For all the talk of how the black vote or Hispanic vote might go, not much talk is expended on the white vote – but it will be at least 70% of all voters, so its going to matter, as Peter Brown notes:

It is more than a little ironic that it has taken the first African-American to win a major party presidential nomination to make clear to everyone what has been the case for more than 40 years in presidential elections: Democrats have a problem with white voters.

Suddenly, the topic du jour on television and radio talk shows, at water coolers and the most exclusive cocktail parties is how well Sen. Barack Obama can do among whites, especially the demographic group pundits call the “white working class.”

The truth is these voters have been around for decades. They’re “The Silent Majority,” “Jill and Joe Six-Pack” and “Reagan Democrats,” and whatever the name, they have given Democratic presidential candidates the back of their hands since 1964. That was the year Lyndon Johnson won in one of the biggest landslides in American history, and any demographic group he did not carry probably held its meetings in a telephone booth.

Neither Jimmy Carter nor Bill Clinton, the last Democrats to occupy the Oval Office since then, won a majority of white voters. Mr. Clinton came relatively close in 1996 and might have done so in 1992 had Ross Perot not been in the race. But focusing on those near misses overlooks the larger point: Sen. Obama, the son of a white mother and black father, could lose this election badly and still outdo the very pale — Sen. George McGovern in 1972, former Vice President Walter Mondale in 1984, former Massachusetts Gov. Michael Dukakis in 1988 and possibly Sen. John Kerry in 2004 – among white voters.

Such discussion as there has been on the subject of white voters revolves around the tired argument of whether whites have gotten enough past their racism (something inherent to white people, according to one of the more ironic leftwing opinions) to vote for Obama – but as Brown points out, the fact that Obama is a liberal and weak on national security might be far more important to his weakness amongst white voters than the fact of his skin color.

Right now, the only reason Obama has a shot is because President Bush and the GOP are so very unpopular – if President Bush’s approval rating were even 45% right now, this election would be in the bag for McCain; but its not, so Obama is ahead and still has to be considered the inside favorite to win in November. But, in the end, will the American people – forget about race – vote for someone as unqualified as Obama when he is also on the extreme end of the American left? That is the question we’ll answer in November – and while liberals are convinced that President Bush’s unpopularity will carry Obama over the finish line no matter what, I am of the opinion that Obama is as high as he’s going to get in the polls based on his now-fading aura of change and President Bush’s unpopularity. To get to a majority of the vote, Obama is going to have to show – to voters who distrust the left intensely – that he will be there man, or at least enough of there man to convince working class whites to vote for the liberal egghead over the American war hero.

It can be done, but it won’t be easy – and thus I see the November election being excruciatingly close, all else being equal from this moment in time.

Interesting discussion of the Holocaust and how much the average German was complicit in it over at First Things – here’s the bit I’d like to discuss:

The Holocaust may be the only universally agreed upon icon of absolute evil, but we deceive ourselves if we insist upon its utter singularity. Kershaw concludes on the sobering note: “So far, with great effort, the combination [that produced the Holocaust], which would be truly dangerous if marshaled by a powerful state entity, has been held in check. Will it continue to be?” Neither divine promise nor our knowledge of the human capacity for good and evil warrants a certain answer in the affirmative.

During the Third Reich, ordinary Germans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a chilling phrase. We might easily say, and many do all too easily say, that during the era of slavery or during current horrors such as the genocide in Sudan or the daily killing of thousands of unborn children in the abortuaries around the country, most ordinary Americans “had many more things on their minds.” That’s a moralistic cheap shot. The truth is that we all have many more things on our minds, and necessarily so. Such as families, jobs, dealing with sickness, and warding off despair. Not to mention, for many, the distinctly unnecessary hours every day spent surfing and chatting on the blogosphere.

The Third Reich is rightly viewed as an icon of evil. This does not mean, as Ian Kershaw reminds us, that the ordinary Germans of the time are the icon of moral indifference or complicity in great evil. Then it was the Jews, the Slavs, and the gypsies. At other times, it is another class of human beings. Given the requisite mix of circumstances, which is not beyond imagination, it is an idle conceit to think that ordinary Americans would behave more nobly than did the Germans of Hitler’s day. Among any people of any time, moral courage is the exception and not the rule. There are heroes and heroines who contend against the great evils of their time, but even they must be selective. You may be devoting your life to helping the people of Sudan, but what are you doing to help prisoners of conscience in China, or to stop international sex trafficking, or to feed the hungry of Zimbabwe, or to relieve the loneliness of old people in the nursing home within an easy drive from your home? The list goes on and on.

