Some sanity from across the pond

H/T Medved, (again). Had to post this great Telegraph piece by Toby Harnden.

But wait a minute. Mr Obama convincingly prevailed over John McCain in last November's election, an event that many American liberals argued could never happen in "racist" America. He has, moreover, not been shot by a redneck, giving the lie to an almost routine pre-election assertion in Europe that a black man could never be elected President, and if he was, he would be assassinated.

I was told to my face by a Canadian idiot that Obama was going to be shot because he was black. Those racist Americans, eh.

The election was a little over 10 months ago. Has America really turned around and stumbled back into the sulphurous swamps of racial hatred?

The short answer is no. Mr Obama is becoming a much less popular figure than he was when he entered office, partly because of the usual laws of political gravity, but also because of the unrealistic expectations he encouraged and the number of mistakes he has made.

My emphasis. He goes on:

Mr Obama was as different as it was possible to be from the likes of the Rev Jesse Jackson and the Rev Al Sharpton, black politicians who had built their careers on exploiting racial grievances. He was not the Rev Reginald Bacon, the Harlem racial agitator in Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities, the 1987 blockbuster novel that centred on racial tensions in the Big Apple; instead, he was Bishop Warren Bottomley.

The churchman, Wolfe wrote, was "one of those well-educated, urbane black people who immediately create the Halo Effect in the eyes of white people....He was handsome, slender, about forty-five, athletic in build. He had a ready smile, a glittering eye, a firm handshake..."

It was a remarkably prescient description of Mr Obama. As now Vice President Joe Biden put it in a characteristic stream of consciousness that condemned him to the ranks of also-ran presidential candidates: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

Nice work. It's good to see that these Brits aren't afraid to point out the stupidities of the Democratic Party like the American media is. He goes on to point out Obama's race-card mistakes including the Henry Louis Gates affair. All this race card stuff is going to backfire; people voted for Obama because he wasn't Jackson or Sharpton or the fictional Reverend Bacon.