I don't think you can win that way either MM aka Destor. It's odd isn't it though. So I had a discussion with one of my white boy crowd on the ferry, and yes I call them that to their faces. I said to Brad, I can't believe you would vote for Mitt Romney, your an electrician, he doesn't represent you. Then I added I would have him voting for the black guy by the end of the week an I laughed. (I know this wouldn't happen though). 

Then I asked him why he didn't like Democrats so much, he liked me just fine, we play cribbage often and I kick his ass often when we play. He says you aren't like real democrats, they hate guns. I asked him if that was it, did it always come down to guns? And he said yes.  So I asked him when was the last time the feds took his guns away from him, and he said never and I said, well what does that tell you then? His wife was sitting there laughing, she says the whole family tries to tell him this all the time. And he couldn't verbalize anything, so I told him as long as he wasn't pointing his guns at me or he wasn't a felon of any kind I could care less about his end of the world bunker or his ammunition or his guns. So then he says to me, "your a republican then." I say, "No Brad, I am not a Republican I am a regular old Democrat, they are almost all like me."

My conclusion to this is, they are woefully misinformed and easily manipulated and are looking for our differences instead of what we have in common. Limbaugh and Faux play to this, they know it and they play up any miniscule differences we as humans have and make is scary for these guys. They are coming around though. This is one thing I am sure of. We need to manipulate them back.. I am just not sure how to do that, but I think it can be done.

When the murdered George Tiller, did we make sure that abortion clinic survived? Or did we watch it shutter up like ACORN? Oh hey, James Tje O'Keefe tried to entrap a CNN reporter (in a rather sexual harassment kind of way), and tapped a Congresswoman's phone 

When a few Catholic leaders protested about contraception benefits for ACA, did we push them to stand down? Or did we fold like a bad hand at cards?

The President of PBS resigned over not-strong-enough-words on liberal bias. But Rush Limbaugh attacked Sandra Fluke over contraception, presenting her as a "slut" and waxing theatric over her imagined sexual escapades.

Laura Bush used the plight of women in Afghanistan to justify our war, and then as the invasion got legs, well, much less worry about whether those girls actually went to school, whether women could take off burqa-wear. 

Misogyny sells - pretending we do a hell of a lot to provent it and correct it is highly.... misleading  Sunday morning newspaper runt kind stuff.

The interesting thing now is not the specific debates - it's the content in the dialogue.

This whole diary is pretty insulting.

Bob Somerby just noted again the racial progress at Ole Miss, that acceptance and tolerance is now multi-generational, but the only message we usuall get is that whitey is scared and irrational and hateful.

The big issue with Mexicans has been *ILLEGAL* immigration as well as a poorly thought out immigration change under George H.W. Bush. The result has been a huge swelling of Hispanic population over the last 3 decades, something like 8-10 million each decade. But from a liberal perspective, the only proper response is to learn to speak Spanish.

The praised auto bailout was used by Delphi to kill 25,000 US union jobs and ship them all to Mexico and China. But we scorn lower-middle class Americans as just whiny whites because they might perceive they're in an economic war with Mexico - at the same time their union jobs go south, more and more Hispanic day workers show up on the corner to do menial tasks like roofwork for cut-rate prices. But let's just all get along.

You can't eat health care. All those Cadillac health plans for unions that somehow got preserved for pensioners don't equal better pay either for retirees or especially for new auto employees. I have educated friends who think that new hires are pushing brooms around the shop floor and that's why they're paid low. They don't realize that all the menial tasks were outsourced long ago and are no longer part of union bargaining - we're talking about the drastic cutting of semi-skilled wages, to compete with the bargain basement non-union semi-skilled wages down south.

Oh but wait, if Southerners want to work cheap, they're immorally undercutting unions, basically scabs - but if Mexicans come in to work cheap or do the job in a maquiladora in the free trade zone south of the border, they're just trying to improve their lives. There is little public understanding of the long-term industrial-agricultural/rural competition between north and south, and how that plays into this issue, where "racism" is the only explanation we can come up with.

While Democrats still seem to be winning elections, they've failed horribly at upgrading their message or pointing to anything that's a core value. After Nov. 7 Obama will go in for the Grand Bargain to cut into Social Security as well as Medicare. He's signalled this, that his unhappiness with Simpson-Bowles is over defense cuts, not social cuts. Rahm told unions they'd flushed their money down the toilet in Arkansas and no help came from DC in supporting union teachers. The President signalled a major change in policy by opening up most of the Gulf of Mexico to drilling the month before the BP spill. And the whole foreign policy "debate" was mostly a bromance on how much the 2 contestants agreed.