“They had many more things on their minds.” And so do we all. Contemplating monstrous evils, such as the Third Reich, is not an occasion for preening in our supposed moral superiority but for humility, for self-examination, for renewed discernment of our duty, and for more earnest prayer for the coming of the promised Kingdom.

If you read Manchester’s The Arms of Krupp, you’ll find that average Germans slipped easily into the role of slave-master over the Slavs and Jews imported into Germany for drudge labor. While many acts of kindness were done by individual Germans for the captives, the plain fact of the matter is that most Germans didn’t act upon any sense of moral obligation towards their fellow human beings, and a very large number took extreme pleasure in their ability to dominate and harm. The question really boils down to this: do the people, on average, just follow along with their government, or does the government always tend to respond to the basic desires of the people? Did, that is, the Nazis convince the Germans to be evil (or at least turn a blind eye to it) or was the evil done by the Nazis latent in the German people from the start? My view is the latter – the evil was built in, and the Nazis just exploited it.

We all have it in us, you see? Only a routine adherence to first principles prevents any of us from slipping into varied forms of evil – and evil, of course, doesn’t require a death camp. Just to have a cold heart towards another human being is evil – and only by continuing to remind ourselves that the other person is due all the love and respect that we feel is our due prevents us from becoming cold hearted. For far too many people, this necessity of keeping on the proper track is forgotten, or left aside as inconvenient. It is much easier to separate one’s self from the evil than to stand up and be counted against it – faced with someone doing something horrible (like, say, gangsters terrorising a neighborhood) it is much easier to just close one’s eyes and walk past, pretending that it is someone else’s problem and, at any rate, why should I risk my neck for people I don’t know personally? In this attitude, of course, is the forgetfullness that if any one of us were terrorised by gangsters, we’d want the entire community to rise up as one to defend us.

There is also the second part of evil – that human desire to be on the winning side. When someone is despised, it is much easier to join those doing the despising than to join the despised. From large to small, it works the same – the Nazis despised the Jews and as the Nazis seemed to be the winners, many Germans simply wanted to be on the winning team; down at the smaller level, it could be merely joining in on some malicious gossip about someone disliked at the office. The actual effects are different, but the evil is the same.

In the end, the people are responsible for what is done in their name – there can be excuses for being under duress, but at the end of the day a government can only do what it convinces people to accept, at least in the sense of a tacit acceptance based upon silence. This does not argue in favor of the collective punishment of a nation if its leadership does wrong, but it does educate us on the need to be ever vigilant – an unguarded moment can be the ruin of a person, or of a nation. And so when someone does suggest even the slightest evil is ok because it is more convenient, that is the moment to stand firm against it – when the snake is just out of its shell, that is the easiest time to kill it…wait until it is full grown, and it becomes a much larger problem and a much larger threat.

Just a poll, of course, but as our lefties are convinced that a public opinion poll is a constitutionally valid means of determining government action, this pretty much knocks the wind out of their socialist sails:

When given a choice about how government should address the numerous economic difficulties facing today’s consumer, Americans overwhelmingly — by 84% to 13% — prefer that the government focus on improving overall economic conditions and the jobs situation in the United States as opposed to taking steps to distribute wealth more evenly among Americans.

Also noted in the poll is that 50% of Americans think that the government is trying to do too much – with 72% of Republicans holding this position, but only 36% of Democrats on board. Essentially, the general American distrust of government continues strong and this, in turn, opens up the prospect of a well-structured GOP campaign to use market mechanisms to deal with problems in opposition to Obama and his Democrats’ top down, tax and spend boondoggles.

