WAS IT ALL ABOUT RACE?

White guilt overcame Jewish concerns for Israel's survival and Catholic positions on abortion.

Jeremiah Wright, Michael Pfleger, Bill Ayers, Louis Farrakhan, Saul Alinsky, ACORN, Rashid Khalidi, Tony Rezko and the corrupt Democratic Chicago machine that has been with Obama through every step of his political career didn't matter.

His extreme positions promoting abortion to the point of supporting infanticide, his arguments in favor of partial-birth abortion, requiring all taxpayers to pay for abortions and forcing all hospitals and doctors to perform operations despite moral objections didn't matter.

His stated intention to weaken our armed forces at a time of great danger from terrorism, Russia and Iran didn't matter.

That rich whites would be taxed to make welfare payments to people who paid no taxes didn’t matter, either.

That rich whites would see their taxes go up on their income, their dividends and their capital gains and would pay onerous taxes on what they leave to their children didn't matter.

That rich whites and Jews had been demonized by Jeremiah Wright for their greed and oppression of blacks and other minorities may even have added to their white guilt more than they were repelled by his “God Damn America” rant.

Shelby Steele, the black author of “White Guilt,” was interviewed earlier this week (multi-part interview; click for part one but view all) by Peter Robinson of Stanford’s Hoover Institution, in his Uncommon Knowledge interview series. It was a follow-up to an earlier interview. This is the key exchange:

Peter Robinson: You claimed the last time you were interviewed that the candidacy of Barack Obama wasn’t about politics or policy or the future of the nation. It was about race—above all, about making white folks feel good. Do you want to stick with that claim?

Shelby Steele: Absolutely I’ll stick with it.

Steele in the interview admits he underestimated the extraordinary extent that white guilt would be used by the Obama campaign and echoed by the media. He had written a book late last year called ”A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win.” But, as Steele made his book tour, he began to realize that the opportunity for whites to put white guilt behind them was making this election even more about race than he had imagined.

As for blacks, it was all about race, too, but for a different reason: They saw the chance to put their feeling of inferiority behind them if Obama became the most powerful man in the world. So there was strong racial motivation for whites and blacks to vote for Obama; That’s why so many didn’t care to learn what Obama was all about and who he was. For them, the election was all about skin color, redemption from white guilt and inferiority, and nothing else mattered.

A viewer who saw the interview emailed Robinson:

Dear Peter: Here in the DFW area the Fort Worth Startlegram (as we call it) [Star-Telegram] has been posting letters from the very people Professor Steele is talking about. I have been amazed at the number of letters gushing how they are white, but feel fulfilled because they voted for a man with black skin. None mention Obama’s qualifications, or give a fact based reason for voting for him, just that they voted for him because he was black and what a wonderful feeling that gave them. This is, to me, very sad as so many in the population do not make (or are capable of) making a reasoned, fact based decision as to what is best for the country.

As in the case of Obama's election as president of the Harvard Law Review, there was a feeling it would be “a nice thing” to elect the first black. Affirmative action by the people at work.

In his second year at law school, Obama decided to run for law review president after a conversation with a black friend. “I said I was not planning to run and he said, `Yes you are because that is a door that needs to be kicked down and you can take it down.’ ” It was a marathon selection process, an arcane throwback to the early days of the review. The students editors deliberated behind closed doors from 8:30 a.m. until early the next day. The 19 anxious candidates took turns cooking breakfast, lunch and dinner for the selection committee, whose members emerged with a historic decision. “Before I could say a word, another black student who was running just came up and grabbed me and hugged me real hard,” Obama recalled. “It was then that I knew it was more than just about me. It was about us. And I am walking through a lot of doors that had already been opened by others.

Anecdotal though all of this is, it does suggest that an affirmative action wave lifted Obama into the presidency. Whether that wave was big enough to be the winning margin is not yet clear, but it may well have been. Otherwise, It's difficult to explain how one so inexperienced, with so slim a record could be elected president. A white candidate with the same credentials, even one with the same powerful rhetorical skills, would have had difficulty gettng out of the starting blocks.

Perhaps the best evidence that white guilt was the principal reason for much of Obama's support was the almost universal refusal of his would-be voters to even listen to any information, let alone criticism, of Obama.

Shelby Steele was asked if he thought Obama's election would mean the end of affirmative action and the emphasis on race. After all, America has proven it's not racist. Steele felt quite to the contrary, that Obama would continue to emphasize race because it's in his political interest and he wants his minority (and Chicago political) supporters to be rewarded. His Saul Alinsky program lives.