Two years ago Politico longingly recalled the Democratic convention of 2004 and
the Democratic Party’s swoon for Barack Obama, who thrilled millions of people hearing the young state senator for the first time with words that set his image as a dazzling unifier in an age of mean and divisive politics:
“Yet 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,” Obama told the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. “Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America — there’s the United States of America.”
Now that early, post-partisan Obama is an even more distant memory, if anyone remembers at all. Well, the Washington Post remembers, noting the change in an article today reporting the Obama 2012 campaign’s decision to build its campaign around “ethnic minorities” and “core liberals.”
The program, called “Operation Vote,” underscores how the tide has turned for Obama, whose 2008 brand was built on calls to unite “red and blue America.” Then, he presented himself as a politician who could transcend traditional partisan divisions, and many white centrists were drawn to the coalition that helped elect the country’s first black president.
Today, however, “political realities” — realities that the Post neglects to mention were largely created by the administration’s attempt to impose a left-wing agenda on a center-right nation — “are forcing the Obama campaign to adjust its tactics.”
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 groups such as blacks, Hispanics, Jews, women, seniors, young people, gays and Asian Americans.
The campaign this month hired a longtime Jewish political activist as a point person for that community, the first of many such hirings to come this fall as staffers are brought on from each of the target groups.
Given the Obama campaign’s decision to concentrate on racial and ethnic groups, teerhaps some enterprising reporter could ask the president or a campaign spokesman:
- Will it have only one “point person” for “Asian Americans,” or will Chinese-Americans, Japanese-Amiericans, Filipino-Americans, etc., etc. each have their own point people?
- Will Jews have only one “point person,” or will there be separate point people for orthodox, conservative, and reform?
- If Jews have a point person or two, shouldn’t Lutherans and Methodists have one as well?
- How many “Hispanic” point people will there be?
- Will there be one gay point person, or individual point people for lesbians and gay men?
- If there will be only one Native American point person, what tribe will he or she be from?
- Will whites have a point person, or will there be separate point people for Italians, Irish, Swedish, etc.?
- Will their be a multi-racial point person for people who do not identify as black or white?
As I suggested a number of years ago, today’s liberals act as though the motto of the United States is, or should be changed to, E Pluribus Pluribus. “Maybe,” I added a year or so later, “we should abandon trying to swim against the tide, accept the inevitable, get with the program, and just agree to change our name from the ‘United States of America’ to the ‘Confederate Races of America.’”