They hit it out of the park, again:

Being a truly advanced white person means being able to speak with authority about pretty much any field of conversation- especially politics. In order for white people to streamline the process of knowing everything, all human beings can be neatly filed into one of two categories: People I Agree With, and People Who are Just Like Adolf Hitler…

Takes in 99% of Kos and DU commentary…

Normally not a very surprising thing for the presumptive GOP nominee, but given McCain’s strong appeal to independents and disaffected Democrats, the fact that he’s also stirring enthusiasm on the right makes Obama’s task much, much harder:

Conservatives may not be enamored of John McCain, but on subjects that are near and dear to their hearts — legal philosophy and judicial appointments — they are finding a lot to like about the Arizona senator.

Between his campaign trail rhetoric and a stable of legal advisers who are well-regarded in conservative circles, McCain is winning over converts who at one time harbored deep suspicions about his commitment to appointing reliably conservative judges.

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It’s a surprising turn of events for a candidate who was once booed at the Conservative Political Action Conference and especially for one who played a key role in brokering the “Gang of 14” compromise in 2005, a deal that some conservatives contend undermined the Republicans’ opportunity to ban filibusters against judicial nominees.

This newfound respect is rooted in the widely-held belief that, if elected, McCain will appoint high court justices like George W. Bush appointee Chief Justice John Roberts. Former President George H.W. Bush deeply disappointed conservatives by appointing the liberal-to-moderate David Souter.

“He has attempted to make it clear he’s going to appoint judges with a demonstrated conservative record,” said Robert Alt, deputy director of the Center for Legal and Judicial studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation.

“I think his general approach will be very consistent with [former] President [Ronald] Reagan and President [George W.] Bush,” said Mike Carvin, a former deputy assistant attorney general under Reagan, who argued Bush v. Gore for the Bush campaign.

Added to McCain’s defense of low taxation and genuine efforts to secure greater energy resources, McCain is rapidly putting together a message which can resonate from the right to the center – and while Obama is busily disheartening his kook left base, McCain is now position to dive into the fall campaign with the ability to set the terms of the debate.

One thing we can be sure of, President McCain will be unafraid to touch the live wires in defense of what he believes:

QUESTIONER: Senator, you have been a leader on immigration reform in the Senate but unfortunately Congress has failed to make progress on this very critical issue. As the next President of the Unites States of America will comprehensive immigration reform, and not just enforcement, be one of your top policy priorities in you’re first 100 days in office?

SEN. JOHN MCCAIN: It will be my top priority yesterday, today, and tomorrow. And my friends, thank you for the question, and let me just review for you again, we tried. I reached across the aisle to Senator Ted Kennedy, and by the way I know that he’s in your prayers, and we worked in bipartisan fashion. And we were defeated. And by the way, it wasn’t very popular, let’s have some straight talk, with some in my party, and so I did that and worked together so we could carry out a federal responsibility. We have to secure our borders, that’s the message. But we also must proceed with a temporary worker program that is verifiable and truly temporary, we must also understand that there are 12 million people who are here and they are here illegally and they are God’s children, they are God’s children and they will be treated in a humane fashion based on the principle obviously that someone who comes here {illegally} cannot have priority over someone who comes here {legally}. Could I mention to you, last Fourth of July I was in Baghdad, I was invited by General Petraeus to attend a ceremony where 688 brave young Americans decide to reenlist and stay and fight for America. There was also a group of people, 166 of them, that decided that they wanted to accelerate their path to citizenship. They were not citizens of this country but they chose to serve in harm’s way in defense of freedom in the military of the Unites States, I was deeply moves by this, that’s what America is all about.

QUESTIONER: Thank you Senator

SEN. MCCAIN: Immigration reform will be my top priority because we have the obligation to address a federal issue from a federal stand point. I will reach across the aisle once again and work in a bipartisan fashion. We will resolve the immigration issue in American and we will secure our borders.

I do believe that McCain learned his lesson and that any immigration reform will have as its knife edge secure borders – fortunately for McCain, a lot of the heavy lifting on border security is already being done, so by the time he is up there making his immigration reform proposals he should be able to point to a very large improvement in border security as the predicate for guest worker programs, etc.

