From "The Unassailable Virtue of Victims, written by Joseph Epstein and published on TheWeeklyStandard.com:
"If Hillary Clinton wins the presidency in 2016 she will not only be the nation's first woman president but our second affirmative-action president. By affirmative-action president I mean that she, like Barack Obama, will have got into office partly for reasons extraneous to her political philosophy or to her merits, which, though fully tested while holding some of the highest offices in the land, have not been notably distinguished. In his election, Obama was aided by the far from enticing Republican candidates who opposed him, but a substantial portion of the electorate voted for him because having a biracial president seemed a way of redressing old injustices...
...Have we come to the point where we elect presidents of the United States not on their intrinsic qualities but because of the accidents of their birth; because they are black, or women, or, one day doubtless, gay, or disabled--not, in other words, for themselves but for the causes they seem to embody to represent, for their status of members of a victim group?"
what eye thynk: There is much more of this drivel. It's Republican, white male, political cluelessness. Affirmative action had zero to do with my choice. I feel bad about slavery, but I don't feel guilty. I have nothing to "redress." My ancestors didn't arrive here from Czechoslovakia until the 1900s. I saw no victims needing saving.
I cast my vote to elect Barack Obama to the office of President of the United States because I supported his policies and admired his character--his "intrinsic values." Period. While I can agree with Mr. Epstein that Barack Obama may have benefited from the overwhelming support of one segment of the population in his first election, he fails to explain why, in 2012, after the country had four years to see Mr. Obama in action and after white voters had assuaged their supposed guilt over his victimhood, we overwhelmingly elected him again. It's the Republican belief that since they dislike him, no one else could possibly like him and so must have other motives for returning him to the White House.
Mr. Epstein seems to be looking for an excuse for Republican presidential failure in the last two elections and a balm for a future loss in 2016. Blaming affirmative action is to completely ignore the fact that recent years have seen his party do everything in their power to denigrate women and the poor, to accelerate the decline of the middle class, to disenfranchise immigrants, to discriminate against gays, to dismiss any religion that isn't conservative Christianity, to ignore the overwhelming percentage of citizens who favor common sense gun laws--in short, to look down on anyone who isn't white, male, Christian, wealthy, and armed. It is easier, I guess, to say women, the poor, the middle class, immigrants, gays and gun law advocates are possessed with shallow political thinking than to admit that his party has nothing to offer the vast majority of Americans.
Honestly, Hillary Clinton is not my first choice for the Democratic nomination; but I doubt her policies will be anywhere near as repugnant to me as those of the candidates the GOP is currently parading around the country.
My brand of "affirmative action" has nothing to do with guilt or "redressing old injustices." It means voting for the candidate who affirms my values and whose actions give credence to the fact they will fight for the same.
Oh, and Mr. Epstein, we've already had a "disabled" president. Maybe you dismissed him because he was a Democrat; so, to remind you, his name was Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and he saw us safely through World War II.
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