Will the US ever be post-racial?.....
The official New York City presidential vote figures show President Obama winning by the highest margin in the 114 years since NYC's five boroughs were fully consolidated into one city in 1898. The One garnered 81 percent of the NYC vote to Mitt Romney's 18, a 4-1/2 to 1 margin. The 8.2 million population city's demographics are 65 percent minority (29 percent Hispanic, 23 percent black & 13 percent Asian) to 35 percent white. The white figure is half the 72 percent national figure for whites; the Hispanic & black numbers are twice, and the Asian number thrice their national group shares. NYC voter turnout in 2012 was 2.45 million, down from 2.62 million in 2008.Here is more detail from the Bloomberg News report:
Republican presidential candidates have taken less than one-fourth of the city vote in each of the past six elections. Calvin Coolidge in 1924 was the last Republican presidential nominee to win New York.
Obama broke his own record of 79 percent support in New York in the 2008 election. His showing four years ago topped the 78 percent that Al Gore won in the city as the 2000 Democratic nominee.
The president in his re-election win improved on his 2008 showing in four of the city’s five boroughs. He rose to 91 percent from 89 percent in the Bronx, to 82 percent from 79 percent in Brooklyn, and to 79 percent from 75 percent in Queens, and carried Staten Island with 51 percent after taking 48 percent and losing the borough in 2008.
Manhattan, which includes Wall Street, is the one borough where Obama’s support edged downward, falling to 84 percent from 86 percent four years ago.
As the president prepares his second inaugural address, America's racial divisions, at the ballot box and in public discourse, seem wider than they have been in a generation....
Which confers rich irony on America's pre-eminent mid-20th century conservative's 1970 public plea that circa 1980 America elect a (qualified) black president. None other than William F. Buckley, Jr. published Why America Needs a Negro President in 1980 in the January 13, 1970 edition of (now long-gone) LOOK Magazine.
In a nutshell--using the lingo of the time, in which Negro remained an acceptable term--Buckley saw the need for a black president as both symbol of black achievement in politics at the highest level and also as balm for the guilty white soul, by ending the cancer of racism. Idealistic black leaders would work within the system and marginalize the race-hustlers--a breed Buckley found as noxious as Communist Chinese Red Guards and Aryan Nazis.
One short segment from the essay captured the essence of Buckley's argument re the value of significant white participation:
It is not necessary to experience the good will of a predominantly white community to confirm that Joe Louis is a better boxer than Max Schmeling. But it is only the white community that can, e.g., express itself--that is is preferable to elect Carl Stokes as mayor of Cleveland than Seth Taft.
(In 1938 Joe Louis demolished Max Schmeling in 2:04 of the first round to hold on to his heavyweight crown. In 1967 Carl Stokes defeated Seth Taft to win election as mayor of Cleveland, on his second try. Stokes was a moderate liberal.)
[N.B., A short excerpt is at this American Conservative webpage. The Buckley Archive is at Hillsdale College Online. In the Archive the document is #923 of 4,165, found at webpage 19 of 84. A compilation of Buckley essays titled Athwart History: Half a Century of Polemics, Animadversions and Illuminations (2010) is at this Amazon page. The essay on electing a black president is at pages 77-81; the quote above is from pp. 79-80.]
Buckley's wish showed that the dramatic events of the late-1950s & early-1960s truly transformed how Americans across the political spectrum viewed matters of race. The race riots of the 1960s cast a pall, but it seemed inconceivable to many of us that radical race hustlers would successfully shove aside more moderate black leaders--and it seemed equally inconceivable that whites would by & large treat the radicals as legitimate leaders with whom to deal. (One shining exception: upon becoming mayor of New York City in 1994 Rudy Giuliani refused to meet with racial arsonist Al Sharpton--now a cable talk show host and long a major player in the Democratic Party. But Rudy's moxie came a 30 years too late to prevent radical takeover of civil rights policy.)
Critical in their triumph was the active assistance of liberal media players who gravitated to the most extreme. That choice proved to be good box office, but yielded awful societal results.
And thus we remain mired in matters of race, perhaps more so than in half a century.
Bottom Line. Thus we face the prospect of four more socially and economically--and, inevitably, racially polarizing years. After which, when the next president takes the oath of office on January 20, 2017, 47 years will have passed since Buckley's ardently hopeful essay in search of lasting racial harmony. And we will still be ISO same....Letter from the Capitol, LFTC, Conservative Politics
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