Barack Obama's Race Problem: White Liberals

Barack Obama has a racial problem, but it's not what the media thinks -- it's not rednecks, older voters, or even women offended by attacks on Hillary Clinton. Obama's racial problem is white liberals.

"I'm OK, You're Not."

A central tenet of modern liberalism, after all, is the unshakeable conviction that white American is deeply and irredeemably racist. For three decades, America's white liberals have invested in the belief that American is so incapable of racial fairness that society needs a panoply of laws, preferences, quotas, set-asides, and remedial programs to ensure that black people are treated fairly.

All of those policies are fundamentally based on the belief that America is deeply racist, that their fellow Americans are personally biased and institutionally prejudiced -- consciously and unconsciously, intentionally and structurally; racist in history and practice.

It follows that many race-holding liberals will be among the last to believe that America will ever elect an African-American as president.

White liberals face this cognitive dissonance: if they decide that America is ready for a black president and back Obama they would also be forced to surrender or at least modify decades of convictions about American bias.

The euphemism for this is "electability," and it is one of the reasons why the race and gender cards are being played so aggressively among post-New Hampshire Democrats.