Additionally, as long time readers know, I was one of the three or four people who actually backed the McCain immigraiton reform but McCain is right – these are God’s children and we must treat them well, even though they have broken our laws in coming across the border. In my view, at any rate, its not like we’re the innocent victims here – all sorts of Americans gave positive encouragement to illegal immigration by not inquiring too deeply into those who were doing the gardening, the maid work, the sheet rock installation, etc, etc, etc. I will never, ever advocate a program which rounds these people up as if they were common criminals – strengthened border security and greater enforcement of employment laws against hiring illegals will greatly attrit the number of illegals in country. For those which remain, we’ll have a pool of mostly long-term residents who have integrated into the society of the United States, and I want them to have the opportunity to become legal residents. I believe that I’m 100% with McCain on this, and I’ll defend it against all comers.

You’d think that with Obama’s success at obtaining a low-cost mansion for himself that he’d have been more effective on housing for the poor:

The squat brick buildings of Grove Parc Plaza, in a dense neighborhood that Barack Obama represented for eight years as a state senator, hold 504 apartments subsidized by the federal government for people who can’t afford to live anywhere else.

But it’s not safe to live here.

About 99 of the units are vacant, many rendered uninhabitable by unfixed problems, such as collapsed roofs and fire damage. Mice scamper through the halls. Battered mailboxes hang open. Sewage backs up into kitchen sinks. In 2006, federal inspectors graded the condition of the complex an 11 on a 100-point scale – a score so bad the buildings now face demolition.

Grove Parc has become a symbol for some in Chicago of the broader failures of giving public subsidies to private companies to build and manage affordable housing – an approach strongly backed by Obama as the best replacement for public housing.

As a state senator, the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee coauthored an Illinois law creating a new pool of tax credits for developers. As a US senator, he pressed for increased federal subsidies. And as a presidential candidate, he has campaigned on a promise to create an Affordable Housing Trust Fund that could give developers an estimated $500 million a year.

But a Globe review found that thousands of apartments across Chicago that had been built with local, state, and federal subsidies – including several hundred in Obama’s former district – deteriorated so completely that they were no longer habitable.

Grove Parc and several other prominent failures were developed and managed by Obama’s close friends and political supporters. Those people profited from the subsidies even as many of Obama’s constituents suffered. Tenants lost their homes; surrounding neighborhoods were blighted.

When we first started building public housing it became a complete disaster – the government ponied up the money to have them built and then managed the housing with a maze of bureaucratic rules which made it impossible to get rid of bad elements and dead certain that the housing would become blighted in short order. The phrase “public housing” by the early 1980’s immediately brought to mind images of crime and filth. And so reforms were proposed – the crowning effort to actually fix the problem was initiated by “bleeding heart” conservative Jack Kemp who initiated the Homeownership and Opportunity for People Everywhere (HOPE) program while he was Secretary of Housing and Urban Development during the Elder Bush Administration…unfortunately, budget battles in cabinet and unwillingness of the Democratic Congress to spend money on a GOP-inspired anti-poverty scheme which would disempower Democratic-donating bureaucrats essentially killed the very promising program – it does linger on to this day, but it never was able to accomplish its primary purpose of making poor people into home owners so that they would be empowered and have the incentive to keep their neighborhoods up to snuff.

What has happened since then has mostly been a boondoggle, as we can see from the quoted article – favored contractors getting government swag to build low-cost housing and as these contractors are protected by their bought-and-paid-for political patrons, there isn’t much incentive for the contractors to actually build something useful. The problem isn’t just in Chicago, to be completely fair to Obama here – we have a low cost housing development here in Las Vegas which was built on toxic soil and was useless from the get-go. But the problem for Obama is that with a rather thin resume’, he can’t afford to have any of this corrupt business-as-usual political backscratching going on – and it appears that he was very happy to be hip deep in it. Now the connections to the corrupt Rezko and his shady mansion deal become more stark…coupled with the revelations that Obama’s supporters profited off Obama-backed slum construction, it shows that Obama is deeply involved – indeed, owes his rise to – the hopelessly corrupt Chicago-area Democratic politics.

So, good people, if you want a President who will ensure that well-connected contractors make money by building unlivable slums for the poor, Obama is your man…if you want something different that warmed-over liberal politics of the past, then McCain would have to by your choice.

Can be read here, Torture is a Moral Issue, A Catholic Study Guide (PDF). While I have not considered the document in its entirety, nor spent any long time in contemplation of what it teaches, I’d like to put out a few observations of my own.

