Prometheus 6

Change is inevitable; you adapt or die. So ultimately the Conservative goal of staying always the same is a cutural suicide pact. Conservatives will yield to the march of time.

But Liberals want to adjust as soon as a change becomes evident. Conservatives want to wait until it is unavoidable.

The Unavoidable Issue
By E. J. Dionne Jr.
Tuesday, August 5, 2008; A19

Last week's dust-up over race between John McCain and Barack Obama was entirely disappointing. Obama spoke first about how his opponents would try to "make you scared of me," noting that he "doesn't look like all those other presidents" on our currency. What Obama said was true, but he made the tactical mistake of suggesting that McCain was complicit in overtly racial politics.

That gave Rick Davis, McCain's campaign manager, the excuse to offer the preposterous charge that Obama had "played the race card, and he played it from the bottom of the deck."

Davis's use of a dreadful cliche brought to mind George Orwell's observation that there exists "a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves."

Nonetheless, the Obama camp was caught short, and the candidate backed off a critique of McCain on race. McCain largely left the matter to his surrogates. Both candidates are wary of racial politics. Obama knows that whites and Latinos will constitute the vast majority of November's electorate, and McCain knows that many swing voters will be turned off by explicit racism. But the episode was a good example of how indirect and misleading political talk can be. Like it or not, Obama's race is an issue, just as John F. Kennedy's religion was an issue in 1960 -- and racism runs deeper in our history than anti-Catholicism.

There is no doubt that two keys to this election are: How many white and Latino votes will Obama lose because of his race that a white Democrat would have won? And how much will African American turnout grow, given the opportunity to elect our nation's first black president?