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Human
Events...
Subdividing
America -- to Win
by Patrick J. Buchanan
09/27/2011
“Now
even as we speak, there are those
who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad
peddlers who
embrace the politics of anything goes.
“Well,
I say to them tonight, there’s
not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United
States of
America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino
America and
Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
That
was state Sen. Barack Obama in
his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic convention. His rejection of
tribal
politics, his stirring call to national unity, vaulted him into the
Senate and
was the first step on the path that took him to the White House.
Well,
that was then, but now is now.
According
to The Washington Post,
Obama’s 2012 campaign is today busily subdividing the nation into
racial,
ethnic and religious enclaves for targeted appeals to find a “narrow
path to
victory.”
Setting
one tribe against another, one
faction against another, divide and conquer, is among the oldest
tactics of
politics and war.
The
Obama campaign headquarters calls
its divide-and-conquer strategy “Operation Vote.” Reporter Peter
Wallsten
describes it:
“Operation
Vote will function as a
large, centralized department in the Chicago campaign office for
reaching
ethnic, religious and other voter groups. It will coordinate
recruitment of an
ethnic volunteer base and push out targeted messages online and through
the
media to different groups, such as blacks, Hispanics, Jews, women,
seniors,
young people, gays and Asian Americans.”
This
is tribal politics, pure and
simple. Hire blacks, Hispanics, Jews and gays to appeal to and advance
the
interests of blacks, Hispanics, Jews and gays. And what happens then to
the
national interest?
Conspicuously
absent from this
racial-ethnic-religious targeting is America’s majority, white
Christians, who
are still 60 percent of the nation. Why no outreach to them? Have they
been
written off?
Obama
got 43 percent of the white vote
in 2008, a higher share than either John Kerry or Al Gore. But his
approval
rating among whites has fallen to less than a third; even lower among
working-class whites.
If
these folks have come to believe
Obama has relegated them to the back of the bus, does not Operation
Vote
confirm it?
And
if targeted appeals to race,
ethnicity, religion, gender and sexual orientation is the Obama
strategy, 2012
will be among the most divisive elections in U.S. history...
Read
the rest of the column at Human
Events
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