In what will surely please the critics of the Bush Adminisration, the document says we must stop using euphemisms in our discussion – no more “enhanced interrorogation” when we really mean something quite harsh. This will please the left – but only up to such time as they actually start thinking about it and realise that this means we’ll also have to stop using “pro-choice” as a euphemism to cover up “pro-abortion”. This is an important thing to keep in mind, because at bottom the issue of torture is a life issue, and thus intrinsic to the whole debate on whether or not human beings have an inherent dignity which must be respected at all times, no matter what the particular human being has done. If we have an inherent dignity then we can’t torture – but we also can’t kill the unborn or, indeed, allow such things as the degradation of pornography to continue unabated (side note: when you start getting into Catholic teaching, dear readers, you’re going to get a lot of things like this: “narrowly focused” is not something which applies to Catholic teaching…the Church isn’t universal for nothin’, ya know?). As a very strong pro-lifer, I have to put myself down, then, as opposed to torture – and this would include the sort of torture which might be used to elicit information on a bomb set to go off.

As we carry on this war against a cruel and wicked foe, we must always conduct ourselves as best we can. Realising that we are fallible humans and, especially, that it is a tricky business to second-guess a soldier in the field, we still must ever strive for the highest standards possible in our conduct. But there are some things to keep in mind:

Irregular combatants are not covered by the Genevea Convention – unless an armed enemy is part of a clearly and immediately identifiable military organization, such a person is liable for a quick court martial and swift execution, all fully in accordance with the Convention. Given this, the fact that we take prisoners at all – and then almost invariably treat them very well while in captivity – is already a sign of our respect for the inherent dignity of those human beings who have chosen terrorism as their means to an end.

While a regular soldier can only be required to state his name, rank and serial number if captured and a civilian law enforcement official is carefully bound by the provisions of the Constitution and long-held US law, an irregular soldier doesn’t really even have a rank or serial number to provide, and to provide lawyers and the full panalopy of US law to captured terrorists is actually unworkable if our goal is to eliminate the terrorist threat. A captures enemy combatant is at our mercy, in a very literal sense.

A captured enemy is still a human and still has an absolute and non-negotiable right to insist that we treat him with the dignity inherent to man and endowed by God – on the other hand, a captured terrorist must not be given a right to remain silent. Once captured, they must tell us all we need to know, or we must in some way compel them to do so. And here we get into that grey area – not really covered in the linked document – of just what is torture. I cannot hold that an act by the interrogator which does no physical harm can be considered torture. Feeling bad about it afterwards isn’t good enough – there has to be a bruise, a broken bone…something, anything to indicate that someone applied brute force to the body of the terrorist. Keeping a terrorist up all night would make him quite exhausted, but it doesn’t actually rise to the level of torture.

The balancing act is to figure out how far we can go, and then work out systems to ensure that we never go any further. Most Democrats are worse than fools in their demands for closure of Gitmo based on flimsy evidence of torture. In the end, we need a prison like Gitmo and we need the ability to ensure that the terrorists give us all the information we require. Providing a statute for the military to work from would be the best idea, but one step at a time – and that first step must be in keeping Gitmo open, and rather unpleasant to be in. But however harsh we might make it and however painful (in a mental sense) interrogations might prove, the dignity of the people incarcerated must be maintained, even for those who accord us no dignity at all.

The news story:

A coalition of African-American pastors and other pro-lifers marched on the headquarters of both major American political parties in Washington on Thursday to demand that the party committees and party candidates for office refuse the $10 million that Planned Parenthood has said it will spend to influence the 2008 elections.

Decrying what they called its “philosophy of prenatal murder in the black community,” the marchers also demanded that Planned Parenthood be stripped of its $350 million in taxpayer funding it receives each year.

The marchers visited the headquarters of both the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee. They were led by Day Gardner of the National Black Pro-Life Union and Dr. Alveda King, who is a niece of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Pastor Stephen Broden of Fair Park Bible Fellowship, speaking at a press conference, described the goal of the march:

“We find it a conflict of interest that Planned Parenthood receives federal funding and with that funding it contributes to Republican and Democratic candidates who support their philosophy of prenatal murder in the black community. Congress gives money to Planned Parenthood and Planned Parenthood in return gives the money to pro-abortion candidates. There’s something rotten in the halls of Congress.”

