Sunday afternoon some three months ago was a warm, spring day in Muncie, Indiana, the “Middletown” of Robert S. and Helen Merrell Lynd’s famous sociological study of an average American town. I was stopped in the right hand turn lane of the second most heavily trafficked intersection in town, second in line to turn. In the through lane to my left was additional traffic, including one gentleman on a motorcycle slightly behind me. And hidden from my view by the traffic in the middle lane were several other cars waiting to turn left. A few seconds later I heard loud, angry voices and rolled down my window in order to better hear. I’d hardly done this when a skinny kid in a county high school jacket ran around the center traffic lane and began punching the driver in my front, striking through the rolled down window. The driver quickly succeeded in getting out of the car, along with his passenger, evidently his girl friend or date, and grappled with the attacking kid, finally getting him on the ground. The girl gamely tried to help. All this took only a few seconds, and the attacker quickly fled back to his car in the left turn lane as he realized he’d lost the upper hand (and that witnesses were on the verge of intervening). As the light changed, he made his escape. The motorcyclist urged the kids back into their car and around the corner into an Aldi’s parking lot, where I followed and waited for the police, who’d been called by, I believe, the motorcyclist. When they arrived I spoke to the first officer and told him what had happened. So did the motorcyclist and I believe at least one other witness. The victim had my name and telephone number and someone had written down the plate number of the attacker. I expected that I’d hear from detectives. That hasn’t happened and I am disappointed, but not surprised. The victim, after all, was a black kid and his girlfriend was white and this is Muncie, Indiana, still Middletown, U.S.A., where racism is alive and well, despite the denials of government and civic leaders both black and white.

And that’s why Obama can’t win the general election. When a white man in THE average American town can attack a black man in broad daylight in the direct view of dozens of witnesses, and get by with it, a black man cannot be elected president.

And so much for the notion that the younger generations are somehow more racially progressive and tolerant than the old farts with whom I hang out.

Radio talkers on the right love to expound upon the notion of “political correctness” and pride themselves on speaking out in favor of “the right thing,” regardless of political protocols and the constraints of social polity. In fact, hardly anyone actually does the “politically incorrect” thing, especially talk show hosts. Comedian Rush Limbaugh, for instance, initiated his “Operation Chaos” specifically because “someone has to bloody up Obama, and WE (the right) CAN’T DO IT.” So much for right wing bravado in the face of political correctness.

But Rush, Hannity, Beck and their ilk are not alone in dodging a real discussion of racism. The media (including the blogosphere) have carefully avoided even a rudimentary discussion of what  may ultimately decide the race between Obama and McCain, that is, the true depth of racism around the country as compared to the illusion embraced by journalists and politicians who should know better. Ignoring, as usual, the lessons of history, pretty much everyone writing about the election instead cites the impending election season as the final inevitable step toward the jubilee dreamt of long ago by slaves and abolitionists alike. Dodging the question of race during the primaries was a huge mistake, one made mostly by the educated elite that many believe run this country without regard to the rights, dreams and aspirations of their economic, social and political inferiors.

While the life experiences of white folks and black folks are obviously different on the question of race, one perspective is common to both races … and both races get that shared perspective wrong. A black man of my age might be able to recollect dozens of times in his life when his dignity was insulted by white men. And a white man can usually recollect a time or two, especially during the civil rights campaigns, when his dignity was likewise affronted by a black man aggressively pursuing his liberation from Jim Crow. But if you ask them today what they think about racism, both would undoubtedly agree that things are better these days. And both would be wrong. Racism is alive and well in this country. What’s different is where it hides its ugly head.

The illusion that race relations are all sweetness and light results from a variety of factors. If you work for a major corporation, or for the government, or most any large business, your employee handbook will lay out the protocols for dealing with workplace diversity, and the penalties for failing to uphold those principles. Schools likewise waste a lot of paper instructing students and faculty alike on complex sets of rules to enforce what would be, in the absence of color, nothing more than common courtesy. Likewise unions, professional associations and similar groups codify every aspect of interpersonal relationships regarding race. As a result it’s possible for most people to go through long periods of time without needing to face racially produced conflict. That’s the corporate illusion.

