MSNBC host Chris Matthews recently said he didn’t know anything President Obama’s critics could be afraid of except that he is black.
Really?
I won’t spend any time on Matthew’s obvious cluelessness. It is on display every time he opens his mouth.
But I would like to assert as strongly as I can that the president’s race has nothing whatever to do with the concerns that I have about his administration. In fact I was eager to vote for an African American for president. His name was Herman Cain.
My problem with Barack Obama is exactly the same as my problem with Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton, two Southern white Democrats not very far removed from the bad old days when Democrat politicians ordered fire hoses turned on Civil Rights marchers. Carter and Clinton are left-wingers and did much to push America away from the bright freedom of its democratic republic heritage and toward sad-sack European socialism.
Unfortunately, there have been too many Republican presidents who moved us leftward as well, but there is at least some hope that Republicans will defend our freedom. There’s pretty much no hope that a Democrat will.
I mentioned Herman Cain. I was very disappointed that he was forced out of the race before I could vote for him in the Georgia primary. His matter-of-fact discussion of the national debt grow out of his extensive business experience. In my opinion that’s just what we need right now. But the left couldn’t allow him to run as a Republican because it would give the lie to their contention that Republicans are racists (see “Just Gets Interestinger and Interestinger“).
But I would have voted for Condoleeza Rice too, had she been running.
Now, after his address to the National Prayer Breakfast in which he offered some barbs to Obama who was sitting nearby, there’s a draft movement to get Dr. Ben Carson into politics. I’ve been aware of Carson for about 30 years. His is a great rise-from-humble-beginnings story. He’s now a prominent surgeon and, while he is better educated and more accomplished than Obama, his straight-forward, common sense approach to the national dialogue ignited excitement among conservatives.
There are plenty of other people of color I admire and would support for political office. Think J. C. Watts, Star Parker, Walter Williams, Crystal Wright, Thomas Sowell, Allen West, Michael Steele, newly appointed Senator Tim Scott, Clarence Thomas, etc.
And of course there’s the most famous African American Republican of all: Martin Luther King, Jr. Too bad a Southern Democrat assassinated him.
