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Politics : Just the Facts, Ma'am: A Compendium of Liberal Fiction -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sully- who wrote (69801)	2/23/2009 7:09:46 PM
From: Sully-	1 Recommendation Respond to of 90947

Jeffrey Toobin: voting Republican indicates racism Betsy's Page The Supreme Court is going to hear a case this term about whether states that were determined in 1965 in the Voting Rights Act to need preclearance for any change they made in their voting regulations, even for moving a voting site to a bigger location. Jeffrey Toobin argues in the New Yorker, that more than 40 years later, we need to keep those preclearance provisions in place. His proof? Southern states voted less for Barack Obama than other states. <<< Barack Obama won the Presidency, but voting patterns in the Deep South suggest that race remains a major factor in American political life. As part of a brief in the Northwest Austin case, Professor Nathaniel Persily, of Columbia Law School, shows how poorly Obama did with white Democrats in those states. According to Persily’s analysis of the 2008 returns, Obama received forty-seven per cent of the white vote in states that are not covered under Section 5 but won only twenty-six per cent of the white vote in covered states. “Barack Obama actually did worse among whites than John Kerry in several of the covered jurisdictions, despite the nationwide Democratic swing,” Persily writes. Race seems like the best explanation for this difference. >>> Maybe there are just more conservatives in Southern states than in other states. And just because McCain might have done better than Bush in 2004 in some of those states isn't proof of racism either. That is to argue that Bush and McCain are perfectly exchangeable people. I know the Democrats tried to argue that in the election and mostly succeeded, but that doesn't make it true. One difference that might have made an impact in some of these locations is McCain's record as a heroic POW. Or the presence of Sarah Palin on the ticket. It seems quite simplistic to argue that Obama did worse than Kerry in those locations so therefore there must be something racist going on. And even if people didn't vote for Obama because of racism, that doesn't mean that there is something explicitly racist in how they are conducting the votes in these states. These are locations that have elected black Congressmen, mayors, and state legislators. Who knows what the Supreme Court will do in this case, but I hope they work from better logic than simply arguing based on election returns or by assuming that any regulations to eliminate voter fraud have racism at their core as Toobin would seem to prefer. betsyspage.blogspot.com

To: Sully- who wrote (69801)	2/24/2009 10:22:32 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Re: Obamology Jonah Goldberg The Corner If I could just add one small point to the discussion. It's worth noting, it seems to me, that the hermeneutics of suspicion (great phrase, that) have a mirror in what we might call the hermeneutics of faith. Two weeks ago — half of Obama's presidency so far — there was a lot of talk of Obama as a "chess master." Bob Herbert: "Mr. Obama is like a championship chess player, always several moves ahead of friend and foe alike." Few can hold a candle to Mr. Herbert's facility with clichés. But I think this is a real dynamic. No, I don't mean that Obama is a chess master, but that some of his fans cannot tolerate the conflict between their opinion of the man and his obvious mistakes and short-comings. This is the flipside to political paranoia; the belief that "your guy" can do no wrong. In this sense the politics of hope and the politics of fear are not so different after all. Maybe, this is worth fleshing out more, or not. Hard to say as I head back to my bubonic-plague coma. corner.nationalreview.com

To: Sully- who wrote (69801)	2/24/2009 10:26:44 PM
From: Sully-	Respond to of 90947

Wingin' in the Reign Mark Steyn The Corner On the Is-he-wingin'-it-or-is-he-a-Machiavellian-genius? thing that Derb started this morning, I'd say the president is wingin' it. That summit today was hilarious, especially the bit before all the bigshots went off to their "breakout sessions" and Obama told them, in best Community-Organizer-in-Chief mode, "not just to identify problems, but to identify solutions." A reader adds: <<< I haven't heard dialogue that leaden since Edward D. Wood was producing, directing and writing his classic films. Plan Nine From Chicago. All Obama needs is a silk body suit, a tin foil helmet and a shower head that's supposed to be a ray gun. >>> It'd be funny if the shower head wasn't shooting trillion-dollar bills . . . corner.nationalreview.com