Then there’s the social illusion, the one that’s shattered every day someplace in America by incidents like the one I described in my opening paragraph. Most folks in America, black and white, think rather well of themselves, often despite all public evidence to the contrary. And most folks like to believe that they are courteous to, and respectful of, their fellow man. And most of the time they are, at least in public. All in all, most folks, most of the time, are reasonable people who will not go out of their way to provoke conflict, especially racial conflict. That’s the good news, for everyone of all races.

The bad news is that there’s a significant percentage of folks for whom race is the overweening consideration in their lives. I can’t quantify their numbers, but you know one or two yourself, whether you want to or not. They may be in-laws or neighbors and they don’t realize they are insulting you by assuming that you share their low opinion of other races and cultures. In public, mixed gatherings (like caucuses), they would never stand against the majority of decent folks, but in the privacy of the voting booth they can express their racial angst without you knowing about it. That is why the caucus states were never a true measure of Senator Obama’s popularity with democrats.

Blacks and whites share a common thread of self deception regarding race. Both races tend to downplay the incidence of racism in today’s American culture. And both sides tend to underestimate the depth of hatred that some folks hold in their hearts. I have more than once confounded black friends by pointing out that blacks give white folks at large way more credit than they deserve for racial tolerance. Everything being relative and experience being reality, most white folks are blissfully unaware that of all the advantages they enjoy, the simple luck of being born white is paramount.

Damned if you do, damned if you don’t …

One of the more esoteric of the political arts is the ability to finesse unavoidable situations that negatively impact the candidate’s electability. Obama’s had two of these situations, and has been badly bitten by both.

In today’s real world of political religiosity, a candidate with no church is truly a lost soul amongst his religiously connected opposition. So when Obama entered politics, he sensibly chose a church that offered a little leverage in local politics, just as all politicians today must do if they are to be successful. Strangely, this consideration has seemingly become important beyond the head count of believers. Today, even infidels prefer that their candidates possess at least a modicum of “public religion.”

The church Obama chose as a young black politician, Trinity United Church of Christ, is said to be the largest church affiliated with the United Church of Christ, with over 8,500 members. Its congregation includes the best and brightest of Chicago’s black community and Obama’s membership there undoubtedly yielded some significant political benefit over the years he was a member. The same can be said for virtually every congressman and senator in Washington regarding their particular religious congregation.

None of this was a problem until the presidential vetting process began and his opponents left and right started digging through his past, looking for chinks in his armor. That’s when the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, his “God Damn America” pastor, and his church, were victimized by the political aspirations of Senator Obama.

It is never morally correct to deliberately misrepresent the words of other men, or to hold them responsible for words they have never publicly embraced. It is, however, the immoral business of political operatives to dredge through the past of political candidates in search of anything at all that can be used to destroy their credibility and better the chances of the candidate they support (or for whom they work). When the damning words are those of an acquaintance, the sound bites assume the willing capitulation of logic by the listener and point to some kind of inferred culpability on the part of the candidate. That’s what happened to Obama.

The worst enemy of any writer, philosopher or preacher is the partial quotation of a larger thought or composition. Rather than worrying about being plagiarized, we should worry about being incompletely plagiarized. If you have a few moments and you are interested in the context of Reverend Wright’s comments, here’s the complete context of his remarks. There’s a bit more to it than “God Damn America.”

Senator Obama has, of course, renounced Trinity United, Reverend Wright, and all his comments. That’s a shame, and it’s the “damned if you do” of the equation. There will be congregants in black churches all across America who will feel that his denunciations of Reverend Wright were wrong, and who will call him to account for abandoning church and preacher. That’s wrong, especially in light of Senator McCain’s free pass from white church goers on his noisy white preachers.

