Race & the Constitution: Remedial 101

While the mortgage mess gets sorted out, let's circle back to an important moment the other day when Whoopi Goldberg the celebrity and John McCain the presidential candidate both displayed abysmal ignorance of how durably the U.S. Constitution has fulfilled its declared purpose "to establish justice" for over 220 years now. Appearing on ABC's "The View," McCain said he'd appoint judges "who interpret the Constitution of the United States the way our Founding Fathers envisioned," to which panelist Goldberg flippantly retorted: “Should I be worried about being a slave, about being returned to slavery? Because certain things happened in the Constitution that you had to change.”

McCain then conceded, heaven help him: “I understand that point. That’s an excellent point.” The video is here; notice from the applause that many in the audience seemed to think it an excellent point as well.

Ross Kaminsky took Mac to the woodshed, but good, for his constitutional and historical illiteracy on PoliticsWest.com a couple of days later. Excellent post. What Ross didn't do, and what I haven't read anywhere, is suggest an actual answer, suitable for the moment on live TV, that the GOP candidate should have given. As a onetime speechwriter, let me give it a try.

Thanks for asking that. I know it's a question in many people's minds, as a result of confusion spread by historians, educators, and politicians who don't know better. But here are the facts.

It is only because of the Constitution and judges who were faithful to it that black Americans are free and equal citizens today

The Constitution enabled the northern states to battle the southern states, first politically and then militarily, at the cost of half a million white people's lives, until slavery was ended and blacks were emancipated. After that victory, the Constitution was strengthened from a document that disapproved slavery into one that forever disallows slavery.

The Constitution is also what Dr. King, Justice Marshall, and Presidents Eisenhower and Johnson used to finally end segregation and guarantee civil rights for all.

Going forward, the Constitution and courts faithful to it are the best protection our country has for securing majority rule and minority rights in a free society. You and I should be grateful for that, and vigilant about it.

The last thing we want in America today is public officials who ignore the Constitution like the judges who denied black citizenship with the Dred Scott decision, the slave state governments who seceded and went to war, or the southern governors who resisted school desegregation.

That's what I want to prevent by appointing judges who will keep their oath to the Constitution without fail.

And by the way, Whoopi, those Dred Scott judges and secessionist states and Jim Crow governors were all Democrats, all of them. The Democratic Party has had a really shameful record on racial equality until very recently.

It was my party, the Republicans, who freed the slaves, led the way on school desegregation, and passed the first civil rights bill of modern times. Our country's historic ideal of liberty and justice for all, the envy of the world for over 200 years, is safest in Republican hands for this new century.

The above argument is less developed and documented than Ross's fine piece on Sept. 15, but it's plausible, I think, as something a real politician with his civic compass in working order could have said under those real circumstances in which McCain found himself on Sept. 12. Too bad he didn't; this now becomes one more reinforcement of the Big Lie that our country was founded on hypocrisy, amorality, and racism.

The best refutation for that lie that I know of is a pair of books in which massive, conclusive evidence is presented for the case which I've made here and which Ross made in his earlier post. Those books, both by colleagues of mine at the Claremont Institute, are Vindicating the Founders by Thomas G. West and Vindicating Lincoln by Thomas Krannawitter. Buy them, read them. Maybe buy extras to send Mr. McCain. They'd be wasted, I'm afraid, if sent to Ms. Goldberg.

Palin is our future

The only really interesting topic of discussion for conservatives right now is Sarah Palin. McCain will be the same mediocrity in the White House that he has been in the Senate – he is a stop-gap, purely anti-Obama vote who, despite his great military service, won’t ever be interesting on his own as a political figure and who seems blissfully unaware that the greatest move of his political career, selecting Palin, is the only reason this is even a race. Palin appears to be the kind of entity conservatives have been hunting for since Reagan, that was totally absent from the national GOP stage prior to her selection, and who now will likely be GOP front-runner for president in 2012 if Obama wins this year and front-runner to follow up McCain if McCain wins. Aside from her, the national GOP picture remains depressingly bleak, and if McCain wins, all the influences that have made the party so will be doing all they can to keep Palin from becoming the Margaret Thatcher kind of character she has the potential to become.

If Obama wins, the party purges and soul-searches at all levels and possibly re-orients again to the heartland kind of conservatism that Palin represents, with Palin the de facto leader in preparation for 2012. I’m voting for McCain, but to be honest, it’s tough to say which outcome is really better for the party and country in the long run.

And just think: all these political tectonics have occurred because one woman had the courage and character to stand up to GOP mediocrities in Alaska. We should all learn from her.

Obie underpaying women staffers

First we were treated to the sublimely ironic reality that Al Gore, champion (and prize-winning) crusader against global warming, consumes more energy (and thus has a larger “carbon footprint”) than a half-dozen or more typical families combined, while the Crawford ranch of George W. Bush, evil scourge of environmentalists everywhere, is a model of energy efficiency. Now, we’ve learned that Barack Obama, famously promoting “equal wages for equal work” as a campaign promise and platform plank, is actually paying his female office staffers LESS than men:

“On average, Obama’s female staffers earn just 83 cents for every dollar his male staffers make. This figure certainly exceeds the 77-cent threshold that Obama’s campaign website condemns. However, 83 cents do not equal $1. In spite of this 17-cent gap between Obama’s rhetoric and reality, he chose to chide GOP presidential contender John McCain on this issue.” (Source: LegiStorm, a “watchdog group”).