So white conservatives have agreed their message - but mostly it's code for "we liked things the way they were" or "we belong to this tribe". Liberals still can't get over that they're part of a tribe too, and especially white liberals can't message to save their lives because they have accepted that being white is being privileged and therefore wrong. We went from a message where everyone should be privileged - all-inclusion, all boats should rise - to one where everyone else should be privileged and whites, especially males, should step down - a suicide pact, whether it's jobs, climate/energy use, religion, regional cultures.

And  it's not like the left doesn't enjoy playing the racist card or using the right prism to view racism in politically advantageous ways. Only white fundamentalists are anti-gay (except when blacks are). Only whites vote for other whites based on race or ethnicity (never a black voting for a black, a Hispanic voting for another Hispanic, Chinese, Italian, Jewish, Irish, Greek... i.e. simply everyone). "Liberals" like to talk about the disaster that's public schools just like conservatives do, only drawing the "spend more money" rather than the "privatize/vouchers" conclusion. Never mind that as Bob Somerby again points out, public schools have been improving the past decades, and that black education standards have greatly increased:

The New York Times has never reported those remarkable data from the NAEP! “By the best national assessment we have available,” black fourth-graders are now scoring higher in math than their white counterparts from 1992! And no, there is no sign that cheating has been involved in this process.

And so somehow it must be racism that voters are supporting Romney rather than the obvious case that we make every day here - that it doesn't matter how bad Obama is, we must vote for him to keep out Republicans, to keep those Supreme Court seats safe for abortion rights and campaign financing, that a Republican majority in Congress and the White House would be a disaster. Well guess what? The other side makes these calculations too, except in the opposite direction. So an aardvark with a -R by its name would be preferable to a Reagan with a -D next to it. It wasn't until 2-3 weeks ago that Obama felt obliged to put out a campaign brochure clarifying his goals for next term - doesn't that make the point entirely, it's all on fanfare and perception, not in the details? While Romney may have gotten an immoral windfall on Delphi, who was President and orchestrated the deal? Who protected Wall Street where not a single person was prosecuted for illegally causing a meltdown of our world's economies? Obama protected Big Bird as a trivial cost, not as a shining example of what our government does well. We sympathize with Occupy Wall Street, but they're protesting against a Democratic President, not the previous one.

But then for all the rhetoric, as Matt Taibbi notes, everyone at the end of the day wants more money for themselves, less money for the undeserving rest. After a hurricane, everyone's a socialist for their own street, and all those conservative property owners want to be bailed out despite not buying flood insurance.

What we could take out of this awful election and period in our history is the idea that we can move forward better with positive, all-inclusive attitudes and policies, without the sky-is-falling shock-and-horror theatrics. Immigration is fine if we acknowledge some obvious concerns from whites (we're not going to sustain moderate population growth without anyway, but we need to shepherd jobs and well-being as well). Healthcare improvement needs to be pro-business as well as pro-individual. Climate change isn't going to be tackled until we have very positive, persuasive technology-cum-social paths forward - car-pooling won't cut it practically or inspirationally. (Events like Hurricane Sandy can spur real change, but only if the right solution is already there staring in our face, a la Bucky Fuller's philosophy). Offshoring to China was needed and unfair and of environmental benefit and an environmental disaster, and the whole mix is going to change again as Chinese population rapidly gets older, 1 worker supports 4 grandparents while doinig home care, workers demand greater wages & better working conditions, China society won't tolerate pollution levels to date, and other SE Asian countries become competitive. For the US it's a great opportunity, to innovate and dominate economically, as we do manage to do pretty well in particular industries like Boeing aircraft, John Deere & Catepillar tractors, Monsanto chemicals, still at the top in autos (with Italians helping us revive Chrysler), infosystems like Facebook & Google, mobile devices like Android & Apple (now that Finland & Canada are irrelevant), etc., etc. If we can only come up with a positive, all-inclusive message and policy, instead of our own yearning for the days of union steel plants & car assembly lines while bashing the other side for being scared & nostalgic, we just might be able to come up with a real party spirit.

And in the meantime, go vote Obama and then let's get on with it.

Great blog.  While sometimes it can be hard to pick (just think of all the fantastic rape-based symposiums we've been treated to), there is no ambiguity this election cycle about what the most salient quote is:

“The demographics race we’re losing badly,” said Sen. Lindsey O. Graham (S.C.). “We’re not generating enough angry white guys to stay in business for the long term.”

The last election was a referendum on Bush and the Republicans so scathing that they dared not even mention a sitting President.  After losing, the right of the party broke off and attempted to re-brand itself.  That contingent is concurrent with the angry white guys Graham speaks of.

The dominant current in this election is demographic transition.  The silent majority is now non-white.  Welcome to the world of white minority: