How Obama milks race

I mean he’s had neither the typical white nor typical black American experience. That’s fine, but why is it this alone constitutes insight? If his history is so unique isn’t also true that he doesn’t quite share the experience of most Americans, black or white? I mean, why is it necessarily a positive? Because he says so in a hundred equally meaningless ways? Is this insight a genetic birthright? Because after the perfunctory bragging about his mixed parentage, all I hear are platitudes.

Imagine an indulgently guilty white liberal getting to actually be black. It must be exquisite. Continual bliss. To be able to resolve this angst in its glorious reversal, to indulge in the romance of oppression not as an outsider but as its subject — as both, in supreme sanctimony, over and over! But it is kind of weird when his white half condescends toward his black half. I think if it was me I’d call it a wash and get on with business. But I’m not the ambitious sort.

None of that for Barack; no grace, no generosity. No leaving anything on the table. Just a meticulous, thorough wringing out of any and all possible political advantage from this circumstance — and then some. He lays claim to all he surveys. He claims a unique perspective on all human suffering with those artlessly exhaustive rhetorical sweeps of his, those godawful geography name-checks. It’s a kind of greed. ‘From the family crossing the Rio Grande to the hillbillies in Appalachia’, he’s feeling you. Something to go with his response to the Wright controversy which, if I’m reading him correctly, is ‘if it offends, I condemn’; call it ‘if you’re sore, I’m your recourse’. If you’ve got a claim on the collective guilt of white America, Barack Obama is your man. Barack wants his cut. Isn’t it a little presumptuous of this guy that he thinks he can coopt the very idea of collective guilt and lord it over the nation?

Barry is to be understood not as a black man but as an ambitious white man realizing the potential of his African features.

He’s the best of the three contenders — which isn’t saying much and it’s in spite of not because of this game — but the game is so obvious. Who else sees a nought (zero) when they see his campaign signs with the big O?

From Steve Sailer.