Topic category:  Other/General

National Journal's Stuart Taylor latest article is titled "Racism Marginalized -- Even If Obama Loses" and subtitled "Bigotry Is A Tough Sell When White Voters Seem More Predisposed To Call The Democrat's Race A Plus."

Unfortunately, Mr. Taylor focused only on white racism and white bigotry.

There are those who define racism in such a way as to exclude the possibility that non-whites can be racists in the United States, but that's ridiculous.

Mr. Taylor: "An African-American candidate with left-of-center views and less than four years in the Senate appears poised to win the presidential election over a seasoned white war hero who was until lately a media darling."

Let's be more precise.

First: Senator McCain was a media darling because he ran against President Bush and opposed him on some important matters.

The New York Times endorsed McCain for the Republican presidential nomination, but as soon as he won it, The New York Times went into attack with a scurrilous, speculative story about a middle-aged female lobbyist that was beneath contempt and it has continued with whitewashing of the Obama connections to Ayers and ACORN and even a pathetic attack on Senator McCain's wife Cindy. If McCain ever thought that The New York Times would really support him for President because he embraced their views on so-called campaign reform and immigration, he was uncharacteristically naive and should have checked with Laura Ingraham.

Second: Obama/Biden is the most radical ticket that the Democrats have fielded in a presidential race, Senator Obama is not merely "left-of-center." National Journal rated him the most liberal of the 100 United States Senators. Senator Bernard Sanders of Vermont, an avowed socialist, came in fourth. Obama running mate Senator Joseph Biden was number three.

Compared to Obama and Biden, former Senator George McGovern, the 1972 Democrat presidential nominee (and an Obama supporter), is moderate. He believes that the secret ballot in union elections should be preserved. Obama and union bosses want to deprive workers of that right.

Mr. Taylor: "There is much to celebrate..., even for supporters of John McCain. Win or lose, Obama has proved (if more proof were needed) that although many blacks are still mired in poverty -- a legacy of our racist history -- contemporary white racism has been driven to the fringes and is no longer a serious impediment to black advancement."

Yes. But what about black racism? Doesn't Obama winning about 90% of the black vote against Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton suggest that a racial connection influenced voting? Polls indicate that the black vote will be nearly unanimous for Obama against McCain. If that turns out to be true, isn't that something to rue?

Interestingly, the military poll shows war hero McCain running about twenty times better against military zero Obama among blacks performing military service. (But Obama is still winning that group by about 4 to 1.)

Mr. Taylor: "So, is the racial-grievance crowd celebrating? Hardly. Instead, the obsessive search for ever-more-elusive evidence of widespread white racism and sneaky appeals to it goes on."

That's hardly surprising. The Obama strategy is to suggest that whites who vote against him are racist, either consciously or subconsciously. Unless it's unanimous for Obama, the charge will be that white racism held down his vote (his lack of military, executive and foreign policy experience notwithstanding).

Mr. Taylor: "The McCain-Palin campaign has certainly showed an ugly side as its fortunes have faded. Examples include Sarah Palin's recent suggestion that small towns were 'the pro-America areas of this great nation,' for which she has had to apologize; her earlier claim that Obama had been 'palling around with terrorists'; and McCain's warnings about Obama bringing 'socialism' and 'welfare.' The mood of some lowlifes at McCain-Palin rallies has turned uglier still."

The truth can be very ugly!

It was Obama who disparaged small-town Americans for clinging to God and guns, allegedly out of bitterness over their economic circumstances. (The father of communism, Karl Marx, said religion was the opiate of the people.)

America is a capitalist society, not a socialist one, and there are parts of the country that do not share the traditional American values.

And Obama did "pal around" with terrorists.

William Ayers and Bernardine Dohrn backed Obama's political career from the start.

Wikipedia:

"A founder of the Weatherman group, Dohrn was a member of the 'Weather Bureau' (name later changed to 'Central Committee'). Larry Grathwohl, an FBI informant who was with the Weatherman from autumn 1969 through spring 1970, considered her one of the two top leaders of the organization, along with Bill Ayers.

