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Obamanation: A Small Collection Of Wise Comments

Following are some almost randomly collected comments on Obama?s election that I found of interest. You may want to check this post periodically, if this post interests you, since I?ll probably be adding to it as new pithy, or whatever, comments pop up.

Shelby Steele

Obama's special charisma ? since his famous 2004 convention speech ? always came much more from the racial idealism he embodied than from his political ideas....

His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America -- and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency.

Ward Connerly

The election of Barack Obama is good for black people in a way that it is not so, necessarily, for whites or others: it liberates blacks from the debilitating mindset of seeing themselves as victims in America. Obama?s victory enables blacks to be, in the words of Martin Luther King Jr., ?free at last.? Free to be Americans stripped from the legacy of second-class citizenship. Free to be seen in the eyes of one?s fellow citizens as inherently as capable as others without the historical restrictions imposed by skin color.

Wall Street Journal editors

The election of a black President doesn't mean that racism no longer exists. But it does make it harder to justify the claim that a racist country is the major obstacle to black advancement.

Roger Wilkins (civil rights activist, affirmative action history professor)

... I think that there are lots and lots of people who say, ?Damn, we?re not as racist as we thought we were,? so they?re pleased.?

Iraqi Terrorist

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates ? The leader of a jihadi group in Iraq argued Friday that the election of Barack Obama as president represented a victory for radical Islamic groups that had battled American forces since the invasion of Iraq.

George Will

The election of an African-American discomfits the Democratic Party. It practices identity politics, stressing the relevance of ?race-conscious? policies, defending racial preferences in public hiring, contracting and education. But the election of Barack Obama is an American majority?s self-emancipation: We are free at last from the inexpressible tedium of the preoccupation with skin pigmentation.

Michael Barone

Do Obama and the Democrats have a mandate?....

.... The decisive shift of public opinion came when the financial crisis hit. McCain approached it like a fighter pilot, denouncing Wall Street, suspending his campaign, threatening to skip the first debate. Obama approached it like a law professor, cool and detached. Voters preferred law professor to fighter pilot. This was a triumph of temperament, not policy.

Full post as published by Discriminations on November 09, 2008 (boomark / email).