Contrast Obama’s record with that of John McCain – who, BTW, Obama castigates as “anti-woman” and “out of touch”:

“On average, according to these data, women in John McCain’s office make $1.04 for every dollar a man makes. In fact, ceteris paribus, a typical female staffer could earn 21 cents more per dollar paid to her male counterpart — while adding $10,726 to her annual income — by leaving Barack Obama’s office and going to work for John McCain.”

Personally, I always hated it when my parents would admonish me to “Do as I say, not as I do” – shouldn’t we demand more of our leaders?

Fact check on Sarah vs. Charlie

Charlie Gibson's dishonest effort to trap, embarrass, and belittle Gov. Sarah Palin in his lengthy ABC interview with the Republican VP nominee is unmasked by the network's own transcripts and, in one case, by actual video of Palin addressing her church. If you like your news unfiltered, a few clicks will illustrate what I mean.

On Sarah's allegedly clueless answer to the Bush Doctrine question, here's Charles Krauthammer in National Review.

On the caricature of her as a scary theocrat and holy warrior against Iraq, here's James Taranto in the Wall Street Journal.

Finally, with a reprise of these topics plus the canard of Palin the warmonger spoiling for a fight with Russia, here's PJ Gladnick on Newsbusters.

Once again, we Republicans owe a vote of thanks to the ham-handed Obama partisans in the MSM for elevating and martyring McCain's everywoman running mate while eroding -- still further -- their own credibility. Keep it up guys, there are barely 50 days until this thing wraps up.

Shoulda said rouge on a corpse

I absolutely don't believe Obama was jabbing at Sarah Palin with his "lipstick on a pig" remark yesterday, and I hope she and McCain laugh it off or shrug it off. Repay him with grace for his gracious refusal last week to drag Bristol into the campaign. Send him a gift box of lipsticks from Avon and move on. I'll bet that around the Illinois Senate where Obama served, as around the Colorado Senate where I served, two of the cliches to describe a futile spin effort were that you can try to put lipstick on a pig or rouge on a corpse, but you'll fool no one. Young Obie probably absorbed both in his vocabulary when Sarah was unknown beyond Wasilla. Don't you know he wishes now that his preferred cosmetic for mocking his opponents' claim of change had been rouge.

If the remark wasn't a slur, though, it was still a gaffe, a big and easily avoidable one. Which gives more evidence that Obama is badly off his game right now, rattled by the Palin phenomenon and the dramatic momentum shift since his Invesco acceptance speech. (How long ago that already seems!)

Any candidate thinking clearly on his feet, as you simply have to do at every moment in the big leagues, would have done a silent self-edit when "lipstick" and "pig" presented themselves in the same sentence and instantly substituted -- rather than added, as he did, too late -- the smelly fish reference or something else with no double entendre. Barack did this to himself because he's obviously not thinking clearly at this season of unexpected adversity.

You can hardly blame the poor guy. It's tough out there all of a sudden. Exhibit A would be the New York Times front-page story last Sunday: "Rival Tickets are Redrawing Battlegrounds. Palin Helps GOP Put More States in Play." It said in part:

Fresh from the Republican convention, Senator John McCain’s campaign sees evidence that his choice of Gov. Sarah Palin as his running mate is energizing conservatives in the battleground of Ohio while improving its chances in Pennsylvania and several Western states that Senator Barack Obama has been counting on, [including] Nevada, New Mexico [and] Colorado.

Exhibit B, corroborating this, is the 13,000 who turned out for McPalin in Colorado Springs on Saturday. With any other running mate, Mac would have drawn about 1300.

Exhibits C and D, a couple of columns that have made waves this week on talk radio and the conservative blogs. Pundits can say anything, of course, and two swallows don't make a summer, but what's striking is the confident prediction of not just defeat but decisive defeat for Obama, partly as a result of the VP matchup.

Heather Higgins, board chair of the Independent Women's Forum, wrote on Townhall.com:

Here’s an unconventional prediction: in this race, unlike those before, the Vice President will actually matter, particularly in what they capture relative to that anti-Washington sentiment. Barring major mishap, here’s a second unconventional prediction: this isn’t going to be a close election, but will look far less like 2000 or 2004 than it does like McGovern in ’72.

And Spengler (pseudonym of an Asia Times columnist whose identity not even Google seems to know) wrote in his latest piece, which Rush Limbaugh trumpeted to the world on Tuesday:

Obama will spend the rest of his life wondering why he rejected the obvious road to victory, that is, choosing Hillary Clinton as his vice presidential nominee. However reluctantly, Clinton would have had to accept. McCain's choice of vice presidential candidate made obvious after the fact what the party professionals felt in their fingertips at the stadium extravaganza yesterday: rejecting Clinton in favor of the colorless, unpopular, tangle-tongued Washington perennial Joe Biden was a statement of weakness. McCain's selection was a statement of strength. America's voters will forgive many things in a politician, including sexual misconduct, but they will not forgive weakness.

That is why McCain will win in November, and by a landslide, barring some unforeseen event. Obama is the most talented and persuasive politician of his generation, the intellectual superior of all his competitors, but a fatally insecure personality. American voters are not intellectual, but they are shrewd, like animals. They can smell insecurity, and the convention stank of it. Obama's prospective defeat is entirely of its own making. No one is more surprised than Republican strategists, who were convinced just weeks ago that a weakening economy ensured a Democratic victory.

To repeat, and use another cliche, these are but straws in the wind. But it was interesting to hear Hugh Hewitt, no incautious cheerleader, also speculating yesterday that we may be seeing everything start to crumble for Barack Obama and the supposed Democratic sure thing.

One reason, then, for Obie not to have made the safer remark in his Ohio speech that "You can't put rouge on a corpse" is that he may be starting to get morbid feelings about his own chances in November. Final cliche: Never mention rope in house of a hanged man.