More On Frank Rich's Gloating About Demographic Transformation
03/29/2010
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New York Times op-ed columnist Frank Rich gloats over American's demographic transformation in his March 27th opinion piece entitled: The Rage is not about Health Care :
If Obama’s first legislative priority had been immigration or financial reform or climate change, we would have seen the same trajectory. The conjunction of a black president and a female speaker of the House — topped off by a wise Latina on the Supreme Court and a powerful gay Congressional committee chairman — would sow fears of disenfranchisement among a dwindling and threatened minority in the country no matter what policies were in play. It’s not happenstance that Frank, Lewis and Cleaver — none of them major Democratic players in the health care push — received a major share of last weekend’s abuse. When you hear demonstrators chant the slogan “Take our country back!,” these are the people they want to take the country back from.

They can’t. Demographics are avatars of a change bigger than any bill contemplated by Obama or Congress. The week before the health care vote, The Times reported that births to Asian, black and Hispanic women accounted for 48 percent of all births in America in the 12 months ending in July 2008. By 2012, the next presidential election year, non-Hispanic white births will be in the minority. The Tea Party movement is virtually all white. The Republicans haven’t had a single African-American in the Senate or the House since 2003 and have had only three in total since 1935. Their anxieties about a rapidly changing America are well-grounded.

Notice that Rich can publicly gloat in the New York Times about a shrinking white majority, but if anybody were to say this is a bad thing, he'd be called "racist". Not that any congressional Republicans seem likely to bring it up.

Frank Rich, though, gets the demographic transformation and its political effects. Why can't the Republicans?

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