General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: 2024: 69% of White men, no degree, voted Krasnov. [View all]BumRushDaShow
(172,322 posts)This lily-white woman (whose ancestors traced back to Ireland) -

and her lily-white parents -

Remember this "imagery"? -

He even took a trip to Moneygall, Ireland where his mother's ancestors descended -

Now add an IRISH Vice President (who would give Obama "white street cred", with the "assumption" that he would really be the one "governing" ), and that was enough to take him over the top (even with the lesser turnout 2012 election).
This is why the racist dreck of the GOP kept trying to wrest their base's "vision" away from Obama's mother's family in order to point them to his father's Kenyan family, where they could go full blown racist CT using them. Not all bought it obviously.
Until we FUCKING DEAL WITH THE RACIAL OVERLAY that has been in this country since before its founding, we will continue to swing and miss.
As speak easy has so noted (and here is the source) -
Bill D. Moyers
WHAT A REAL PRESIDENT WAS LIKE
November 12, 1988
WHILE Lyndon Baines Johnson was a man of time and place, he felt the bitter paradox of both. I was a young man on his staff in 1960 when he gave me a vivid account of that southern schizophrenia he understood and feared. We were in Tennessee. During the motorcade, he spotted some ugly racial epithets scrawled on signs.
Late that night in the hotel, when the local dignitaries had finished the last bottles of bourbon and branch water and departed, he started talking about those signs. "I'll tell you what's at the bottom of it," he said. "If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you."
Some years later when Johnson was president, there was a press conference in the East Room. A reporter unexpectedly asked the president how he could explain his sudden passion for civil rights when he had never shown much enthusiasm for the cause. The question hung in the air. I could almost hear his silent cursing of a press secretary who had not anticipated this one.
But then he relaxed, and from an instinct no assistant could brief -- one seasoned in the double life from which he was delivered and hoped to deliver others -- he said in effect: Most of us don't have a second chance to correct the mistakes of our youth. I do and I am. That evening, sitting in the White House, discussing the question with friends and staff, he gestured broadly and said,
"Eisenhower used to tell me that this place was a prison. I never felt freer." For weeks in 1964, the president carried in his pocket the summary of a Census Bureau report showing that the lifetime earnings of an average black college graduate were lower than that of a white man with an eighth-grade education. And when The New York Times in November 1964 reported racial segregation to be increasing instead of disappearing, he took his felt-tip pen and scribbled across it "shame, shame, shame," and sent it to Everett Dirksen, the Republican leader in the Senate. I have a hard time explaining to our two sons and daughter -- now in their twenties -- that when they were little, America was still deeply segregated.
(snip)