Who's Really Smiling?

The woman above most likely to be genuinely smiling is the one who pays the least attention to race. Hint: She was raised an Alabama sharecropper's daughter.

Got it?

Nexis tells me there have been a couple hundred newspaper articles in the last few days on Hillary's "plantation" gaffe, mostly featuring political columnists sweating hard to say something original. I think I've found the one worth reading: Shelby Steele's piece in today's Opinion Journal.

Steel succeeds by contrasting Clinton with Rice -- "It is impossible to imagine Hillary Clinton's 'plantation' pandering in a room full of Condi Rices" --and in the process, he deconstructs the Democratic party.

The black vote, Steele points out, is what gives the Dems their block. In politics, a solid hold on a significant block is all you need to fill up your side of the aisle, and the Dems have been exploiting this advantage for decades. Steele thinks it now puts the Dems at risk:

But this Republican "weakness" has now begun to emerge as a great--if still largely potential--Republican advantage. Precisely because Republicans cannot easily pander to black grievance, they have no need to value blacks only for their sense of grievance. Unlike Democrats, they can celebrate what is positive and constructive in minority life without losing power. The dilemma for Democrats, liberals and the civil rights establishment is that they become redundant and lose power the instant blacks move beyond grievance and begin to succeed by dint of their own hard work. So they persecute such blacks, attack their credibility as blacks, just as they pander to blacks who define their political relationship to America through grievance. Republicans are generally freer of the political bigotry by which the left either panders to or persecutes black Americans.

And that, Steele points out, is exactly why so many are hoping for a Clinton/Rice race in 2008. The Dems, who need so badly to keep blacks mired down in victimhood, would have to slander Rice to appeal to that section of their base, but doing so would alienate them from anyone who appreciates the American dream realized.

What a nightmare!

Update: Guess who's topping Right Wing News' mod-right blogger poll of most desirable GOP presidential candidates for 2008?

h/t memeorandum