Hillary Clinton's "plantation" pandering

Shelby Steele with the Hoover Institute has an excellent piece in the WSJournal today titled Hillary's Plantation. It outlines how the pandering to black audiences by Democrats is an approach based a grievance attitude that many blacks have. As Steele puts it the panderer always identifies with the suffering of those pandered to--always "feels their pain". The appeal is to the feeling of entitlement for the pain and suffering of their ancestry. Hillary's "plantation" example is a shameless example if, like me, you believe in the undertone of Steele's message. As I have said before in many blog postings, this is what the black leaders promote and feed on. The black leaders, and the stumping Democrats, need the black community to feel grievance, to feel they have been wronged and are entitled to special help. So Hillary and Al Sharpton benefit from black grievance and are happy to promote a wrong done hundreds of years ago as if its effect are fresh in the black community today.

Steele then outlines why Republicans can't pander in this way to the mostly Democrat black voter block as it's counter to big government and entitlement programs. Instead Republicans, who don't benefit from the outdated grievance attitude, embrace the achievement of minorities. Condi Rice is an example Steele says strikes fear in Democrats for if blacks can see opportunity for themselves in her success through hard work they loose. This is why the MSM pays less attention to Rice then they might normally pay to the Secretary of State. This is also why you see the disparaging cartoons and comments about Rice. She brakes the stereotype that the black and Democrat leadership need to keep the defeated blacks under there thumb.