Newsweek’s liberal columnist Jonathan Alter makes explicit one of the underlying motivations for Obamamania:

While Obama can do much to guide white Americans toward a better racial future and a greater appreciation that poor kids are not, as he says, “someone else’s children,” his most exciting potential for moral leadership could be in the African-American community.

Remember the 1998 movie “Bulworth,” where Warren Beatty plays a U.S. senator suffering a nervous breakdown? When Beatty’s character tells astonished black Democrats that it’s time for them to “put down the chicken and the malt liquor,” it’s final proof that Jay Bulworth is crazy and suicidal. But consider what happened late last month in Beaumont, Texas, when I covered Obama speaking before an African-American audience. A woman asked about health care and Obama explained how, for the first time in human history, thousands of obese children, many of them black, were being diagnosed with adult-onset diabetes—a disease that is killing millions and helping bankrupt the health-care system. He told the crowd that kids couldn’t keep on “drinking eight sodas a day,” then went in Bulworth’s direction. “I know some of y’all got that cold Popeye’s [chicken] out for breakfast. I know,” Obama said with a smile. He continued: “That’s why y’all laughing. You can’t do that. Children have to have proper nutrition. That affects also how they study, how they learn in school … It’s not good enough for you to say to your child, ‘Do good in school,’ and then when that child comes home, you got the TV set on, you got the radio on, you don’t check their homework, there is not a book in the house, you’ve got the videogame playing.” Instead of being jeered, he was cheered wildly.

Obviously, not all black adults and children would suddenly start doing exactly what President Obama tells them. As he said in his Philadelphia speech, he’s not naive enough to believe that one politician will transform American attitudes. But it must make at least some difference when Obama tells African-American audiences, as he did this year on Martin Luther King Jr. Day at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, that they need to stop being homophobic and anti-Semitic.[The Obama Dividend Instruct. Illuminate. Rearrange our mental furniture. That's a president's challenge. Mar 31, 2008 ]

I call this theory, “Don’t be so black; be more Barack!”

This is classic:

Althouse: “I’m used to Greenwald misrepresenting me wholesale, but being savaged for a post I didn’t link to is a new one.”
Sunday, March 23, 2008
“I’m used to Greenwald misrepresenting me wholesale, but being savaged for a post I didn’t link to is a new one.”
Writes Glenn Reynolds, who’s irritated at being slammed for linking to some blogger’s Happy-Easter post which turned out to be right above that blogger’s co-blogger’s racist rant. In fact, one of my regular commenters — in this thread — seems to be taking me to task because I’ve been linked by Reynolds who linked to the guy who blogs with the guy who said something racist. This is the dog that worried the cat that chased the rat that ate the malt….

The Easter post at a multi-blogger called Instapunk site that Instapundit linked to was this one–the “racist rant,” by another blogger, calling himeslf “Old Punk” was this one.

It actually includes racist language–the “Old Punk” succumbs to combination of punk sensibility and what both Steve Sailer and John Derbyshire has called “Elderly Tourette’s Syndrome” ( which is where you’re too old to give a damn anymore what people think) and actually uses theDeplorable Word (A word I deplore myself, and never use, although it’s popular with rap music artists.)

But here’s the conclusion to his post:

Here’s the biggest thing we “racists” notice. Every single immigrant group that ever came to America — including the Chinese who came as railroad slaves–has risen out of poverty and want to prosperity and respect. The Irish, the Italians, the Polish, the Jews, the Koreans, the Vietnamese. Every group but you. And you’re the only group we fought a war to free.

Sorry to break it to you, but Obama won’t be elected president. We were ready, but you clearly aren’t. Time to think about getting ready.

Now, let the abuse descend. I’m ready.

Well, they’re not just abusing him, but people who linked to a post next to his post. Clearly there’s a lot of abusive behavior going around.

