The reason why Obama makes bogus accusations that the Right will make an issue of his race is taken from the well-established playbook of black grievance-mongers who do so “to keep whitey on the hook.”
It’s also a tactic from Saul Alinsky’s “Rules for Radicals”, Obama’s mentor. Alinsky’s Rule 12 says to pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it. Cut off the support network and isolate the target from sympathy. Go after people and not institutions; people hurt faster than institutions.
Labelling his opposition as racists polarizes the confrontation, tars them with hurtful slander, and denies them sympathy. Obama learned a lot by teaching those “Rules for Radicals” workshops when he was a “community organizer”. Doubtless he would run America the same way.
The reason why Obama gets such a starry-eyed welcome from the witless Left is that electing him will prove, PROVE, that they are not racist and so give them greater moral authority, they think. The Left consistently confuses the messenger and the message. They believe that electing a Messenger who can not be challenged will force acceptance of his messages. If Obama supports universal health care and you oppose, YOU ARE A RACIST! Do you see how fun that will be for the lefty race-baiters? It relieves them from all that tedious and pesky thinking.
Meanwhile, trudging through this smog of race-baiting and identity politics, conservatives like me oppose Obama because he is a doctrinaire liberal and liberal ideas don’t work. His oratory has a soaring quality to it though not much substance. When you examine what he says in detail, much of it is foolish or simply falls apart.
However, I don’t think Obama’s cultists actually listen to his words. They just listen to the tone of his voice, like dogs. If he looks calmly into the camera and explains in his measured reasonable voice that the surge didn’t actually work, that it was the Sunni sheikhs who just happenned to turn the situation in Iraq around spontaneously, the absurdity of that claim does not penetrate the thick skulls of the lefties. All they hear is that confident tone, which reassures them he knows what he’s doing.