"During this period, the group organized the October 1969 Days of Rage riot in Chicago, which Dohrn led. During the 1970s, the Weathermen bombed federal buildings and police stations. Prior to the March 6, 1970 Greenwich Village townhouse explosion, in which three members of the group were killed as a bomb was being constructed, all members of Weatherman went underground. The group then changed its name to Weather Underground.

"Dohrn went underground in early 1970, engaging in bombing activities...."

Note: Dohrn and Michelle Obama worked at the same big Chicago law firm at the same time (even before the Obamas married). If youbelieve that the Obamas did not have a clue about the history of Ayers and Dohrn, you must think they are too oblivious to become President and First Lady.

Mr. Taylor: "But the complaint that this shows that McCain and Palin are peddling 'racist garbage' in code, as Harold Meyerson (to pick one example) wrote in the October 22 Washington Post, seems contrived."

The truth is that McCain has refused to focus on the long-term relationship between Obama and Rev. Jeremiah A. "God damn America" Wright, Jr., lest it be perceived as an appeal to white racism.

That's ridiculous: one need not be white to loathe many vile things that Rev. Wright said.

Mr. Taylor:

"The ugliest race-tinged comment by any prominent leader during this campaign came not from a Republican but from Rep. John Lewis, the Georgia Democrat whom McCain has repeatedly called a personal hero for enduring merciless beatings by racist white cops while leading civil-rights marches in the 1960s. Lewis accused McCain and Palin on October 11 of 'sowing the seeds of hatred and division,' likening them to George Wallace, the segregationist Alabama governor who created an 'atmosphere of hate [in which] four little girls were killed.'

"Lewis should be ashamed of himself. It is precisely to avoid stirring up racial division that McCain has passed up what could be one of his most powerful and legitimate issues: Obama's long and close former relationship with the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, a leftist demagogue given to anti-American, anti-white, hate-filled ravings."

The presidential candidate playing the race card has been Obama. Obama declared that he had a problem because he did not look like "other presidents" on dollar bills. But being a president of the Harvard Law Review is not equivalent to being President of the United States and Obama has never been a President of the United States.

Mr. Taylor: "A New York Times editorial on October 7 accused McCain and Palin of 'race-baiting and xenophobia.' The evidence? Well, the editorial cited Palin's 'palling around with terrorists' charge. But that was a reference to a white man, the unrepentant Weather Underground terrorist Bill Ayers. The editorial also said that 'a man yelled "kill him"' while Palin was denouncing Ayers and Obama at a Florida rally. But the original Washington Post report on which this account was based did not say that the man 'yelled.' It also seemed to suggest that the comment was directed at Ayers, not Obama. And Secret Service agents monitoring the crowd found no evidence that anyone had said 'kill him' at all."

The bias of The New York Times contaminates its news coverage as well as its editorials. In March 2007 The New York Times reported that Obama had told Rev. Wright that Rev. Wright should not appear at the announcement of the Obama presidential campaign because his sermons could be "rough, " but it took more than a year for the public to find out--from others--what "rough" meant.

Has The New York Times fairly and accurately reported on the relationships of Obama with Ayers and ACORN and what ACORN is all about or slanted and spun?

Time will tell.

Mr. Taylor:

"The search for evidence of racism among white voters has been equally tireless and almost as tendentious. Some are undeniably racist, of course. But not all that many. So when a CBS News/New York Times poll found in July that only 5 percent of whites said they would not vote for a black man -- which doesn't sound so bad -- much was made of the fact that 19 percent said that most other people they know would not.

"An Associated Press/Yahoo poll in September found that one-third of whites harbor negative attitudes about blacks. That's a lot. But less attention was given to the fact that 58 percent of those with 'negative attitudes' said that they would vote for Obama.

