Shelby Steele, a mixed-race (black father, white mother, but raised in a segregated black milieu) and distinguished black writer and scholar who I’d vote for as gladly as I did Ronald Reagan (another is Thomas Sowell) has this to say about Barack Obama (in five integral sessions):

http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=YmM5NDRhMjRhMWNmMjBhODBiZTBhZDhiYmI5OTc0OTQ=

http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=YmY4MDk4M2I0NmUwZTVkNDkzY2JkOGI1MTg0MWJkNTQ=

http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=OTQ0MjEyMWQzOTg2Nzk2NDVlN2U3OTk4YjViODYwMDU=

http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=N2QwMTMwODM4YTJiYTI4MTI5Y2MwZTlkZDVlYzJmOWE=

http://tv.nationalreview.com/uncommonknowledge/post/?q=NTczYTIwZDFmYTZjODM5NmNiOTEzZjM5NzYxOTZkMTQ=

Unfortunately, the original NRO-TV sessions with Shelby Steele in late January of 2008 seem inaccessible.

Clearly, Professor Steele is disappointed and disturbed about the election of Barack Obama, and not merely because he thought all along that he should not have been elected. I share that disappointment, that disillusionment with American political perspicacity and skepticism. I cannot believe that, no matter their racialist motivations, so many Americans can be so ignorant and/or stupid and/or greedily predatory on fellow Americans.

Now, I was raised in a typically ethnic racist family – largely and widely so. I took physical abuse in my teen years for being for civil rights for all Americans, no matter race, creed, etc. I dare any to call me a racist. But, the abuse I took has been nothing compared to the humiliation of witnessing so many live exactly down to what my family said about them fifty years ago.

Most disturbing: "He may not be 'anybody'. He may not have strong convictions in fact."
Or, the pig-in-the-poke may turn out to be even less than a polecat.

"He may not be 'anybody'. He may not have strong convictions in fact."

There is hope, with a man known for powerful ideas that restore the person in his character, from which hope is gleaned. Give us in him Ronald Reagan. This man spoke of MY challenges to be the best I can be on MY terms. He had confidence less in anyone else but me (and God) doing for me. And, he made his stand less on me as a selfish individualist than me in my family, communities, etc., in responsibilities and duties as much as opportunity.

There is ‘hope’ wherein ‘all my troubles will just fly away IF . . .’, and give us FDR or LBJ or BHO. There was even a touch of this with Billy Jeff Clinton before he permitted his wife, ‘Cold Lips’, to give us a glimpse about moving toward tyranny with her presumptuousness over ‘her’ ‘health care reform’ of 1993; similarly, Blair of Britain was to play the ‘beneficent laird’ over the UK. It is this hope that ‘we’ (spelled T-H-E-Y) will take care of me, no matter how much I bungle and blow. After all, I am not in character responsible because someone else is in fault responsible. And, ‘we’ will (yet again!) have safety nets that cling like so many spiders’ webs; to the ‘victims’’ multi-generational entrapment and the taxpayer’s ongoing burden. We will have ‘salad days’ where neither man grows into ‘the best he can be’ on his own productive terms, nor can our nation grow with its citizens.

Plus, they will leave us all ‘barefoot in the kitchen’, so uneducated and dully senseless as to slouch along five paces behind them. Thence, we can be so stupid as to let them buy our votes over and over again because ‘they’ – oops, ‘we’ – will take care of us. Though, barefoot isn’t so bad; these are emperors without raiment, at all.

One raiment they surely lack in my eyes is real hope. How can we hope on a band of bandits – Congress – who have proven untrustworthy about statesmanlike competence? Can I wonder how Congress entered the recent election with a ten-percent approval rating but were retained at over 90% of incumbents? Even for their constituent satisfaction, these ‘pork’-fed operators advertise what they have grasped from others’ wealth as ‘accomplishments’. They specialize in euphemistic ‘we’s and ‘they’s that has no good in it for anyone but themselves, their cronies and the ‘special interests’ that have purchased their re-elected hides; which it is simply to say ‘it has no good in it’. They seem but giant egos somehow embodied with small minds and hearts shriveled into rapaciousness.

Did you view the sessions with Shelby Steele? Here is one black man of long-distinguished experience in research on race and government who tells us that in voting-for-THIS-black-man-just-because-he-is-black America has probably made racism more entrenched than ever. Worse, the man who we elected ". . . may not be 'anybody' . . . may not have strong convictions”. And that does not mark a Reaganesque leader, does not bring on hope but trepidation.

After fifty years of the shenanigans I have witnessed and read about in Wash.D.C. and other capitals American and otherwise, I must agree with Thomas Jefferson that ‘the government that governs least governs best’. Governing-most is to banish hope into the hands of just the wrong parties.

All of which should inform me not to hope on even a Reagan – he is gone in eight years, now dead for years and of none but ephemeral influence. Back-to-back Psalms have it best:
O Israel, hope in the Lord!
For with the Lord there is steadfast love,
and with Him is plenteous redemption.
O Israel, hope in the Lord
from this time forth and for evermore. (Psalm 130:7; 131:3)