Obama, Dem Disaster? [John Derbyshire]
A characteristically well-thought-through analysis, JOS, and to its main point — the pros and cons of supporting John McCain — I think correct. However, there is one scenario — a possible one, though not of course a certain one — you do not mention that would, if it came to pass, make an Obama presidency live in infamy. That is the possibility that such a presidency would make our racial division (the one that really matters, black v. nonblack) much worse.
You say:
And if it should turn out to be Obama, Republicans will take cautious comfort from the possibility that his presidency will advance the wider conservative interest in a less fractured America. For that would be a permanent gain for conservatism under any president.
It might do the opposite. Imagine an Obama presidency overwhelmed and floundering, like Carter's. There are enough issues, domestic and foreign, coming down the pike to make this very possible — you know them, I don't need to enumerate. Black Americans will of course go on voting for the party of a black president regardless. Nonblacks will flee from the Democrats in droves, though. A Republican landslide in the 2010 midterms (think 1994); a clear GOP victory in 2012 (think 1980).
By that point the Democratic Party might be nothing other than the party of black Americans. To the degree that black and nonblack Americans get on with each other at all, it is largely thanks to the coalition of black citizens and nonblack liberals and interest groups represented in the national political life by the Democratic Party. A permanent sundering of that coalition would be greatly to America's peril. Black Americans would be shut out of our political life.
The cruel fact is, that black Americans need the Democratic Party much more than it needs them. If a black president, with solid and unwavering black support, looks like he is dragging the Democrats down, then one solution for the Dems — only one, of course — would be to unhitch itself from black America. Already in fact, in some of the immigration news this past couple of years, I have seen black grumbles about being "left standing at the bus stop" while the Democrats go speeding off after Hispanic votes. There have been echoes of that in the Hillary-Barack set-to. (Though on the bright side, the notion that Hispanics won't vote for a black candidate seems to have been a dog that hasn't barked, at least not very loud.)
It was marvelous to see Britain get a woman Prime Minister, and doubly marvelous that she was a conservative Tory. It is hard to imagine that, say, a Barbara Castle PM-ship would have been anything like as successful as Mrs Thatcher's was, or anything remotely like as good for Britain. Hard to imagine, in fact, that it would have been anything but a ghastly calamity for her party and her country both. Barack Obama is at least as far left on the current U.S. political spectrum as Barbara Castle was on the British one of the late 1970s.
I should be thrilled to see a black American become president, but only if he was a conservative Republican. A black president with ideas all formed by the 1980s-college-radical instruction manual, will surely be a disaster for the U.S.A., and likely for his own party, too — even more so than a white president with the same menu of ideas.
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