"Did the 'negative attitudes' reflect real racial animus? Or the poll's use of leading questions? Consider the poll's finding that 'given a choice of several positive and negative adjectives that might describe blacks, 20 percent of all whites said that the word "violent" strongly applied.' Sounds ugly. But the racial stereotype was loaded into the question. And the answers might have had something to do with the statistical fact that blacks commit seven times as many homicides (and several times as many other violent crimes) per capita as whites.

"Slate Editor Jacob Weisberg perceived veiled racism when 14 percent of whites in another poll said yes when asked whether they feared Obama would 'favor blacks over whites.' But Obama has long supported overt racial affirmative-action preferences that do favor blacks over whites, in employment and college admissions."

It's worse than that. Obama finally disowned Rev. Wright, claiming, essentially, that he had not know enough about Rev. Wright.

But Obama can't fool people into thinking that he was oblivious about Rev. Wright's church, of which the Obamas were long-time members and where they were married and their children were baptized.

Trinity United Church of Christ adopted the Black Value System, written by the Manford Byrd Recognition Committee, chaired by the late Vallmer Jordan in 1981, and sets its forth on its website (www.tucc.org/black_value_system.html).

The twelfth and final commitment reads as follows: "Personal Commitment to Embracement of the Black Value System. To measure the worth and validity of all activity in terms of positive contributions to the general welfare of the Black Community and the Advancement of Black People towards freedom."

Michelle Obama candidly admitted in her college senior thesis, titled "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community," that she "would utilize all of [her] present and future resources to benefit [the Black] community first and foremost."

Mr. Taylor:

"For all of the focus on white racism, it seems quite possible that more people may vote for than against Obama because of his race. Campaign manager David Plouffe has told reporters that Obama will win at least 95 percent of the black vote, up from the 88 percent who backed John Kerry in 2004, and Obama is doing better with white women and white working-class men than either Kerry or Al Gore.

"A lot of white voters see Obama's race as a plus. In my case, the main reason (as I said in my January 12 column) is that electing an African-American who preaches education and opportunity rather than grievance and reparations would provide the best imaginable beacon of hope for black children who have been misled by bad leaders into thinking that America is still too racist to give them a chance at success."

Reverends Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton prepared the way for Obama to appear as an UNangry black presidential candidate.

Mr. Taylor:

"Racism-spotters also make much of the 'Bradley effect,' a term coined when Tom Bradley, the black mayor of Los Angeles, lost the 1982 California governor's race to George Deukmejian after exit polls had predicted he would win. This is typically seen as proof of white voters lying to pollsters to hide their racism. A more plausible hypothesis might be that they opposed the black candidate on the merits but feared being falsely perceived as racist by the pollsters.

"A still more plausible hypothesis is that the Bradley effect is a myth. So said Blair Levin, who worked in Bradley's campaign, in an October 20 New York Times op-ed. Bradley lost, Levin explained, not because of race but 'because an unpopular gun control initiative and an aggressive Republican absentee-ballot program generated hundreds of thousands of Republican votes no pollster anticipated.' Academic studies have suggested the same. And a study of 133 elections by Daniel Hopkins, a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard, found that -- although most black candidates fared worse than polls had predicted from 1989 until 1996 -- most did better than predicted from 1996 through 2006."

How about the possibility that polls are skewed to influence elections? Why only suspect the polled? Why not suspect the pollers too?

Mr. Taylor:

"What should the lesson be if Obama loses? 'Racism is the only reason McCain might beat him,' Weisberg asserted in August. 'If Obama loses, our children will grow up thinking of equal opportunity as a myth. His defeat would say that when handed a perfect opportunity to put the worst part of our history behind us, we chose not to. In this event, the world's judgment will be severe and inescapable: The United States had its day but, in the end, couldn't put its own self-interest ahead of its crazy irrationality over race.

"This is nonsense, and dangerous nonsense at that. A chorus of such commentary after an Obama defeat would reinforce in the minds of black children the pernicious myth that there's no point studying or working hard, because the white man will hold them down no matter how good they are."

