Conservative serious person George Will appears to be throwing in the towel today, but not without offering a not-at-all clever excuse for the failure of his party's platform and their presidential nominee.
That Obama is African American may be important, but in a way quite unlike that darkly suggested by, for example, MSNBC’s excitable boys and girls who, with their (at most) one-track minds and exquisitely sensitive olfactory receptors, sniff racism in any criticism of their pin-up. Instead, the nation, which is generally reluctant to declare a president a failure — thereby admitting that it made a mistake in choosing him — seems especially reluctant to give up on the first African American president. If so, the 2012 election speaks well of the nation’s heart, if not its head.
According to George Will, Americans aren't willing to give up on President Obama because he's black. Because Americans would feel guilty about firing the black man. And he says this not just of those darn liberals at MSNBC who, as Will alleges, spot racism in all the wrong places, but also of independents and a limited number of moderate Republican voters.
The implication seems to be that the shared guilt of Americans who are wary of replacing the nation's first black president represents a sort of reverse-racism that Democrats have commandeered to the detriment of the Great White Hope Mitt Romney.
Will is self-aware enough to not repeat the tired mantra that "conservatism can't fail, it can only be failed" so this is his way of saying that without saying it. Because in this case conservatism didn't fail, gullible Americans failed conservatism.
The idea that average Americans simply favor President Obama's policies because his policies are more beneficial to them doesn't factor into George Will's conservative apologia. Will dismisses the notion by citing misleading, out-of-context numbers, Solyndra, and the slow takeoff of electric cars as evidence that Americans are stupid for wanting to re-elect President Obama.
Can't you see he ruined everything!?
Ahem.
Because Americans are obviously too stupid to see that President Obama's administration is in "shambles" (but smart enough to know that men like Will are ideologically and morally bankrupt) he consequently reaches the conclusion that white guilt is the root of all Democratic evil.
The election is far from over, and I would not rule out the possibility that the race could tighten between now and November, but this appears to be a preview of what we can expect to see from establishment "thinkers" during the last days of, and those immediately following, the election.