Perhaps It Is Still Just About Race

We conservatives have analyzed the presidential election from multiple points of view, seeking to explain the loss. Possible factors frequently discussed include:

Dependency on big government handouts on the part of some pro-Obama voters
Mainstream media bias
Romney’s refusal to respond to negative ads
Democrats outperforming Republicans in get-out-the-vote efforts

All these reasons are surely key to Obama’s reelection. Romney only lost by 400,000 votes in four battleground swing states; the absence of any one of the above three factors could have resulted in a win for Romney.

Yet there is still a feeling of bewilderment among conservatives over the outcome of the election. Per an opinion cited by Ann Coulter:

The reason this election scares me so much is that I fear we’re losing our grip on reality. … Personal finances have always trumped political rhetoric in America — until this moment.

One more possible element to Obama’s reelection deserves sufficient consideration: it appears likely that a substantial percentage of Americans may have voted for Obama in order to demonstrate that Americans have put racism behind us. In October, George Will argued a very similar point:

That Obama is African-American may be important, but in a way quite unlike that darkly suggested by, for example, MSNBC’s excitable boys and girls who, with their (at most) one-track minds and exquisitely sensitive olfactory receptors, sniff racism in any criticism of their pin-up.

Instead, the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake choosing him — seems especially reluctant to give up on the first African-American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the nation’s heart, if not its head.

In November, days before the election, AllVoices ran the following headline: “A Romney win would legitimize intolerance and racism.” Endless accusations of racism, made by Democrats against Republicans, continued throughout the election, and still continue. This month, the Weekly Standard credits Barack Obama’s victory as “certifying that America was (for the moment) not racist.”

For decades, adults have been told, and more importantly our children are now taught, that America owes penance due to a past history of racism. It is inevitable that this would play a key part in the reelection of the nation’s first black president.

This was a massive error on the part of pro-Obama voters.

Obama is one of the most race-obsessed presidents in the history of the nation, continuously seeking to create hostility between ethnic groups, and particularly toward white voters. Additionally, Obama’s policies are directly tied to numerous crises facing the nation, including the debt crisis, the spending crisis, the unemployment crisis, and the crisis of an Iran that is armed with nuclear weapons and dedicated to using them against America.

Some percentage of pro-Obama voters decided that putting racism in America’s past would be a deciding factor in their vote. Even for his second term, it is an essential piece of the puzzle.

If conservatives are to counter this for the next presidential election, we must begin now. We must respond to negative ads and arguments. Conservatives must focus on answering the unrelenting and false allegations of racism. We must mention the many GOP leaders of black and Hispanic origin. We must educate the nation about the history of the Republican Party opposing slavery, and the history of the Democrat Party supporting slavery.

We must repeatedly show how Republicans supported modern civil rights while Democrats opposed them. We must repeatedly show how Democrat welfare programs have decimated black families by rewarding single-parent households. We must unmistakably call out the Democrats’ racist views that black conservatives don’t count. We must highlight that under Obama black unemployment is about twice as high as white unemployment.

It’s going to take constant work to get this message in front of the public in time for the next election.