From his speech...

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds - by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper."

This sounds like affirmative action to me. The rich will do fine no matter who is elected president. I'm white working class. At least with a status-quo president, everyone in the lower classes gets screwed. With Obama, I will definately be last on the list. Oh and that rhetoric about one person's dreams not having to come at the expense of someone else's? Impossible. Someone always has to win and someone always has to lose. It's a fact of life.

If everybody in the lower class gets screwed in general, but you will get screwed more if Obama wins, does this mean that you think that the "rich" will always have the upper hand, that there is nothing that can be done about it and that doing anything to deal with the legacy of slavery and racism must necessarily be bad for for you, perhaps because you will always be lower class? Reminds me of the old communist joke about two peasants asking a genie for a favor: the first askes for a cow, and the second asks, "please kill his cow." Really, I'm sorry for you, but you don't have to just lie down and be such a loser. Maybe you'll win, and maybe others will as well, all at the same time. Your ideas about the facts of life at the moment are no better than the second peasant's. Buck up, friend.

You got my sympathy, bub. For over thirty-five years working class white men's wages have been dropping. Not the wages of black men. Not the wages of women.

But your wages have not dropped far enough to suit Obama and his Harvard Law School Wall Street Banker and College Professor friends and supporters.

Obama's pals and co-workers at the University of Chicago favor open borders, no tariffs and globalization (oh, and affirmative action, too). That's why they love Obama, because he does, too.

Obama talks of "fairness" for black folks, at the same time that he, as chief black man, wants to amnesty tens of millions of Mexicans who took black jobs -- The Jobs That Americans [read:black folks] Won't Do.

Yet Obama now wants "justice" and "equality" for blacks? Having given away their jobs to illegals he wants white Americans to make a whole bunch more for black folks?

Honey, If I give you a sammitch to eat because you say you hungry, and you elect Obama to go give it to that Mexican illegal over there, don't be coming back to me looking for more sammitches.

@fhdpjosc

"You got my sympathy, bub. For over thirty-five years working class white men's wages have been dropping. Not the wages of black men. Not the wages of women."

This is just lazy. If you want to make a point then compare apples to apples. Have all white men's wages been dropping? I would guess not, so you limit it to working class white men. Fine, but then you should compare them to working class blacks and working class women. How do they match up? I don't know, and if you have an answer I'd like to hear where it comes from.

As for globalization- not sure why you're singling Obama out here. All the things you knock him for have basically been the GOP and Clinton Dems position for quite a while too. As for immigration, could make the same complaint about McCain and Bush. The hardliners (Tancredo, Romney-eventually) made their case in the primaries and got nowhere. Maybe your beef is with the public in general for not voting the way you want.

Dear AMT,

Yes kill his cow. That's reality, friend.

Immigration: Romney did not fare too well on Immigration because McCain reversed his earlier position and promised to be hard on immigration and enforce border security. Basically he took away the issue from them. But the issue remains that so long there is plentiful cheap labor pouring across the border, it will be very hard for african-americans to make headways. They need 30-40 years of sustained help in getting past their poverty. Every time they make progress, some tsunami of "squeeze" on low-wages, be it destruction of unions, importation of cheap labor or globalization, that keeps pushing them back to where they are. It is sustained affirmative action coupled with positive help and workfare for a long period of time that is needed - not rhetoric and race discussions in the cozy libraries of Boston Brahmins.

Globalization: Granted this is the Republican invention which was co-opted somewhat by Bill Clinton. However, Hillary is less enamored with globalization than Bill. She is in favor of looking hard at trade polices and providing "wherewithal" to people losing on the trade front. Even though that it is better than Bush, I am still not enamored by her stance. I was expecting Obama to make a fundamentally different stance - but by standing with even-more-free-traders such as the Chicago School, Obama has proved to be a total hypocrite. At least Hillary claims to be in the free trade school with help for the losers. Obama talks about a new way but is more in the old school that Hillary!

This is a repeated pattern for Obama. He says one thing but his advisors (economic and foreign policy) reveal in interviews that what he is saying is to be ignored because it is just politics to get elected. Isn't that what Obama and his cohorts or "change we can believe in" wants to supposedly change? He is black when it is convenient and white when it is. Colonet West came out of a meeting with his advisors believing that Obama is not saying what he feels about Blacks because he does not want to offend the Whites! Hillary or McCain is not pitching to the voters that they should vote for them because they are the second coming of Gandhi or Jesus. But Obama is - he claims to be integrity itself. Yet he is just another politican. I have no problem with that if he does not make that his principle campaign theme. He seems Mitt Romney on the left - but more slick and less clumsy.

bennifer:

Dear AMT,

Yes kill his cow. That's reality, friend.

And you wonder why people have responded to what some are calling a "vague message or hope." It's becuse apparently our only other choice is to give in to cynicism and the general belief that if we can't make our own circumstances better, at least we can make someone else's as bad or worse than ours. I, for one, am not ready or willing to do that. If that makes me naive then so be it.