I have, my whole life, flirted with religion, sometimes very seriously. At one point I thought that I’d be a preacher, but after waiting vainly for several years, I finally figured out that all those preacher stories about being “called” were probably either bogus or the result of over stimulation at the foot of an extraordinarily good preacher. I’m not claiming theological expertise here, merely speaking to the perspective from which I view the current election.

I’ve spent a lot of time in churches and along the way I’ve picked up a little bit of insight into the business of preaching. If you’re of my age and of a similar spiritual disposition, you’ve probably noticed a pattern or two yourself. An expert can listen to a preacher and after only a moment or two, like the blind guy in the beer commercial, identify from the sound and cadence of the sermon the seminary attended by the speaker and the spiritual heritage from which he is descended. That’s true of white preachers as well as black.

Most white evangelicals preach from an emphasis on hell and damnation. Their primary tools are fire, brimstone, fear and guilt, and the bogeymen of their sermons historically reflect the peculiar angst of the day. In the days of slavery, white churches in the south provided the spiritual certitude that slavery was scripturally sound. And Nat Turner provided white angst aplenty.

Amongst the slave population, however, the preachers were untrained slaves whose exhortations typically reflected on their bondage and their hope for freedom down the road. And despite white efforts to suppress the news, Nat Turner’s story was as widely known among blacks as among whites and black angst was multiplied by the knowledge of Turner’s grisly demise.

Most folks have at one time or another witnessed the miracle of thousands of birds rising in unison, filling the air with whirring wings and break neck speed, all without the seemingly inevitable collisions one might expect in such crowded surroundings. It’s a phenomenon known as “flock consciousness.” I once heard it argued with some logic that this same natural phenomenon somehow accounted for the distrust of one race for the other. White folks, for example, and black, somehow both subconsciously recall the fears of their ancestors, wherein slave owners feared fire and murder in the night, and black folks the retribution sure to follow.

I don’t buy that, at least not the supernatural part of it. But I do buy the notion that the problems of racism today are the natural result of chattel slavery in the agrarian south in the face of widespread moral indignation in the north, resulting in the greatest national schism in our national history, and the complete ruination of the south and all its institutions. From that everything else follows. While the miseries visited upon the white population of the south during reconstruction pale in comparison with the miseries of the slave, they were nevertheless sufficient to give rise to the KKK and Jim Crow, which were sufficient to bring about the further national miseries of the civil rights battles to follow. Perhaps, in the face of the first credible presidential campaign by a black man, it is natural that all of the old animosities should be amplified, with all the ramifications that implies. Natural, but tragically unfortunate.

The consternation with which The Reverend Wright’s “God damn America” sermon was greeted by the media and public at large illustrates well the simple fact that most folks, black and white, do not have any real insight into the lives of their counterparts of the opposite color. Too many white folks subscribe to the quaint notion that black folks are monolithic, that they all think and vote alike. That’s certainly not the case. Likewise, certain white folks hold the notion that all black preachers speak from the same book. That’s certainly no more true of black preachers than white. And yet those perceptions exist.

An example of the diversity of opinion within the black religious community is the ministry of The Hon. James David Manning, who believes that Obama, Oprah Winfrey and The Reverend Wright are “The Trinity of Hell.” Unless you’re a You Tube fan, you probably will not have heard of him. Trust me, before the campaign is over, you will. The GOP will find a way to use his message to their advantage.

The Reverend Wright’s sermons calling the white man to account for his crimes against black folks are no more nor less meritorious or blasphemous than the sermons of white preachers decrying children born out of wedlock while implying that this is mostly a fact in the black community. Both themes are generally enthusiastically embraced by the respective congregations.

The great failing of democratic politics is the mistaken notion that just because an idea or proposal is good, said idea will be adopted by the majority of the voting public. And the great strength of the republican party is the ability to not only recognize an ugly truth, but to act on it and benefit from it.

Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” was popularized by strategist Kevin Phillips, though according to Wikipedia, he did not originate it.

