Forty-six years after the assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., the Democratic Party has made clear its rejection of King’s dream that people be judged by the content of their character rather than the color of their skin. Democrats favor lower standards for Blacks and racial quotas in employment and college admissions. They created the housing bubble with Clinton-Reno race-discrimination threats against banks that wouldn’t make mortgage loans to non-credit-worthy Blacks.
Yet, despite massive evidence that the vast majority of Whites long ago embraced King’s dream; Exhibit A for that case, the re-elected Black President of the 70% White United States last week blamed recent post-Obamacare-roll-out-polls on “racial animus.” President Barack Obama would be liked by more white people if he had been white when he failed to stimulate the economy and misled them concerning insurance policy retention in order to pass the Affordable Care Act? We don’t think so, and, being Caucasian ourselves, happen to have “inside information” on this question.
But what of campaigns for poor people in the Age of Obama? Would the leader of a Poor People’s Campaign at the time of his death favor the policies of a Democratic Party that have left millions of Blacks mired in poverty for generations? In Memphis, Tennessee to support striking city sanitation workers due to unsafe working conditions and wages that left many full-time employees still eligible for food stamps and other welfare; King was in the midst of organizing a poor people’s march on Washington when he was struck down by an assassin’s bullet.
We will never know whether the Baptist preacher who never joined the Democratic Party would have been satisfied with welfare policies that kicked the black man out of the house and made Uncle Sam daddy, green spaces that make housing less affordable and wars on coal and other fossil fuels that raise the price of energy and food. But if Dr. King cared about actual policy results and desired that there be less poor people and more middle class Blacks, he surely would not.
Eighty-five years after the birth of Daddy King’s son here in a then-segregated Atlanta, Georgia, this city dubbed “too busy to hate” and most Americans have embraced and made very real the dream of a society in which racism is no longer an impediment to achieving the American dream. Sadly, the Democratic Party still pursues policies that divide Americans based upon the color of one’s skin and place government-run regulatory and other impediments in the way of poor people that would seek that dream.
This former Democrat is thankful that Martin King challenged America to live up to its “all men are created equal” creed and that his birthday is celebrated as a national holiday today. We would like to think that had he lived, he would have been driven by his educated mind and Christian heart to care so much for the poor that he would have long ago rejected the siren song of failed big government non-solutions.
The best poor people’s campaign in world history has been the Liberty-fueled free market capitalism embraced in the United States. The kind whose superiority to spread-the-wealth policies supported by liberals was most recently made manifest by the 25-year Reagan Recovery that ended after the housing bust. Most Republicans, and all tea partiers and other conservatives, favor a return to those small government policies that brought prosperity to Americans, red and yellow, black and white.
Have a dream today!
“One man with courage makes a majority.” – Andrew Jackson
