Reading George Will's op-ed pieces in WaPo usually make me gag a bit but this morning's column about why Romney is losing pissed me off.
In the first several paragraphs he articulates a list of reasons why Obama should be losing, which are reasonable -- decline in incomes, slow job growth. I still don't agree that Obama did anything wrong on Libya, but I'll give Will a pass on that one.
After attempting to make Obama seem out-of-touch because of his support for "affluent" car makers, he goes back to the old canard that the only reason Obama is winning is...
Wait for it .... because he's BLACK!
As soon as I read the words "civil rights" in a George Will column I should have known.
A significant date in the nation’s civil rights progress involved an African American baseball player named Robinson, but not Jackie. The date was Oct. 3, 1974, when Frank Robinson, one the greatest players in history, was hired by the Cleveland Indians as the major leagues’ first black manager.
So this election, according to Will, comes down to civil rights?
But it gets worse:
But an even more important milestone of progress occurred June 19, 1977, when the Indians fired him. That was colorblind equality.
So, if we were only
colorblind, we'd have the good sense to toss this bum out on his rear.
My message to conservatives: Liberals are OVER the novelty of having a black president. We're voting for him because he's the BETTER MAN.
Between the likes of Will, Romney and others, Americans are only leaning toward re-electing Obama because a) He's black and we'd all feel guilty for firing him and b) we're all a bunch of (brown) moochers anyway and we want to continue to live off the dole.
Will's column says nothing about the problems with Romney's campaign nor the Republican vision, which has only gotten more cynical and narrow in recent years.
Since conservatives cannot figure out how this black man is going to beat them twice, their reason has to be race or voter laziness. I for one, am so tired of GOPers using race as an excuse, and trying to send the not-so-subtle racist message to voters that it's okay to fire the dark man since he sucks and our society has truly achieved color blindness anyway.
That's what they'll tell themselves when they LOSE in November.
1:50 PM PT: UPDATE: Zach Beauchamp over at ThinkProgress agrees with the premise of my diary:
http://thinkprogress.org/...
George Will: Obama Is Winning Because He’s Black | Washington Post columnist George Will suggested in his Tuesday column that President Obama was only ahead in the polls because he’s African-American. After dismissing Obama’s record as being obviously “in shambles,” Will suggested that Americans were supporting him only because they didn’t want to see a black president fail, writing that “the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake in choosing him — seems especially reluctant not to give up on the first African American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the nation’s heart, if not its head.” Credible academic estimates suggest Obama lost a net 3 to 5 percent of the national vote in 2008 as a consequence of his race.