And just which party do you think will give a more open-minded hearing to these demonstrators? Given that since 1990 pro-abortion donations to politics have never been less than 61% to the Democrats and are so far 91% to Democrats in 2008, methinks this protest against pro-abortion donors will fall on deaf ears over at the Democratic National Committee.

I bring this particular news story up because it highlights two things:

1. The African-American community in large measure shares the social values of conservatism, especially Christian conservatism.

2. There are a lot of cross-currents going on out there, some of which may not be showing up in polling.

Now, don’t get me wrong – with Obama as the nominee, I can’t see him getting less than 95% of the black vote in November; even a lot of conservative blacks are considering Obama because, lets face it, just like with Catholics and Kennedy in 1960 and Jews and Lieberman in 2000, there is something deeply satisfying in one of your own making it to the heights…especially if your people are or have been a despised minority (and Catholics, Jews and blacks all have a legacy of bigotry against them – though, of course, black Americans had it by far the worst). But the fact that these voices are being raised in direct contravention of core Democratic principles shows that there is a means for the GOP to eventually make inroads into the black vote. Not in 2008 – but in 2012 and beyond. It goes on issue after issue – black Americans favor school choice; black Americans favor restrictions on abortion; black Americans oppose gay marriage. All we need do is break down the wall of distrust between black Americans and the conservative movement and we’ll be on to great things. That wall was partially created by the conservative movement (when we largely wrote off the once strongly GOP black vote), partially created by a careful and very cynical policy of the Democratic leadership to heighten fear of the GOP in the black community by slanderous attacks on the GOP over race issues – breaking down this wall won’t be easy, but it must be done.

While we have many goals as a movement, the primary purpose of conservatism must be the destruction of the left. We know that the left’s entire worldview is based on a lie backed by a series of subsequent lies. It is a baleful influence on any activity it tries to involve itself in – and the sincerity of its adherents must not blind us to the necessity of destroying the left, as a political force, for good and all. We can’t do it as long as the left is able to reach outside of its urban fever swamps and get the votes of, say, union workers and black Americans who have absolutely nothing in common with left other than a shared fear of the GOP. Take away the fear, and union voters (other than public employee unions) and black Americans will stream into the GOP in ever rising numbers. Reduced to a few kooky places on the map, the left will then be marginalised and we can procede with the certainty that even under a liberal government the people running the show will be animated by a love of America rather than, as the left is today, animated for a hatred of America, and especially its Christian elements.

Some on the left – including here on this little blog – have tried to tell us that the abortion issue doesn’t matter. Actually, it matters more than people imagine. Not because it will, in and of itself, change the election results but because it puts such a stark contrast between left and right, now divided into the Culture of Death and the Culture of Life. Abortion is a piece of the puzzle on how to destroy the left, and we’d be worse than fools to refuse to avail ourselves of the strength the pro-life movement brings to conservatism and the GOP.

That is the number of days since Obama visited Iraq…and by my reckoning it has been 514 days since Obama called, on the floor of the United States Senate, for us to quit and have our last soldier out by 89 days ago…

You know, Senator, things do change and when change does happen, don’t you think a person’s views should be modified by the changed conditions?

Waaay back when, this was your story:

Obama’s First Day In Iraq Was January 7, 2006. “Anti-war U.S. Sen. Barack Obama’s first day in Iraq did nothing to change his view that if the country’s various factions can’t achieve political peace, no amount of U.S. involvement will bring stability… [O]bama told reporters in a Saturday [January 7, 2006] conference call.” (Eric Krol, “Obama: ‘Everything’s Up For Grabs’ In Iraq ,” Chicago Daily Herald, 1/8/06)

But now its been some time and some things have happened, and this is the story:

“There Has, However, Been Major Progress This Spring On Two Fronts. Together They Give Reason For Hope That The Major Improvement In Security Resulting From The Surge Of American Forces May Endure Even As The Surge Itself Ends This July.” (Jason Campbell, Michael O’Hanlon and Amy Unikewicz, “The State of Iraq : An Update,” The New York Times, 6/22/08)

Geesh, what is a leftist Senator who has been pandering for leftwing votes to do?