Take A Chance On Me

"Despite the importance of the bully pulpit, there’s little in Obama’s record beyond hopeful rhetoric to indicate that his presidency would change the racial conversation appreciably, let alone move the country past race. On the contrary, nearly everything in his record demonstrates that Obama is a doctrinaire racial bean counter who’s spent more than two decades marinating in Jeremiah Wright’s black-liberation theology. He’s a staunch supporter of racial preferences in employment, contracting, and school admissions. He worked to defeat the anti-affirmative action Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. Obama even maintains that last summer’s Supreme Court decisions outlawing racial discrimination in public-school assignments are wrong.

Even if the simple fact of having a black president has some marginal salutary effect on the nation’s racial dynamics, the question for ambivalent black conservatives remains whether the benefits associated with this black presidential candidate outweigh the manifold risks of his policies.

As president, backed by strong Democratic majorities in Congress, Obama, the most liberal member of the Senate, would appoint as many as four Supreme Court justices in the mold of Stephen Breyer; withdraw from Iraq on the precipice of victory; talk without precondition to leaders of state sponsors of terror; return to a pre-9/11, law-enforcement model of fighting terrorism; expand payroll taxes; increase capital gains taxes; increase estate taxes and permit the Bush tax cuts to expire; allow illegal immigrants to participate in the Social Security system; maintain current bans on oil- and natural gas-drilling; fund abortions with taxpayer dollars; eliminate funding for missile defense; place restrictions on gun ownership; erect impediments to the monitoring of terrorist communications; enact big-government health care; maintain the governmental educational monopoly; slow the development of future weapons systems; and smother private enterprise with a blizzard of regulations. He might also nag us about what to eat and drive and ask the U.N. to check our thermostat settings.

That guy — the one who combines the domestic-policy modesty of Lyndon Johnson with the foreign-policy wizardry of Jimmy Carter — is the one ambivalent black conservatives would be voting for in the off chance we’d start talking differently about race.

That’s a lot to risk — all for racial intangibles not much greater than those evinced by the very fact of Obama’s nomination."

-- Peter Kirsanow, a member of the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, on why Barack Obama is a bad choice for black conservatives, on the National Review Online

Get the point?