Why?

With this political season closing I am confounded.  Not only has reason decided to pick this season to go on vacation, but I’m left to conclude that the dynamics which may decide the political and judicial future of this country are found in the darkest corners of our National consciousness.

Barack Obama is at best holding a barely distinguishable lead in this contest.  Mitt Romney is potentially the next President. That’s right – Mitt Romney; a man whose only political leadership was that of a one term governor so divisive and unpopular that he couldn’t have been reelected, a man who has been rejected across the political spectrum as Presidential timber for seven years, a man who treats pragmatism as an art form – that Mitt Romney.

There is practically nothing real that has occurred in the past four years that should lead to this outcome a week before the election.  The only reason Romney is the Republican candidate at all is because the field of heavy-weight Republican politicians decided two years ago that the race was not winnable. The clown-like Republican Primary has clearly vanished from the collective memory of the American electorate. 

No one denies what the Nation was left with at the end of the Bush presidency.  Although not the direct cause, the Bush Administration and Congress had cultivated an atmosphere where politically connected financial barons, and the institutions they ran, could advance their self-interest with impunity.  The greed that evolved based on ever magically rising real estate values made no correction even as the cataclysmic outcome of falling housing values on derivatives became obvious to the major players. 

The resulting meltdown had the potential of eclipsing 1929 as a financial black hole.  Yet the Obama Presidency held court over a recovery which avoided anything like what was experienced in the 1930s and did so in spite of more obstructionist opposition than any President has faced since the Civil War.  Even if Obama’s failures as a communicator (see this blog – Handling Depression  9/9/12) hurt his ability to make his case, he still should be comfortably ahead in this election because of his successes and the actual outcomes.  His and the Democratic Party’s premier accomplishment, The Affordable Health Care Act, was used as a tool to drum the Democratic House majority into a minority, despite it being a major step away from the most dysfunctional health care system in the industrialized world.  Reason be damned.

We need to get real. Obama is barely holding onto his Presidency because he is so profoundly hated (not disagreed with – hated), and primarily by white men.  He has been vilified as a Communist, Socialist, Anarchist, radical Muslim, non-American (legally and emotionally), traitor, a Hitler, a Stalin, an anti-capitalist, anti-energy, anti-freedom, and (on occasion) anti-Christ  - who probably shoots kittens to get them out of the trees their stuck in, while still being anti-guns.  It makes no sense. Aside from some social issues, Obama is far closer to Ronald Reagan than he is to Jimmy Carter on all matters regarding the economy and National security, including health care. What really makes a significant majority of white men hate Obama is as simple as it is impervious to discussion – race.   

It is obvious that a large majority of African-Americans support and will vote for Obama based strictly on race.  Obama is projected to receive 95% of the black vote which carries with it no more legitimacy than race voting by white men.  The difference is in the numbers and intent.  According to the 2010 Census, white males in the US consist of numbers 3 times that of all Blacks in this country.  The ratio could be 4 or 5 times as many if one only considers those who vote. 

White men, especially with limited education, don’t see what Obama was handed and what he has accomplished because they don’t want to see it, or perhaps, more realistically, their bigotry won’t let them see it. Sure the Nation elected Barack Obama in 2008 because he appeared to be a young engaging leader who happened to be Black to boot, which some of those white men still encumbered with bigotry felt well about accepting.  However, it has now become obvious that we are much closer to the decades prior to 1960 than we thought.  When Romney Co-chair Gov. John Sununu suggested this week that Colin Powell had endorsed Obama due to race he (Sununu) was saying something far more telling about himself (and his peers) then about Powell.

Given time over these past 3 years and a concerted effort by a neo-conservative movement, tens of millions of white American men are allowing themselves to embrace their fears of lost supremacy.  To those who would argue to the contrary I offer as evidence Mitt Romney…their chosen alternative.