All of us don’t have latent racism. Speak for yourself.
Well, as you said, it’s “politics”, so we’re not talking about truth. People (his opponents) are going to call him a liberal because that’s a dirty word in the US, and they want to paint a negative picture of him. He’s maybe a little more liberal than Clinton was as president (or at least how he governed once the Republicans gained leadership in Congress), but I would say by any objective measure he’s pretty centrist (wrt American politics).
The reality of US politics is that any president has to be pretty centrist since that’s where the political center of gravity is, by definition. He isn’t going to survive, politically, if he tries to govern as strong lefty.
What is his position on immigration? Does he support the working class fear of wage dumping?
We have a 2 party system. But it is very expensive to run in America. We have an overly long campaign period that has people running for over a year and a half. So both parties have to appeal to the wealthy and corporations for campaign money. Eventually they are both beholden to big money and big business.
The rub is that the Dems have a conscience about the poor. They try to help them out. The Repubs do not care about the unfortunate. They are just collateral damage in the rush to international corporate governments.
Obama could not be president if he threatened the wealthy. He does not. But he is apt to cost them a little of the control they demand,. The Repubs will give them what they want. The differences are not huge, but they are real.
Everyone has latent racism, it’s human nature to fear those perceived as “different”. But like many aspects of human nature, the degree to which it affects a person’s state of mind and outward behavior varies considerably. It may not affect you very much, but to claim that some people are just immune to racist attitudes is not realistic.
Is it? Or rather, let me say, should they be?
According to cultural Marxist theories, only people of Northern European descent have latent racism. So it would be very easy for Obama to be “right-winged” on immigration. But I suppose he would then lose his support from the mighty Hollywood-lobby. You know, they never argue their points philosophically, they just beam television show after television show into every American home depicting the anti-immigration folks as the scum of earth.
If you compare Obama to Bush, is he more left or right on immigration?
Good question. My take is that if you are a political scientist, you are going to want to be as objective as possible in defining your terms. You’ll want them to mean the same thing in the US as they do in South Africa. The problem is, most lay people use language descriptively, not prescriptively.
I have no formal education in political science, so I’m not really sure if there is a consensus among those who study the subject as to which side of the various issues constitutes the right side and which the left side.
And that always leads us to the question as to whether that 1-D model is really useful at the academic level. It makes good sound bites in a political campaign, but is it a good way to study a complex subject?
Bush at least proposed some sort of amnesty or guest worker program at some point, but when his supporters got all huffy at the idea that they may have to stop treating a bunch of brown-skinned criminals as 2nd class citizens he dropped it.
AFAIK Obama’s never tackled the immigration issue, but it’s pretty hard to say who’s more “right” or “left”, much less actually defining what it means to be “right” or “left” on immigration in the first place.
This, mostly. Even if they manage to disguise, it during the lying/getting elected, phase of the process, it rarely takes long for the evil to show which pile of money they’re beholding to.
And he’s black, of course.
It’s been a long, long, LONG time since they had someone in the White House who wasn’t doing something, somewhere, some time that revealed him to be a scumbag on some front or other. Whether it’s cheating on your spouse, endorsing torture, lying bare faced, or whatever. Whether they agree with his politics or not, I think, most people recognize he is trying hard to do the right things, and he is, at his core, a good person.
I don’t have latent racism. I don’t fear those perceived as different. Maybe most people do, but I don’t, so any such claims that include everybody are false.
This, mostly. Even if they manage to disguise it, during the lying/getting elected, phase of the process, it rarely takes long for the evil to show which pile of money they’re beholding to.
And he’s black, of course.
It’s been a long, long, LONG time since they had someone in the White House who wasn’t doing something, somewhere, some time that revealed him to be a scumbag on some front or other. Whether it’s cheating on your spouse, endorsing torture, lying bare faced, or whatever. Whether they agree with his politics or not, I think, most people recognize he is trying hard to do the right things, and he is, at his core, a good person.
What would be the point?
What’s left and what’s right on immigration?
The laissez-faire capitalist free-trade pro-immigration position?
The populist/protectionist anti-immigration position?
The internationalist/populist/social justice-driven pro-immigration position?
Gotta say Der Trihs is right on the money. In elections now you’ve got the choice between a corporatist Democrat or an insanelt corporatist Republican. The choice between right and righter, and if the right guy wins any policy he proposes that doesn’t benefit the top 1% and corporations entirely will see him labelled as a socialist.
Okie then, you’re a perfect human being, totally different from and superior to the rest of us. Congratulations. :rolleyes:
Far from perfect. Just not affected by racism, despite the efforts of others to influence me. But I have plenty of other faults, just ask my wife 
Actually you can ask Mangetout. One of my faults is saying everybody does things when I know it couldn’t mean absolutely everybody.
The obvious flaw in that argument is that it presumes that everyone on Earth has the same definition of “different”. Race is an artificial distinction created by slavers and imperialists to justify their depredations, not some objective or instinctive form of categorization that everyone automatically takes seriously. Most people throughout human history have not been racist, for the simple reason they didn’t even have the concept of race in the first place.
Semantics. Call it tribalist or ethnicist or whatever and it boils down to the same thing.