Juan Williams: Dependably naive

From the Wall Street Journal...

And now comes Barack Obama, the son of a black Kenyan who came here as a scholarship student and his white American wife. There is no other nation in the world where a 75% majority electorate has elected as their supreme leader a man who identifies as one of that nation's historically oppressed minorities.

The idea of black politics now tilts away from leadership based on voicing grievance, and identity politics based on victimization and anger. In its place is an era in which it is assumed that talented, tough people of any background will find a way to their rightful seat of power in mainstream political life.

The Jesse Jacksons, Al Sharptons and Rev. Jeremiah Wrights remain. But their influence and power fade to a form of nostalgia in a world of larger political agendas, such as a common American vision of setting the nation on a steady economic course and dealing with terrorists. The market has irrevocably shrunk for Sharpton-style tirades against "the man" and "the system." The emphasis on racial threats and extortion-like demands -- all aimed at maximizing white guilt as leverage for getting government and corporate money -- has lost its moment. How does anyone waste time on racial fantasies like reparations for slavery when there is a black man who earned his way into the White House?

And Democrats are simply going to toss away the lies that have guaranteed Black votes for well over a quarter of a century? I don't think so. I predict within a week of Obama taking office you'll hear (because they'll be forced on you by the Liberal controlled press) cries of Blacks all over America that they, amazingly, aren't suddenly rich, that the "advantages" they've been "denied" by "The Man", advantages that everyone else seems to have (because they actually worked for them), are still being denied to millions of Black Americans (who continue to thing they should be handed to them). Obama will be called a token, a figurehead, and Uncle Tom, because the lie that Blacks deserve happiness spoon fed to them by the government, will still be told to them daily.

That millions of foreigners come here with nothing and create successful lives never suggests to them that we are promised not happiness, but the pursuit of happiness, and when we don't ourselves pursue it the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence are meaningless in delivering it to us. No, it'll be some white guys fault. Just continue to complain and vote for whoever the poverty pimps tell you to vote for and someday that "happiness" will be delivered to your doorstep.

I have no doubt Democrat strategists are working feverishly to figure out way to keep as many Black Americans in their perpetual despair as they can, in order to maintain the political control The DNC has enjoyed all these decades--Obama or no Obama.

Posted by Danny Carlton at November 10, 2008 7:13 AM