Obama’s humorlessness about race is starting to cause him real problems. For example, on an AM radio sports talk show, of all places, he got asked about his Throw Grandma from the Train speech (“a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street “), and bumbled:

From his speech at Howard U.:

What’s truly risky is to let the same injustice remain year after year. What’s truly risky is to walk away and pretend it never happened. What’s truly risky is to accept things as they are instead of working for what could be. In a media-driven culture that’s more obsessed with who’s beating who in Washington and how long Paris Hilton is going to jail, these moments are harder to spot today. But every so often, they do appear. Sometimes it takes a hurricane. And sometimes it takes a travesty of justice like the one we’ve seen in Jena, Louisiana.

There are some who will make Jena about the fight itself. And it’s true that we have to do more as parents to instill in our children that violence is always wrong. It’s wrong when it happens on the streets of Chicago and it’s wrong when it happens at a schoolyard in Louisiana. Violence is not the answer. Non-violence was the soul of the Civil Rights Movement, and we have to do a better job of teaching our children that virtue.

But we also know that to truly understand Jena, you have to look at what happened both before and after that fight. You have to listen to the hateful slurs that flew through the halls of a school. You have to know the full measure of the damage done by that arson. You have to look at those nooses hanging on that schoolyard tree. And you have to understand how badly our system of justice failed those six boys in the days after that fight - the outrageous charges; the unreasonable and excessive sentences; the public defender who did not call a single witness.

Like Katrina did with poverty, Jena exposed glaring inequities in our justice system that were around long before that schoolyard fight broke out. It reminds us of the fact that we have a system that locks away too many young, first-time, non-violent offenders for the better part of their lives - a decision that’s made not by a judge in a courtroom, but by politicians in Washington. It reminds us that we have certain sentences that are based less on the kind of crime you commit than on what you look like and where you come from. It reminds us that we have a Justice Department whose idea of prosecuting civil rights violations is trying to rollback affirmative action programs at our college and universities; a Justice Department whose idea of prosecuting voting rights violations is to look for voting fraud in black and Latino communities where it doesn’t exist. …

I don’t want to be standing here and talking about another Jena four years from now because we didn’t have the courage to act today. I don’t want this to be another issue that ends up being ignored once the cameras are turned off and the headlines disappear. It’s time to seek a new dawn of justice in America.

From the day I take office as President, America will have a Justice Department that is truly dedicated to the work it began in the days after Little Rock. I will rid the department of ideologues and political cronies, and for the first time in eight years, the Civil Rights Division will actually be staffed with civil rights lawyers who prosecute civil rights violations, and employment discrimination, and hate crimes. And we’ll have a Voting Rights Section that actually defends the right of every American to vote without deception or intimidation. When flyers are placed in our neighborhoods telling people to vote on the wrong day, that won’t only be an injustice, it will be a crime.

As President, I will also work every day to ensure that this country has a criminal justice system that inspires trust and confidence in every American, regardless of age, or race, or background. There’s no reason that every single person accused of a crime shouldn’t have a qualified public attorney to defend them. We’ll recruit more public defenders to the profession by forgiving college and law school loans - and I will ask some of the brilliant minds here at Howard to take advantage of that offer. There’s also no reason we can’t pass a racial profiling law like I did in Illinois, or encourage state to reform the death penalty so that innocent people do not end up on death row.

What really happened:

Similarly, in September, when Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton led thousands of demonstrators in a march on the small town of Jena, Louisiana to protest supposed racism in the treatment of six black high-school students accused of beating unconscious then stomping the body of a white schoolmate, the assembled national media got the story almost 180 degrees backward. We weren’t witnessing a revival of the Emmett Till Era of lynchings, as the pundits insisted, but another example of the O.J. Simpson Age of stars athletes whose off-field misdeeds are excused until they finally go too far.

The Jena Six hadn’t been despised outcasts: they were the best football players in a gridiron-obsessed small town. Mychal Bell, the only one of the Six tried so far, was an All-State junior who scored 18 touchdowns in the 2006 season. A local minister, Eddie Thompson, explained, “For the most part, coaches and other adults have prevented them from being held accountable for the reign of terror they have presided over in Jena.” As Abbey Brown wrote in the Alexandria-Pineville Town Talk: “Bell was adjudicated—the juvenile equivalent to a conviction—of battery Sept. 2 [2006] and criminal damage to property Sept. 3. … A few days later, on Sept. 8, Bell rushed 12 times for 108 yards and scored three touchdowns.”