From NRO’s The Corner:
Senator John McCain said today that he supports the Arizona Civil Rights Initiative, which would ban preferences based on race, ethnicity, and sex in the state’s public contracting, education (including university admissions), and employment programs. Essentially identical initiatives will be before voters this fall in Colorado and Nebraska, and have been enacted in California, Washington, and most recently Michigan.
Disappointingly, Senator Barack Obama immediately criticized McCain: “I think in the past he’d been opposed to these Ward Connerly initiatives as divisive. And I think he’s right. These are not designed to solve a big problem, but they’re all too often designed to drive a wedge between people.”
Obama’s criticism is wrongheaded for at least three reasons: (1) it is obviously preferential policies that are divisive, not their abolition; (2) the “big problem” of helping people from disadvantaged backgrounds can be addressed by helping people of all colors who are disadvantaged, rather than crudely and unfairly using race as a proxy for disadvantage; and (3) Obama himself has recognized as much, albeit fitfully and inconsistently, in his own statements—for instance, acknowledging the divisiveness of preferential treatment (in his Philadelphia speech), and the fact that his own daughters, for starters, come from privileged backgrounds and thus are “probably” not deserving of preferential treatment.
It is rather breathtaking the way our liberals will claim that after divvying us up into race, class and gender groups for forty years that they’ll call any attempt to end such things “divisive”. Never let it be said that our liberals lack for an ability to be Orwellian in their viewpoints. John McCain has now taken a strong stand in favor of treating human beings like, well, human beings.
It has long been my contention that while liberals love humanity, individual humans rate very low on their scale of concerns. Liberals don’t really want to help that poor, black guy down the street who’s having a hard time…they want to help “black people”. Liberals will help you as long as the help is directed towards an identified victim group – and so for a liberal the black son of a lawyer and the black son of a sharecropper are same/same…both need affirmative action to get ahead. On the other hand, conservatives view individuals and see the inherent worth in each one of them…we want to help people who are poor, and we don’t care what sociological grouping the particular poor person belongs to.
Added to this worldview is the corruption so endemic to modern American liberalism. Affirmative action helps out some rather well-connected individuals, groups and businesses. Like this – if you’re going to have a bit of minority set-asides for the new highway contract and there’s only one minority-owned highway contractor in the area, guess who’s going to get the job, even if he’s not the best at it? Of course, that highway contractor now has a vested interest in keeping the set-asides going forever – and so he donates to politicians who will promise to defend affirmative action. Then there’s the fact that a lot of companies will put a woman or other minority in as CEO and call themselves a minority-owned business just to get in on the affirmative action swag.
Taking into consideration the corruption and injustice of affirmative action, its clear that any forward-thinking politician would be in favor of scrapping it. And in this we see just how hidebound Obama is – in fact, the best way to describe him is as a liberal reactionary. Odd grouping of words there, but Obama is so entirely locked into the failed policies of the 60’s and 70’s that only the most stubborn blindness can explain it. Affirmative action, as we know it today, was saddled on to the country by Richard Nixon as a cynical ploy to try and get liberal media to be nice to him – didn’t work, of course, but we’re stuck with this unjust dinosaur nearly 40 years later, and its high time to scrap it.
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