My title has the question Eugene Robinson asks as the title of his Friday Washington Post column, which I highly recommend.
He begins simply enough
This election is only tangentially a fight over policy. It is also a fight about meaning and identity — and that’s one reason voters are so polarized. It’s about who we are and who we aspire to be.When Republicans vow to “take back our country,” they never say from whom. But we can guess.
Issues of race, power and privilege are less explicit this year than they were in 2008, but in some ways they are even stronger.
Please keep reading.
Robinson acknowledges that there are genuine differences in policy - assuming we can figure out what policies Romney would actually attempt to implement (my thoughts).
The key for Robinson is not to call those who resist and push back against Obama racists, although certainly some are, as they make clear with their explicit statements. Instead he focuses on how we are changing as a people, and how our nation's place in the world is also changing.
Let's take the first:
What I’m saying is that Obama’s racial identity is a constant reminder of how much the nation has changed in a relatively short time. In my lifetime, we’ve experienced the civil rights movement, the countercultural explosion of the 1960s, the sexual revolution, the women’s movement and an unprecedented wave of Latino immigration. Within a few decades, there will be no white majority in this country — no majority of any kind, in fact. We will be a nation of racial and ethnic minorities, and we will only prosper if everyone learns to give and take.
Having just completed 17 years of teaching in increasingly diverse schools, I am seeing the change at ground zero. It is racial, religious, and sexual.
I graduated from high school 50 years ago this academic year. There was no interracial dating, relatively few Hispanics, no Muslims, and no openly gay, bisexual or transgendered students.
I had students with two moms, students of two or more racial backgrounds, Sunni and Shi'a Muslim students, Hindus, Jains, transgendered, gay, bi- . . . . I saw openly gay students being affectionate with their significant others, couples whose racial differences would have shocked in my day, even in relatively liberal Larchmont NY.
Yes, there are those who are threatened by the changes. We saw this as early as Pat Buchanan's 1988 speech at the Republican National Convention with his references to culture war. In that sense a Black man with a Muslim-sounding name in the nation's highest office is a nightmare for them.
Robinson chooses to accept Romney at his word in the final debate, and thus says there is not much difference between the two candidates on foreign policy. I suspect that is for convenience sake. Like Colin Powell, I would worry that we cannot determine what Romney's foreign policy might be, and I would explicitly raise concerns given the preponderance of recycled Bush advisors like Dan Senor.
Still, most Americans tend to vote on domestic issues. The way they approach Obama on foreign policy issues can be summarized in two easy ways - it is the Republican attempt to delegitimize him as not fully America (think of the words of John Sununu) and to falsely (yes, Mitt Romney) accuse him of having apologized for the United States.
For Robinson, Romney's promise to repeal the Affordable Care Act is sufficient reason to oppose his election. But while there are policy differences, he thinks that is not the real reason for the sharp political divides, since
White men need medical care, too. African Americans and Latinos understand the need to get our fiscal house in order
With the exception of those at the very top, we are all suffering from the economic slowdown. But that is not what is happening in our political discourse, and that is certainly not how Romney is allowing his campaign to be run.
I began as did Robinson. I will end with his final words:
Some of Obama’s opponents have tried to delegitimize his presidency because he doesn’t embody the America they once knew. He embodies the America of now.