesday.
Here are the first two paragraphs of an Associated Press report on those results:
“White voters played a decisive role in Hillary Rodham Clinton’s lopsided victory Tuesday in Kentucky’s Democratic presidential primary. Barack Obama got the victory in more liberal Oregon, where race and the hard-edged rivalry between the two embattled candidates was muted.
“Nearly nine in 10 of each state’s voters were white, surveys of voters showed, but there the similarities ceased. Kentucky’s less educated, less liberal, poorer and more rural population fit the profile of states where Clinton has done well, while Oregon’s better schooled, more affluent and urban residents more resembled those that have delivered for him all year.”
Spare me the Southern stereotypes here, but the story went on to note that Hillary Clinton won the support of 63 percent of the white college graduates who voted Tuesday in Kentucky. Obviously the “better-schooled” and presumably more affluent Southerner did not prefer Obama.
Is Obama’s race the explanation? You can believe that if you also believe that the better-schooled or the worse-schooled Kentucky voter would have chosen McGovern, Dukakis or Kerry.
The left is determined to make this election a referendum on white racism. But the fact is that a majority of this country has not and will not now elect a president who runs as far to the left as Barack Obama.
It is essentially over. Obama will be the Democratic nominee. The party has what it has, a candidate who in Kentucky failed to win the votes in a Democratic primary of all age groups and incomes, the college-educated and those who aren’t, and those who described themselves as liberal,moderate and conservative.
By the convention this is a party that will have buyer’s remorse. They’re getting themselves another McGovern.
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