The American Spectator

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Left unsaid by Bush is the very, very long record of the Democratic Party in believing precisely that "people whose skins are a different color than white" cannot govern. It was, after all, Abraham Lincoln's famous Democratic opponent for both the Senate and the presidency, Stephen A. Douglas, who said: "I believe this government was made on the white basis. I believe it was made by white men, for the benefit of white men and their posterity for ever, and I am in favor of confining citizenship to white men, men of European birth and descent, instead of conferring it upon Negroes, Indians and other inferior races."

Is it any wonder that a political party that has such sentiments as its founding principles moved seamlessly from slavery to segregation to racial quotas, whose prominent adherents promote a journalist because of race, prosecute athletes because of race or rate a presidential candidate because of race, would unsurprisingly craft their foreign policy because of race? The "cumulative trauma" of their political party's childhood would not allow anything else.

Are critics of the Democrats insistence that Iraq is another Vietnam-style quagmire missing an all too obvious sign of the party traumatized by race? What, after all, do Vietnamese and Iraqi's have in common? They are people of...color. It is striking that Democratic Party history shows a repeated pattern of wanting to declare failure and come home in the Civil War, Vietnam and Iraq or opposed involvement in Grenada, the first Gulf War over Kuwait or stopping the genocide in Rwanda - all wars that involved liberating non-whites.

How in the world does a political party that once had white Southerners voting for it as a block (the so-called "solid South") reach the point where they continually get 90% of the vote opposite race? Is it not a learned ability that is at once insidious, skillful and persistent to play out the politics of race, the very heart of the trauma that has been at its cumulative center from the beginning of its history?

Quite literally, the history of the Republican Party is based on its original premise of ending slavery and supporting the equality of the races. The mindset between the two parties is radically different, especially today. There is no sense of racial trauma in a Republican Party that is responsible for the 1865 Thirteenth Amendment that ended the nightmare that was the Democrat's formative experience -- slavery. It is the Republican Party that provided the black man the right to vote in 1870 with the Fifteenth Amendment -- and the Democrats who fought that right viciously until 1964, doing everything they could to abort, suppress or eradicate that vote. Doing this all the while they elected presidents from Cleveland to Kennedy and thousands of lesser federal, state and local officials as well. Is it any wonder that a party so racially traumatized produces black candidates (would Joe Biden call them "unclean"?) like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton? Candidates who have mysteriously learned from somewhere that the key to their power is -race? The Jackson-Sharpton era roughly coincides during the same period of modern history that the GOP has produced public officials who universally view their race as a genetic reality rather than a qualification for office. Is there any wonder why Democrats are so manic over the appearance at long last of a serious political figure in their midst who is taken as seriously as Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Clarence Thomas or Michael Steele?

The problem for Americans who believe, as Democrat Robert Kennedy used to say, that America should be "color blind," is that the Democratic Party itself demonstrates repeatedly a pathological inability to judge anything without seeing color.

Because of this cumulative trauma, the party of race followed its support for subjugating millions of black Americans to slavery with support for a hundred years of segregation. After abandoning millions of people of color in their struggle against Communism, it now seeks to do the same as Iraqis struggle against Islamic fascists.

Is it any wonder that after watching events unfold from the New York Times newsroom to a North Carolina court room, from a blogger affiliated with John Edwards and a Senatorial musing to Democratic foreign policy proscriptions from Vietnam to Rwanda -- that the question of exactly what place race has in the Democratic view of American foreign policy in Iraq should -- finally -- be asked?

If the Democratic Party were a child raised with the trauma of drug addiction or alcoholism, questions would be asked. The problem that seems increasingly obvious is that it is a political party raised with a cumulative trauma over race, a trauma that it seeks continually to inflict on both America and the world.

Isn't it time to "just say no?"

topics:
Foreign Policy, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Islam, Law, Iraq, NATO, Africa, Communism