Back of the Bus No More

It’s always good to hear the sensible words of the adults after a week or so of ranting and raging by the kids.

So today Charles Krauthammer opines on the LBJ-MLK flap. 

You remember.  Hillary Clinton said that it is presidents that get things done.  It took Lyndon Johnson to pass the civil rights acts of the 1960s. 

That is true, and it is true for a shameful reason.  Back in the 1960s blacks were disfranchised.  They had to get in the back of the bus and let the liberals lead on Capitol Hill.  Liberals have preened themselves on their nobility ever since.

Today, that arrangement — white liberals acting as tribune for blacks in return for their political loyalty — is a demeaning anachronism.

And that is why blacks have reacted with offense and outrage over the patronizing remarks of the Clintons on race.

For conservatives there is a real frisson of Schadenfreude over white liberal Democrats getting the Treatment over race.  We risk the Treatment any time we open our mouths.  And couldn’t happen to more deserving people.  Krauthammer

But where, I ask you, do such studied and/or sincere expressions of racial offense come from? From a decades-long campaign of enforced political correctness by an alliance of white liberals and the black civil rights establishment intended to delegitimize and marginalize as racist any criticism of their post-civil rights-era agenda.

Today there is a black man running a mainstream campaign for a major party presidential nomination.

What Barack Obama is saying by his presence as a major contender with a real chance at winning the nomination is that it is time for blacks to get out of the back of the political bus.  They don’t need liberals to front for them any more.

And liberals are shocked.  How could blacks forget all that we have done for them, they whimper.

But this is an old story.  The history of the United States is full of hyphenated Americans that grew up in the motherly embrace of the Democratic Party.  And then the day came when it was time to grow up.  It became time to throw off the hyphen and become an American.

African-Americans have had as rough a time getting to that moment as any group in US history.  But now it looks like they are getting there.  And one of the rites of passage is to throw off your allegiance to the Democratic Party, to leave the liberal plantation.

We conservatives say: Welcome!  There is nothing in the world like being an American.