Obama or Hillary  

A scary thing happened today. A good friend of mine admitted that she doesn't want to vote for Obama because he is black. How do you debate that?

This entry was posted on Monday, June 02, 2008 and is filed under , , . You can leave a response and follow any responses to this entry through the Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom) .

5 comments

You can't.

Unfortunately, there are some people who won't be able to get past Obama being black, Hillary being a woman or John McCain being a Republican.

It's irrational and no amount of persuasive, coherent logic will get that person to change their mind.

At best you can convince that person to stay at home and not vote for the other guy.

Anonymous  

It's the kind of statement you have to dig into deeper. Dave is right but usually there is an assumption on their part that they haven't stated.

Do they worry about a "black agenda"? Are they afraid people will use this to promote their own bigotry? Do they simply feel he can't be qualified because he is (presumably) less educated?

From there, you can discuss any misconceptions or errors in understanding they may have. I doubt they are out-right racist. If they were, you wouldn't likely call them friend.

Anonymous  

WOW.. I haven't heard that yet but I did hear conversation about how he won't have a chance in hell at being elected if he doesn't pick a white man as his running mate.

Regardless of who he picks, this year's presidential race is the Democrats' to lose.

They've got everything going for them: the economy is down, there's an unpopular war and the guy on the Republican ticket is an old, angry white man.

When the economy is doing poorly incumbents (or their parties) tend to do poorly. An unpopular war can be dangerous to a president (LBJ and the Dems in '68) but isn't necessarily fatal (Abe Lincoln in '64).

You don't debate that.
You just have to shake your head and wonder if we need the ability to restrict some folks voting rights.
I can't vote for Obama because I don't think he has the experience. He hasn't been a Senator all that long, he appears to be too liberal for me and I just don't think he's ready for the job.
Hillary, no thanks. I don't trust her any further than I can throw her. The only reason she and Bill are seen together is so that both of them can get access to the White House again. She is a liberal Nixon in a pant suit.
Actually I would have preferred Huckabee, but I don't have that choice any longer.