> I am absolutely convinced that voting for Obama, and calling people to
> vote for Obama, was the right thing to do in 2008. It wasn't -- I
> argued then -- about Obama personally, but about disenfranchised
> sectors of the working people -- Blacks and Hispanics, the youth, in
> the U.S. and abroad -- who, as anybody with eyes could see, felt the
> fervent need to have a Black man in the White House, and got deeply
> vested in the campaign. It wasn't about a self-infatuated individual
> making it big time, but about groups of people crushed by social order
> who needed to expand the scope of what they deemed possible.
Have you considered the idea that expanding the sense of the possible by putting a (neoliberal) black man in the WH became a substitute for -- rather than a spur to -- a more radical expansion of the sense of the possible?
This was published today by one of the polling analysts at the Pew Center:
> http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/hard-hit-in-recession-blacks-still-hopeful/2011/07/27/gIQA5e8sfI_story.html
>
> Hard hit in recession, blacks still hopeful
> By Paul Taylor, Published: July 28
>
> The depth and breadth of the financial toll that the Great Recession
> has taken on the nation’s minorities is just now coming into full
> focus. On top of experiencing a well-documented spike in unemployment
> and housing foreclosures, the nation’s blacks and Hispanics have
> suffered a massive meltdown in household wealth.
>
> [...]
>
> But there is another aspect to this saga that’s almost as poignant.
> It’s a variation on the Sherlock Holmes story of the dog that didn’t
> bark. Even as their wealth has been decimated, the nation’s minorities
> have remained politically quiescent. No street protests. No marches on
> Washington. No detectable rise in racial and ethnic grievances.
>
> Indeed, Pew Research surveys show that during the same period — from
> 2005 to 2009 — minorities moved ahead of whites in their measured
> levels of satisfaction with the state of the national economy.
>
> How can that be? Is it that minorities are better fortified,
> psychologically, to endure hard times? (Certainly they’ve had more
> experience.) Or could it be that because so much of their loss was of
> relatively recently acquired “paper wealth,” it stung less?
>
> Perhaps. But whatever one’s circumstances, the loss of wealth is a
> major blow. Unlike income, wealth is a stock of assets, accumulated
> over time, that can provide a bulwark against short-term economic
> setbacks; savings for a college education; security for retirement;
> and a nest egg for one’s children. It’s the ticket to the American
> dream — and it can be passed on from one generation to the next. Its
> loss cannot be easy for anyone to swallow.
>
> So why the apparent cognitive dissonance? In the absence of a more
> plausible theory, one could do worse than consult the political
> calendar. According to Pew Research surveys, the period when
> minorities first passed whites in their measured level of satisfaction
> with the national economy was between 2008 and 2009. That happens to
> be when the nation elected and inaugurated its first nonwhite president.
>
> Optimism among blacks and Hispanics about the nation’s economic future
> has fallen off since those politically heady days of 2008-09. But it
> remains above that of whites: In the latest Pew surveys, 40 percent of
> blacks say they expect the economy to improve in the next year,
> compared with 34 percent of Hispanics and 29 percent of whites. Pretty
> remarkable, given the disparate impact of the recession on these groups.
>
> The moral of the story? When it comes to the way minorities perceive
> the economy these days, it may not be the economy, stupid.
>
> Paul Taylor is executive vice president of the Pew Research Center and
> co-author of its recent report on the racial wealth gap.