After wiping the soda from off of my keyboard and monitor and profusely apologizing to my roommate for rousing him so late, I collected myself enough to do a little Googling and found out that Obama, in fact, does not have a degenerate disease of the central nervous but Kansas’ Lt. Gov. Mark Parkinson had endorsed him for president.

Easily confused but well meaning desi moms: gotta love ‘em.

My comment harked back to the general theme of race preferences among “our parents.” It was not about who is voting for Obama and why.

Floridian, you indicated you would sooner vote for McCain than either of the dems – “My friends and I, all 50+ year old desis, have no faith in either Obama or Hillary. Our hearts are with the Democrats, but our minds say McCain.”) Since you are representing your friends and their political leanings, in this instance it seems material to question your generation’s attitude on race, and how they affect your political choices this season. As others have pointed out, the “experience” card is difficult to support, especially if you try to play it against Hillary. Have you asked your friends why they don’t like Obama or Hillary and do you think race and gender politics are at play?

Floridian @ 95: “You speak of the changing racial attitudes among the newer immigrants. Your point might be applicable more to those new immigrants who enjoy more opportunities than my generation of immigrants did.” This isn’t supported by what I see happening in NYC. I met active SAFO volunteers last week, who are taxi drivers, waste treatment workers and meter maids.

Is it possible that the respective legacies of India for these two generations – circa ’60s/’70s vs. ’90s/millenium – have conditioned different responses to race & gender politics?

You speak of the changing racial attitudes among the newer immigrants. Your point might be applicable more to those new immigrants who enjoy more opportunities than my generation of immigrants did. A case in point would be H-1B computer programmers. I hear these fresh immigrants start at $50K to $75K a year. So they start as the American middle class. There was no such thing in my time. We all started poor.

Another factor affecting racial attitudes is the socioeconomic environment the new immigrant is ensconced in upon arrival. PhD student or convenience store worker? Their day-to-day experience of America will be so different that their entire take on American people, white, black or brown, will be different.

Wagerah, wagerah, to quote Kush Tandon.

Our racism is rooted in our immigrant experience. Arriving in a new country as non-citizens, we had no rights, no claims on government handouts, and none of the usual social skills to network for some private gain. Our only salvation was to excel in college and then in the workplace, and any group that got away with less, far less, became an object of envy and, eventually, dislike.

Sorry I’m late to the party, but this was a fascinating thread – congrats to all for a balanced, courteous debate. While I can follow Floridian’s rationale, I wonder why his paradigm does not translate to 1st-gen immigrants from the nineties/millenium. From working with SAFO in NYC I see a large number of 1st-gen subcontinentals who feel strongly about Obama, and are putting their money where their kundi is. This reflects my convictions and those of friends who migrated in the last 15 yrs. Like Floridian, they came as immigrants, with few rights and no entitlement. This generation entered the workforce at a time when the U.S. hunkered down and looked inwards – post-9/11. They braved the INS (pre-ICE) and the IRS, glass ceilings, affirmative action, stereotypes and old boys’ clubs.

What has come out of this collective crucible is the largest class of brown public defenders, teachers, social workers, campaign operatives, legislative aides and social entrepreneurs. If you move in any of these circles, this is visually/aurally self evident.

First of all, the first-generation desis are not equal-opportunity racists. Their dislike and fear are homed in on any race in America that is poor, less educated, lower on the achievement scale, prone to criminal behavior and dependent on government handouts – all interrelated socioeconomic traits.

So the question is, what makes a newer generation of 1st-gens approach the same “reality” that Floridian encountered (if anything conviction statistics are more racially one-sided), with a very different reaction, absent fear or resentment for the most part? What makes them vote Obama?

