POLITICO: DENYING OBAMA NOMINATION WITH 90% BLACK SUPPORT “HARD TO CONCEIVE”

The Democratic nominating process has apparently again run aground on the shoals of race.

On the one had, we have the continual criticism of former president Bill Clinton for allegedly “playing the race card”, even though Team Obama primed its troups with a campaign memo to jump on any comments by the Clintons (or their surrogates) that could be construed as racial. Indeed, the opening salvo against the Clintons came in response to Bill Clinton referring to the Obama campaign as “the biggest fairytale I ever heard”—hardly an overtly racist remark.

Then of course Team Obama (we now know pursuant to the strategy outlined in the campaign memorandum) jumped all over Geraldine Ferraro for stating that Obama had gained momentum in the nominating process because he is black. (Never mind that a well known black scholar, Brown University professor Glenn Loury, explicitly stated that it was precisely because so many black voters viewed him as the black candidate that he enjoys a lead in the delegate count and that Obama has been “hypocritical in its exploitation of a simple-minded racial voting reflex among black Americans.”)

Then we learn from recent news accounts that as an apparent counterpart to Obama winning over 90% of the black vote in the three most recent primary contests, Clinton is now winning over 60% of the white vote. Hardly a 'post racial' candidacy or primary election.

And now we have this observation from Politico.com as to why it believes that it is hard to imagine Obama not winning the nomination:

“As Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen, among others, wrote weeks ago, when Obama finishes the primary season ahead in elected delegates, as he will, it is hard to conceive the circumstances that would cause Democratic superdelegates to deny an African-American politician with overwhelming support from the party’s most loyal constituency.”

So let me get this straight.

Not only have we suffered attacks on a popular former president and former female vice presidential candidate as “racists” for telling the truth and saying (milder versions of) the same thing black scholars were saying—according to an Obama plan hatched before any comments were made—we now have to sit back and watch our party elders anoint Barack Obama as the Democratic nominee because he is African-American and we don’t want to offend the Democratic Party’s “most loyal constituency”: Blacks?

I am sorry, but this “constituency” is hardly “loyal”. After a very long history of affection between the Clinton’s and the black community, it turned away from the Clinton’s and into the arms of Barack Obama in a heart-beat, before the end of a single 24-hour news cycle.

Second, lets get our priorities straight.

The super-delegates have a duty to nominate the most electable Democratic candidate for the presidency as between the two candidates that failed to win the nominating process by attaining at least 2,025 pledged delegates.

The exercise is not a mathematical one—simply ascertaining who has the more pledged delegates (we could have any accounting firm do that)—nor should it be based on racial considerations, let alone fears of offending a fickle group of voters who make Bill Richardson look loyal in comparison.