Affirmative Action/Quotas/Preferences

Saturday’s New York Times front-page article detailing the Obama Administration’s plans to boost minority preferences in schooling, U.S. Urges Creativity by Colleges to Gain Diversity [webposted December 2], reflects a big shift in how the Main Stream Media talks about the 2012 election—towards the frank racial analysis I’ve been using for the last eleven years.

Reporter Sam Dillon’s article starts:

“The Obama administration on Friday urged colleges and universities to get creative in improving racial diversity at their campuses, throwing out a Bush-era interpretation of recent Supreme Court rulings that limited affirmative action in admissions.”

In other words, the Affirmative Action President wants, unsurprisingly, more Affirmative Action. As I argued in America’s Half Blood Prince, Obama is essentially a racial redistributionist.

But what’s interesting is that Dillon’s article twice mentions how this payoff is part of the Obama Administration’s grand strategy for 2012:

“ ‘The administration is making strong policy statements on low-income children and students of color, outlining remedies,’ said Bob Wise, a former Democratic governor of West Virginia who heads an education nonprofit organization aimed at improving high school graduation rates. ‘They seem to be putting some markers down as the election begins,’ he said, adding that the new set of guidelines ‘tries to keep within the letter of the Supreme Court opinions, while probably pushing the spirit.’ ”

This confirms the insight of veteran Democratic pundit Tom Edsall in his The Future of the Obama Coalition (New York Times, November 27, 2011):

"[P]reparations by Democratic operatives for the 2012 election make it clear for the first time that the party will explicitly abandon the white working class. All pretense of trying to win a majority of the white working class has been effectively jettisoned