The Race Race

Stop. Take a deep breath and listen very carefully. You are not thinking straight. You are disoriented by an onslaught of misinformation being thrown at you by people who do not care about you, your family, or your problems. You don't realize it, but there is a psychological civil war taking place in your head and it's time to get a peace treaty worked out quick before more damage is done. Let me help.

I don’t care whether you’re a Democrat, Republican, Independent, Libertarian, Green, or Whig. If you are not extraordinarily wealthy, you should listen to me. If you are unemployed, uninsured, underpaid, unable to afford your child’s college education, or unsure about your future, you should listen to me. If you would not like to see the U.S. enter an era of long-term conflict and perpetual war, you should listen to me. If you sense that things are not as they should be in the United States of America, you must listen to me.

It would appear that you are seriously thinking about casting your vote for John McCain and Sarah Palin this November, despite your profound unhappiness with the policies George W. Bush, John McCain, and  Republican Party in general. The pollsters have figured this out. Malign them all you want, but the numbers don’t lie. Statistically speaking, you are ready for a change and you are prepared to vote for Democrats at the state and local level, but you’ve either decided on McCain or remained mysteriously “undecided” about your presidential choice. You don’t really agree with McCain on any of the major issues of the day and you think the Democrats are better suited to get us back on track, but you can’t quite bring yourself to support Obama. You are, in fact, prepared to vote against Obama. It doesn’t take a statistical or sociological genius to draw conclusions about the basis of your ambivalence.

Let’s deal with an ugly truth right now. If you find yourself saying and thinking things like “I don’t know what it is…I just don’t trust Barack Obama,” then you, my friend, are suffering from what we call racism. It may be subconscious, you may be appalled by the notion, you may even know some black people,but if you look closely—and we will—there is simply no other viable explanation for your irrational distrust of Barack Obama. (This is most evident in those of you who claim that you would have voted for Hillary Clinton but will not vote for Barack Obama. Unless your sole reason for supporting Hillary was her lack of a penis, your thought process cannot be justified in any other way. There is not a single substantive issue on which Barack Obama’s position is not infinitely closer to Clinton’s than to McCain’s. If her lack of a penis was, in fact, your sole criterion, then I can see how the selection of Sarah Palin—who stands ideologically even farther from Clinton than McCain does—might have changed your mind. Otherwise, I’m sorry to inform you that you are on the verge of making a race-based decision to the detriment of your own well-being.)

John McCain and his people are going to try to make this easy for you. They’re going to provide you with a laundry list of “issues” and “concerns” that will help you rationalize your decision. So far, this list consists exclusively of distortions, exaggerations, and flat-out lies. They’re not even putting any real effort into this because they think your intrinsic bigotry will do the heavy lifting for them. They know that you are subconsciously looking for a reason to not vote for the black guy, which is why you might just buy the ludicrous argument that little, white, western Sarah Palin—mayoress, governor, neighbor-of-Russia—is more “experienced” than Barack Obama. It’s a perfectly efficient and sterile justification, if you can blithely ignore the demonstrated intellectual acumen of both candidates, if you can disregard the considered judgment of the 18 million voters who saw Obama through a rigorous presidential primary (that’s approximately 17.4 million more people than there are residents of Alaska), if you can look yourself in the mirror and pretend that Sarah Palin and Barack Obama are comparable in any way. They’re betting that you are so innately desperate to not vote for the black guy that yes...you can.

They think you’re so desperate to not vote for the black guy that they can convince you that John McCain, who boasted of voting with President Bush 90% of the time, is a maverick. They think you’re so desperate to not vote for the black guy that they can dismiss Barack Obama as a Paris Hilton-like, flash-in-the-pan celebrity. Apparently, they think you’re so desperate to not vote for the black guy that they can just bullshit their way through election day. (In a particularly repulsive move, they’re parading Cindy McCain around in belligerently white, designer, 50’s housewife costumes—as if she’s a Barbie doll—just so you have a chance to compare and contrast that image with Michelle Obama’s blackness.)

It's insulting. It's embarassing. It is the saddest thing I've ever known.   

This election is too important to let them manipulate you like this. This isn’t just about health insurance, stagnant wages, and the Iraq war. This is about big, broad, existential issues, like whether we are going to continue to let corporate America strangle the American dream out of the American worker; like whether my child—your children— will be drafted one day because neo-conservatives like John McCain preferred fighting to talking; like whether we are going to continue to live in fear of everything and everyone that did not originate inside our borders.

Are you really willing to let your innocent, provincial nervousness about Barak Obama’s non-whiteness be the deciding factor in this election? Are you really willing to let things get worse than they are just because Barack Obama makes you vaguely uncomfortable...in ways you can't really articulate? Do you yearn for a more traditional candidate? Do you wish the Democrats had made this easier by nominating a more conventional candidate? Well…too bad. You passed up decent, non-revolutionary men in 2000 and 2004 and gave George W. Bush eight whole years to drive us to our knees. In 2008, wholesale transformation is the order of the day. Grand mistakes lead to great demands.

You must not let them make a fool of you. You must defy them. They are exploiting a weakness you may not have even known you had—a weakness you might have overcome without their interference. They know that if this were a blind taste test—a clash over issues and ideas—Obama would win in the biggest landslide ever recorded. They have nothing positive to say, no real change to offer. And so their only path to victory—a path that a true patriot would refuse to tread—demands a gruesome willingness to pick at the slowly healing scabs of America’s painful struggle with race relations.

And all you have to do to stop them is look out for yourself.  You don’t have to march on Washington, or join the ACLU, or donate to a campaign. You just have to look at the issues, look at our current circumstances, look at the behavior of these two campaigns, think about the last two elections, think about the future, set aside your petty prejudices, and do what's right for your country. You just have to suck it up and vote for the right man, regardless of his race.

Comments

[tonya]

People need to see what McCain really knows about our Economy here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_1X3efvVTLA

[ryan nelson]

I say this with saidness you are an angry person and angry at President Bush and forgetting the Congress for they send the money and have to agree with the president if the vote is for his policies .
Congress is the only place were the problem should be placed the dems are unable to lead anything. Please Obama is just out of school this guy will destroy this country and in every way from keeping us safe to money he knows nothing.L-Wingers are looking for what? I can not understand anything they say it changes so fast every day. This election is about keeping me and my family safe if we are all dead who cares about health care we won't need it. The only one I trust with keeping me safe is McCain I want experience over someone who has done nothing but run a social club and hang out with people who want to destroy AMERICA ,like you someone who haths the greatest country in the world.. Your parties are coming to an end and the independents will run this country correctly!AMERICA LAND OF THE FREE HOME OF THE BRAVE.

CP RESPONDS:
Wow...that's quite a mouthful for an illiterate. How long did it take you to type that completely incoherent, rambling, steaming pile of horseshit? For your sake, I hope you are no older than seven or eight years old, because otherwise your spelling, punctuation, and syntax reflect as poorly on you as the "substance" of your comment. Best of luck out there, Ryan.

[Brutus]

I meet rambling, incoherent adults like Ryan every day. The things that come out of their heads make me wonder how they manage to keep themselves alive. You're right to wish them the best of luck. My only regret is that their muddled thinking represents a significant enough portion of the electorate to really derail things.