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I Am An Activist For Civil Rights

When Obama Won The 2nd Term It Became Clear The People Pledging To Him Their Vote Were More Of Those Invested In Civil Rights... And Likely So Equality

By: Stellerana
Written on January 31st, 2013
Age: 70+
46 people have read this story

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9 responses
  • GTR1400

    I like the truth in your title more than the story. I have been able to clamber out of a lower working-class existence precisely because I am white, and because the government helped me. Knowing this, I work, I speak out, I vote for anybody who will uphold a meritocracy, one where money does not allow one to fail upward. I vote for a government that breaks down barriers to progress by anybody.

    My only wish has been that Obama needs to be more liberal. His economic policies, by representing the wealthy, is damaging to equality.

    Jan 31
    1 like
    • berangere

      I do not believe Obama represents the wealthy he tried to help the underprivileged by making health care more available to all but was faced with a great deal of opposition from insurance companies and other organisations who put profit before people,please explain.

      Jan 31
      1 like
    • SpiceZ

      I agree berangere.

      Jan 31
      1 like
    • SpiceZ

      GTR I agree with most of what you say, though berangere's reply is also correct...and what I have to add is that Obama would have done a lot more for poorer folks if that dam dysfunctional GOP would not have blocked his every move.

      Jan 31
      1 like
    • GTR1400

      Obama continues a revolving door between Goldman Sachs and the Treasury. People like Geithner, who always "failed up" continue to give out money to the bankers who created the economic crisis in many, many different ways. Don't believe that anybody getting money in 2008 has actually paid it back.

      And, like the latest "fiscal cliff" Obama once more caved and will not tax the wealthy by letting all of Shrub's tax cuts expire. He continues to cave, and the latest was to disallow financial help to obtain affordable insurance for family members by somebody who is insured at work. He, unfortunately, is on the side of profits.

      I prefer him to any modern republican, but he remains to the right of people like Richard Nixon. I never thought that I would see the day that Democrats like Obama talk about limiting Social Security and Medicaid.

      More needs to be done to help ALL people. And the first step is to eliminate the influence of the wealthy. I voted for the man, but I expect more from him.

      Jan 31
      1 like
    1 More Reply
  • SpiceZ

    Great story!!!!..but I must tell you there are more white women than you think down in the dumps economically and etc. with the rest of us.

    Jan 31
    2 likes
    • bijouxbroussard

      Many whites are really just a paycheck (or even a welfare check) away from homelessness. That's why it's mind-boggling when they vote Republican, it's like cutting any safety net out from under themselves.

      Jan 31
      1 like
    • SpiceZ

      Yes...just goes to show..those greedy white male republicans only care that they get all the pie, leaving the rest of us the crumbs...Though there are a growing number of white males who are not like that....and are one paycheck away from the streets :( though they are highly unlikely to vote 'Republican'

      Jan 31
      1 like
  • Stellerana

    Obama's 2012 Victory: The Demographic Becomes the Narrative


    Since 2008, commentary about presidential campaigns has been saturated in the rhetoric of narrative. However, Obama's 2012 presidential victory wasn't, strictly speaking, based on narrative.

    So what happened? The Obama campaign focused strategically on offering specific policies or programs that targeted the new demographic. This meant ensuring a governmental mandate to address immigration; the issues of single women; the concerns of Hispanics, African Americans and Asian Americans; the rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender (LGBT) Americans; and the interests of supporters of trade unions and ordinary folks struggling to find jobs or keep the ones they had.

    As Rosa Ramirez has shown, exit polls suggested the importance of the demographic. Obama captured 71 percent of the Latino vote, in contrast with Romney's 23 percent. The president garnered 93 percent of African-American men and 96 percent of African-American women. He received 73 percent of the Asian vote.

    Indeed, electoral demographics have become the driving force of the last two presidential elections, a fulfillment of Peter Brimelow and Ed Rubenstein's 1997 prophecy, "Demography is destiny in American politics." They forecast 2008 as the year when a shift in ethnic demographics would ensure the Republican Party's inexorable slide to "minority status."

    What, then, do the demographics of the 2012 presidential election indicate? As Nancy Benac and Connie Cass illustrated, nonwhites represented 28 percent of the 2012 electorate, in contrast to just 20 percent in 2000. Obama received 80 percent of the nonwhite vote in both 2008 and 2012. White, male voters represented only 34 percent of the votes cast in the 2012 election, compared with 46 percent in 1972.

    According to John Cassidy, white men chose Romney over Obama by 27 percent (62 vs. 35 percent, respectively). Caucasian women voted for Romney over Obama by 56 vs. 42 percent, respectively, a higher percentage than those who voted for either McCain in 2008 or Bush in 2004.

    Today, according to Benac and Cass, 54 percent of single women vote Democratic, in contrast to 36 percent of married women. The single women's vote was strategically significant, accounting for nearly a quarter of all voters (23 percent) in the election. White voters favored less government (60 percent), Hispanics wanted more (58 percent), and, by comparison, blacks were the most interventionist of these ethnic groups (73 percent). Hispanics represented a significant and growing share of prospective voters in the Western battleground states. In 2000, for instance, white voters constituted 80 percent of voters in Nevada, but by 2012 their percentage of the total vote had declined to 64 percent, while the Hispanic vote had increased by 19 percent. Not surprisingly, 70 percent of Hispanics voted for Obama in Nevada.

    The youth vote sided decisively with Obama, as Benac and Cass demonstrated. In the case of North Carolina, a battleground state that narrowly supported Romney, two thirds of these voters supported Obama. Younger voters are also more ethnically diverse. Of all Americans under 30 who voted in the election, 58 percent were white, compared with 87 percent of seniors who voted.

    Just how significant are these numbers? As Ryan Lizza noted, three fifths of white voters selected Romney, equaling or exceeding the support that Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush received from white voters in 1980 and 1988, respectively. But if the white electorate was 87 percent of voters in 1992, by 2016 they will represent less than 70 percent of American voters. As the demographic landscape of our country changes, even conservative strongholds such as Texas will be at risk. Ted Cruz, a newly elected senator from Texas, who campaigned from a "secure-the-borders" perspective, expressed it this way to Lizza:

    In not too many years, Texas could switch from being all Republican to all Democrat. If that happens, no Republican will ever again win the White House. ... If Texas turns bright blue, the Electoral College math is simple. We won't be talking about Ohio, we won't be talking about Florida or Virginia, because it won't matter. If Texas is bright blue, you can't get to two-seventy electoral votes. The Republican Party would cease to exist.
    Barack Obama and his team of advisors ran a tactically brilliant campaign. Obama's victory wasn't based on a narrative, because that would have exposed the economic failings of his administration. Instead, the campaign demonized Mitt Romney by appealing to the "diversity values" of the Democratic rank and file while saturating the battleground states with attack advertisements. The party appealed to a multicultural mosaic: Hispanics, single woman, African Americans, ethnic minorities, young people and many of the economically disenfranchised who voted, as well as a significant number of affluent progressives and, of course, the LGBT community.

    The Democrats strategically targeted their demographic, and the demographic became the narrative. "In sports parlance," as I have noted previously, "Obama's 'ground game' was hard-hitting and decisive. The demonization against Romney began early and never stopped. Even before he was the designated Republican candidate, the Obama machine had Romney effectively in their sights. All is fair in political warfare. And this Democratic victory was supremely won."

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/dr-diana-e-sheets/obamas-2012-victory-the-demographic-becomes-the-narrative_b_2341438.html

    Jan 31
    2 likes