Stanley Fish makes this point much more eloquently and in much greater detail in his NY Times blog post today. A relevant excerpt:

Perhaps, as I suggested in the original column, nothing accounts for it; it’s just an ineradicable and ever-mutating virus. The important thing, then, would be not to explain it, but to acknowledge it and move on from there. That is exactly the conclusion reached by a huge number of posters who then add it to it a pro-Obama twist. It goes like this: Yes, Hillary-hatred is irrational and unfair. But it’s a fact and it’s not going away. Indeed it will only intensify in the general election. Therefore we cannot nominate her, for she would surely lose. Alberta (118) confesses, “I am probably not going to vote for her simply because of these irrational and pervasive feelings of many Americans. It may not be the best reason to give Obama my vote.� Brendan (144) warns that “to nominate Clinton in the face of this clear hatred … would simply arm the G.O.P. machine with a powerful tool to motivate its base.� Barney Scott (153) predicts that “if she were to run against the Republican nominee it would unleash the snarling dogs of unlimited hate, half-truths, and just plain venom.� Jorita Madison (75) sums it up: “The fact that Hillary Clinton is hated is true and real. Therefore if the Democrats want to recapture the Whitehouse, they better think long and hard about electability in their choice of a candidate.�

Electability (a concept invoked often) is a code word that masks the fact that the result of such reasoning is to cede the political power to the ranters. Carolyn Kay (456) makes the point when she observes that if you vote against Clinton because you fear the virulence of her most vocal enemies, “you have allowed the right-wing hatemongers to decide who our candidate will be.� Underlying this surrender of the franchise to those least qualified to exercise it is the complaint (rarely overtly stated) that the Clintons have had the bad taste to undergo the assassination of their characters in public and have thereby made us its unwilling spectators. This is of course the old ploy of blaming the victim, and Ava Mae Lewis (16) is at least explicit about it. After deploring the “wild accusations� and “rabid hate�, she declares herself “disappointed that the Clintons force us to make this final and public rejection.� In other words, by being the targets of unwarranted attacks — that is their crime, being innocent–the Clintons are putting us in the uncomfortable position of voting against them for reasons we would rather not own up to. How dare they? Given the fierceness of the opposition to her candidacy, why doesn’t Hillary do the decent thing and withdraw? “What bothers me about Hillary is that she must know this, yet she apparently thinks so much of herself, or wants to be president so badly, that she’s willing to risk compromising the Democrats’ chances of winning in November to stay in the race� (Matthew, 440). How inconsiderate of her both to want to be president and to persist in her quest in the face of calumny.

the ‘situation room’ has a dedicated (i think aussie?) ‘internet’ correspondent who reads lines out of random blogs. You’d think this would be a way for Micky Kaus to scare a thousand babies into premature pooping by demanding that blogger #1′s face be given exposure, but, sadly no.

arch-repub step-dad used to be all on McCain’s jock, but after that pansy Manchurian candidate viciously limited our free speech with McCain-Feingold (bars of bamboo constraining Rambos of free speech) and expressed doubts about the morality of fraternity pledging rites, he took a seat next to Ted Kennedy and Bill/Hitlery KKKlinton in the great pantheon of LIebrul warlocks.

I did intend to follow PAFD’s advice and go to a recent Obama “after-party” to meet winsome ladies but read that the event was held to sign up volunteers for canvassing and cold calls. Anyway, fires keep away candidates and it’s the dry season.

As for the “vast right wing conspiracy”, the fact that even Dems are afraid of Hillary still inspiring the frothing irrational rage of Republicans everywhere indicates that there might be reasonable basis for that idea, even though the words, which were spoken in the middle of one of the most vicious assaults in recent political history, may not be the best chosen from a PR point of view.

It’s been a while since I followed MSM, but when exactly did CNN become the 1930s circus sideshow channel?

Doesn’t CNN have a program where they have a couple of 20 something girls just out of college read out random blog posts that might be relevant? Or they did at one point, I think. This is the supposedly respectable established news network. Thank god for Al Gore’s invention of the Internet, which has made getting quality news and opinion so much easier!

“We can’t see who they’re pointing at, so we’ll have to use our imagination”, followed by some gratuitous shots of UBL, Ann Coulter, Monica Lewinsky, Jimmy Hoffa and a guy in a tug of war with an elephant.

It’s been a while since I followed MSM, but when exactly did CNN become the 1930s circus sideshow channel?

Couldn’t come up with someone else for Obama? Why not a pic of Bill Clinton, or someone else? I have no idea how they thought Osama was okay.