Obama's racial problem.

Richard Fernandez makes a compelling case that the reason that non-black support for Obama has melted like a snowball in hell is that his brand of economics does not work to the benefit of all the people.   It works for some.  Washington DC is a "boom city in a Depression."  For the rest of the country, people desperate for work realize that

The fundamental weakness with President Obama’s theory of racial healing and social progress is that has assumed that America would always have the means to pay for its grand ambitions. With the arrow of redistribution flowing along racial lines from the relatively well-off whites to the latinos and blacks, ‘progressive politics’ in a depression may just be another word for “division and tension between black and white Americans”. When it became clear that Obama would not — could not — fix the economy; and when it became clear who was going to pay the bill for his social engineering, his supported melted away. President Obama doesn’t have a racial problem. He has an economic and ideological problem with racial dimensions.

The political ramifications of this are found in the polls: 

While black support remains steady the other ethnic components of his base are falling away. What is astounding is the rate at which it has collapsed. White support was “as high as 60 percent as late as the week of May 10, 2009″. Two months later it it was below 40% and still falling. More interesting still are hispanic opinion trends which have followed the same downward trend as whites, albeit from a higher base. Interestingly, neither the President’s appointment of the “wise Latina” nor his war with Arizona helped him on a sustained basis.

For example, Hispanic warmth toward Obama hit its peak (85 percent) a few weeks before he nominated Sonia Sotomayor on May 26, 2009. By August, he was down in the 60s with Hispanics.

Similarly, in the weeks before Obama went to war against the citizens of Arizona in late April 2010 over SB1070, his Hispanic approval rating had been in the 60s. Now, it’s at 55.

As for the theory that illegal immigrants are doing the jobs that Americans won't, it turns out that "Americans are posing as Filipinos on Rent-A-Coder to find jobs."  When times get tough enough and rent has to be paid and food bought, people are willing to work for less.  If unemployment checks were to stop, a lot of jobs would be filled with Americans taking jobs that illegal immigrants now have.  Under those circumstances, imagine the tension that would arise between those at the low end of the economic ladder and Illegal immigrants who have the jobs that Americans now want.  It could very well be the reason why the Democrats are so anxious to extend unemployment payments beyond two years. 

He concludes:

The problem is that his governing mental model may be founded in a lost world — in the Marxist critiques of the 1960s and 70s. It may have been forged at a time when Americans seemed obscenely prosperous in comparison to the denizens of the Third World. They were harmless eccentricities at the time. Today, in a globalized world where China, not America is on track to become the greatest consumer in the world; in a world where Americans and Britons pose as Filipinos to get jobs, it is nothing short of disastrous. His old categories of race and privilege and noblesse oblige are survivals from a bygone age. President Obama has made much of being the harbinger of the future. On the contrary, he may turn out to be a relic from the past.

It's also, by the way, why the hidden conspiracy behind JournoList is pissing so many people off.  The media talking among down to us is irritating enough.  The media talking amongst themselves is gut churning.  Here's what a Public Radio employee Sarah Spitz said she would do if Rush Limbaugh were having a heart attack.  Call 911?  No:

In a post to the list-serv Journolist, an online meeting place for liberal journalists, Spitz wrote that she would "Laugh loudly like a maniac and watch his eyes bug out" as Limbaugh writhed in torment.

In boasting that she would gleefully watch a man die in front of her eyes, Spitz seemed to shock even herself. "I never knew I had this much hate in me," she wrote. "But he deserves it."

NPR has desperately tried to distance itself from the hatred that Spitz expressed, but the thing I wonder about is how such an unimportant cog in the taxpayer-supported media would be invited to join a fairly small group of Liberal Fascists determined to elect Obama and shut down Fox News.