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WILLIAM HARWOOD BIOGRAPHY

William Harwood is the author of thirty-six books and over 500 articles for freethought journals in eight countries. He is a contributing editor of American Rationalist, and for the seven years that Free Inquiry maintained an advisory Editorial Board, he was a member of that Board.

Dr Harwood’s first book, Mythology’s Last Gods, based on his doctoral dissertation, did to religion what the first close-up photographs of Mars did to the “canals” delusion. His most recent books are American Hitler: George W. Bush and the Republicanazi Gestapo, and the two-volume The Fully Translated Bible.

Was the Hillary vote really an anti-Obama vote?

by William Harwood

According to voting figures reported by CNBC, all states in which African Americans constitute less than eight percent of the population, and all states in which African Americans make up more than sixteen percent of the population, voted for Barack Obama in the Democratic primaries. Those states with between eight and sixteen percent Black populations voted for Hillary Clinton, in many cases overwhelmingly. Was there a reason for those statistics, or were they sheer coincidence? One possible explanation comes to mind.

Blacks overwhelmingly voted to create the first Black president. That makes sense, since, all else being equal, it is high time a long oppressed minority achieved the ultimate equality of being represented in the White House. And with the white vote split between the first Black and the first woman president, a solid bloc of sixteen percent or more was sufficient to take their candidate over the top.

In those states in which African Americans constitute a large enough proportion of the total population to be seen as a self-serving clique, able to further a “me first” agenda due to the lack of unity among Whites, there was a very real fear—strictly in the eyes of the beholders—that a Black administration in Washington would be as self-serving as Black cliques in their home states. Given that either Obama or Clinton would be a history-making president, and all else being equal, that fear triggered a convergence on the candidate who did not appear to be a threat to majority rights. That was Hillary Clinton.

In states with insufficient Blacks for them to wield local power out of all proportion to their numbers, Whites had no reason to fear that voting for a Black individual was tantamount to voting for a Black agenda. Minorities are only feared when first-post-the-post voting splits the majority vote and gives the minority a virtual veto over what are perceived as majority rights. Canadians in recent years have seen the result of such a situation, when the anti-theocracy vote was split three ways between liberals, socialists, and environmentalists, resulting in the theocrats, despite receiving only one-third of the popular vote and being detested and feared by the other two-thirds, winning the largest number of Parliamentary seats and being allowed to form the government. Much the same thing happened to the party of Abraham Lincoln since 1980. Lack of unanimity among the two-thirds of Republicans who are moderate has enabled the theofascist one-third to take over the Party and turn it into a willing puppet of the American Taliban, forcing its human members such as John McCain to kowtow to the mad dog minority or have no chance of being elected.

So does that mean that Democrats who voted against electing a Black president in the primaries will do so again in the general election? There is good reason to conclude that it does not. While there was mere suspicion that a Black president might pursue a Black agenda of “reverse discrimination,” there is absolute certainty that a Republican president will pursue the Republicanazi agenda of abolishing the wall of separation between church and state, imposing the religion of the 16 percent fundamentalist Far Right on the majority of 51 percent moderate believers and 33 percent nontheists, and the wars to impose the Bush religion on the rest of the world will continue unabated. A Hispanic president, a Jewish president, a Mormon president, or even an African American president, while disquieting to some voters, will be recognized as a far safer and wiser choice than a Republican president.

The Chickasaw Plum - Volume V - Number 7 - June 2008

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