That "nonsense" is a campaign tactic!

Mr. Taylor:

"This is not to deny that an Obama loss could plausibly be attributed to race-based voting, given all of the reasons one would expect him to win: the financial crisis and recession; two unpopular wars; Republican disarray; the erratic McCain campaign; and Obama's first-rate intellect, calm temperament, gigantic fundraising advantage, and big lead in the polls.

"But to paint an arguably race-tipped Obama loss as confirming that America is incurably racist would be perverse. Randall Kennedy, a Harvard law professor, explained why in a Washington Post commentary:

"'If Obama loses, I personally will feel disappointed, frustrated, hurt. I'll conclude that a fabulous opportunity has been lost. I'll believe that American voters have made a huge mistake. And I'll think that an important ingredient of their error is racial prejudice....

"'But I hope that soon thereafter I'll find solace and encouragement in contemplating this unprecedented development: A major political party nominated a black man for the highest office in the land, and that man waged an intelligent, brave campaign in which many millions of Americans of all races enthusiastically supported an African-American standard-bearer.... He has reached the edge of the pinnacle. And shown that we can stand atop it.'

"Beyond that, Obama himself will still be a good bet to stand atop the pinnacle sooner or later even if he loses this year."

Don't bet on it.

Obama is as close to the pinnacle as he is because he has not been properly vetted and exuberance has been accepted by many as a substitute for experience.

The truth won't be covered up forever.

In 1960, JFK kept secret both his annulled first marriage and his medical history, facts that would have made Nixon the winner in a very close race if they had been known before the election day.

So far, Team Obama has kept things from the public consciousness that would explode the myth of Obama or deflected damaging information with the help of biased major media. But it's still October, a month for surprises.

Michael J. Gaynor

Biography - Michael J. Gaynor

Michael J. Gaynor has been practicing law in New York since 1973. A former partner at Fulton, Duncombe & Rowe and Gaynor & Bass, he is a solo practitioner admitted to practice in New York state and federal courts and an Association of the Bar of the City of New York member.

Gaynor graduated magna cum laude, with Honors in Social Science, from Hofstra University's New College, and received his J.D. degree from St. John's Law School, where he won the American Jurisprudence Award in Evidence and served as an editor of the Law Review and the St. Thomas More Institute for Legal Research. He wrote on the Pentagon Papers case for the Review and obscenity law for The Catholic Lawyer and edited the Law Review's commentary on significant developments in New York law.

The day after graduating, Gaynor joined the Fulton firm, where he focused on litigation and corporate law. In 1997 Gaynor and Emily Bass formed Gaynor & Bass and then conducted a general legal practice, emphasizing litigation, and represented corporations, individuals and a New York City labor union. Notably, Gaynor & Bass prevailed in the Second Circuit in a seminal copyright infringement case, Tasini v. New York Times, against newspaper and magazine publishers and Lexis-Nexis. The U.S. Supreme Court affirmed, 7 to 2, holding that the copyrights of freelance writers had been infringed when their work was put online without permission or compensation.

Gaynor currently contributes regularly to www.MichNews.com, www.RenewAmerica.com, www.WebCommentary.com, www.PostChronicle.com and www.therealitycheck.org and has contributed to many other websites. He has written extensively on political and religious issues, notably the Terry Schiavo case, the Duke "no rape" case, ACORN and canon law, and appeared as a guest on television and radio. He was acknowledged in Until Proven Innocent, by Stuart Taylor and KC Johnson, and Culture of Corruption, by Michelle Malkin. He appeared on "Your World With Cavuto" to promote an eBay boycott that he initiated and "The World Over With Raymond Arroyo" (EWTN) to discuss the legal implications of the Schiavo case. On October 22, 2008, Gaynor was the first to report that The New York Times had killed an Obama/ACORN expose on which a Times reporter had been working with ACORN whistleblower Anita MonCrief.

Gaynor's email address is gaynormike@aol.com.