The Bonfire Of The Multicultural Vanities

Orrin Judd compares and contrasts 2000 and 2008:

There’s a very simple question you can ask to gauge the racial character of the race: what are three policy changes Senator Obama has said he will pursue if elected?

Recall that eight years ago, if you’d asked the same question about W (the eventual winner), it would have been easy for people to answer: cut taxes, test kids in school, privatize Social Security, and give government money to religious charitable organizations, just to name a few of the big ones.

But ask yourself–and most readers here follow politics to some considerable degree–what are Obama’s issues? What does he want to change? What would be the point of his presidency?

Isn’t the sole purpose of his candidacy to afford America an opportunity to vote for a black guy for no other reason than that he’s black?

How is Hillary Clinton supposed to run against that without race entering the discussion?

She can’t, and as Matt Bai recently noted, “The most dangerous place to be in the rest of the country is between the Clintons and an elected office.” The result, which has caused the Clinton attack machine to aim left instead of right for once, hasn’t been pretty, as we’ve all seen. David Brooks writes:

All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action, like Ward Churchill [Err, that should be Ward Connerly, as Betsy Newmark, and not the Times’ layers and layers of fact checkers noted–Ed] and Thomas Sowell, and critics of the radical feminism, like Christina Hoff Summers, are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners.

Clinton is suffering most. She is now accused, absurdly, of being insensitive to the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Bill Clinton