snood wrote:I really shouldn't have to say this - but looking at some of the comments being made here, I guess it bears saying:
John McCain is the white guy in the contest. That is going to be some much more valuable coin of the realm than a lot of people are either realizing, or admitting - I can't say which. There are people who have deep set insecurities about the basic trustworthiness of a black man, or a man with a Muslim-sounding name. Some of those people are not the dirt-poor uneducated, but some of them are otherwise reasonable people who couldn't for the life of them articulate reasons for the intensity of their distrust.
I've asked some people who will not vote for him why they feel the way they do about Obama, and they just can't say anything but some nonsensical blather about how they "just have a bad feeling".
If the polls don't give you a clue - if even after seeing 8 years of Bush; if even after getting a chance to see both McCain and Obama articulate their views for over a year on TV and people are STILL saying that they would either vote for McCain or NO ONE than Obama - then you are not paying attention.
Y'all really shouldn't be crowing about how Obama is going to wipe the floor with this "mental defective". Trust me, it gives me great pain to say so but in this America, this mental defective still may have the upper hand in a one-on-one with Obama.
Alright, wanna be proved wrong, I'm here for ya. Think outside yourself - what's the real problem with selecting only from the set of non-Black candidates? Save the morality and the individual criticisms, it didn't kill us in the past, much as it's fashionable to say so we're not on the brink of annihilation, and the will of the people exists on dimensions that supersede socio-economic equitability. I know that last one makes me the Grand-Dragon-Wizard, but think about it, suffrage, inter-demographic subtleties, I mean, right or wrong, at that level we can't just put our head in the sand. You could say it's un-American to treat each other that way, just cut a demographic out of representation, but apparently if it's a thing we feel the need to and it's hard to argue at that particular level. Sub-optimality is the real problem. Add an unnecessary constraint, maybe it cuts off a winning solution. Maybe that's what's going on with Barack.
What I've done is qualify the relationship put forth in the issue - what we're left with is the higher dimensions of public-small-mindedness, insofar as it's in play, relative to the objective function - good-presidentiality. It didn't have to be that easy, but in this case it is.
Now, as much fun as it would be to defend it, let us assume small-mindedness is indeed an immaterial constraint - that the opinions of racists have no bearing on what makes a good president. The question, if we are to make a thing about it for some reason other than entitlement, is how much of the feasible region can they deprive us of? 15% is a big chunk, and if we give positive credit for the added perspective (I don't disagree) - say maybe 25% of the 'region. We could add for other minorities, but it'll be immaterial, as much as a matter of circumstance as probability, differential electability-or-lack-thereof, convergence with white demographics, blah blah blah. if you want to play through with a bigger percent go ahead, I don't mean to say exactly how wonderful a non-white pres would be but to acknowledge it as something quantifiable. Anyway, if 25% is the case, and we keep it up long enough we'll be cheating ourselves out of 75% of presidential-effectivity. Big ass problem - this is really why I view bigotry negatively - people can think what they want, but counter-productivity is everyone's business.
So we've got the relationship pinned down, I don't think anyone would disagree per se, let's map it onto the current field, de-generalize so to speak. McCain = 1. 1 presidential potentiality. Barack = 1.33, 1/0.75 of a ticket. Doesn't work, right? the coin-flip thing, they should both be 1. True, but the hypothesis is that we're not going to vote for him because we're cross-burners like my avatar (no, not really). Could Barack be as much of a statesman as 0.75 of McCain? Yeah, that'll be the day. So I say screw race, look at the issues.
