06/19/2012
Ross Douthat has been a columnist The New York Times since 2009: I doubt he will be there much longer.
In The Media and Obama’s Immigration Gambit June 18, 2012 Douthat has the temerity to question the political wisdom behind the Obama Youth Amnesty and — even more heretical — he does so by thinking in terms of race:
Hispanics were still only about 10 percent of the electorate four years ago, whereas whites without college degrees were almost 40 percent. This meant that even though Obama won about 67 percent of Hispanics and only 40 percent of white working class voters, he still won millions more working class white votes in total — and needs to win at least some of those millions again. Given that anxieties about immigration’s impact on native employment tend to be concentrated among working class voters (and particularly among young working class voters, who happen to be in direct competition for jobs with the beneficiaries of this policy change), it seems at least possible that the White House’s gambit will hurt in states like Ohio and Wisconsin as much as it helps the campaign in states like Nevada and Florida.
If that was not enough he also questions the sagacity of the MSM
In both center-left and mainstream outlets, there has been consistent admiration for the administration’s maneuverings on these issues, and a consistent implication that the political risks are marginal-to-nonexistent.
(“These issues” involve what Douthat has called “the social issues strategy”)
He concludes
Whether the White House really knows what they’re doing politically, then — both with this policy shift and with the social issues strategy, generally — depends on how thoroughly they’ve dug into the underlying numbers and gamed out their state-by-state implications, versus how much they’ve allowed themselves to be swaddled in a comfortable media cocoon.
In essence, Douthat sees that the Obamacrats (like others) have convinced themselves White Christian America does not count.
Douthat has been doing some very interesting work, notably recently attacking Charles Murray’s recent politic suppression of the immigration dimension in his recent book.
VDARE.com looks forward to welcoming Ross Douthat to the blogosphere.
This is a content archive of VDARE.com, which Letitia James forced off of the Internet using lawfare.