The following is from a 1970 New York Times article, quoted in *Wikipedia:

“From now on, the Republicans are never going to get more than 10 to 20 percent of the Negro vote and they don’t need any more than that… but Republicans would be shortsighted if they weakened enforcement of the Voting Rights Act. The more Negroes who register as Democrats in the South, the sooner the Negrophobe whites will quit the Democrats and become Republicans. That’s where the votes are. Without that prodding from the blacks, the whites will backslide into their old comfortable arrangement with the local Democrats.”

I use this quote not so much to explain Nixon’s strategy as to point out the ruthlessness of republican politics and republican operatives.

None of this is new, in fact I’d trace much of today’s acrimony to Newt Gingrich’s infamous 1996 GOPAC memorandum, “Language: A Key Mechanism of Control,” which was a campaign guide to prospective republican candidates. If you’re old enough, you’ll recall being surprised at the cohesion of the GOP message of the day. If you’re at all current on national politics, you’ll recognize the same message, along with a new found zeal contemplating the success of their campaign to insure, insofar as possible, the nomination of Barack Obama, a candidate who is a black man, and who will become even blacker as the campaign season draws closer to its end. The GOP will make sure that happens.

Who can blame black folks for their enthusiasm for Obama? And who can blame women for their enthusiasm for Hillary Clinton? The election of either would have represented a giant step forward for America and a huge boost to our international esteem.

When Abraham Lincoln made Grant general-in-chief he did so because Grant recognized and appreciated “the arithmetic” of the war. It’s a lesson the GOP has learned well and one that is seemingly completely beyond the grasp of the top democrats. Blacks make up about 12.4 percent of Americans nationwide. That’s not enough to swing an election, even if they vote as a bloc.

I like Obama and I like Joe Biden. Both are bright and intelligent men who would, I believe, restore some of the international prestige that’s been squandered by the Bush administration and perhaps return the country to pay-as-you-go government in Washington.

But they can’t win in the face of the racism that still exists in this country, a fact that’s been ignored by the democratic idealists and dreamers, white and black, young and old, male and female, who drove the democratic primaries to a final showdown between the two candidates most unlikely to prevail against a GOP united in racism and misogyny.

In the years since the civil rights marches, we’ve (black and white alike) followed a very decorous and deceptive little dance around the subject of racism, a dance that’s deceived us into the erroneous notion that everything’s coming up roses in America’s social garden. And the foolish notion that a woman, or a black man, could somehow be elected President of this country.

Had Hillary won the primary, by this point in time the GOP would have painted her as a classic bitch getting bitchier every day, just as Obama has been cast as a black man getting blacker every day. Make no mistake about it, the race card was first played by the GOP. It will continue to be their trump card as the season winds down to its sad but inevitable conclusion, a McCain presidency.

Politics is about numbers. There were never enough black folks in the country to elect Obama by themselves. And there were never enough Hillary lovers to overcome the Hillary haters. In fact, the only chance either had required partnership with the other. As the VP nominee, Hillary might have helped Obama to a win. Joe Biden has plenty of foreign policy expertise, but he didn’t have the votes in the primaries and that’s unlikely to change.

Barbara Bush should have had the honesty, when Dubya was still a young man, to explain to him that he was not real smart. Hillary’s mother should have had the honesty to explain to her that as a woman she’d bump her head against the glass ceiling. And Obama’s white mother or grandmother should have had the honesty to explain to him that ours is a racist country unlikely to embrace even the most meritorious black man when offered a white alternative, however limited he might be.

The “hell’s” of this turn of events are multiple. First, as a white man of good reputation, Biden was probably the most electable of the three going in. Second, an unknown number of Hillary’s voters will vote for McCain (if he chooses a woman VP that number will increase even more). And last, because he’s black, the racists among us will most likely deny Obama his chance to serve.

If you thought the election of 2000 was a tragedy and that of 2004 made you sad, prepare to be sickened by what looms ahead.

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