Race

The polling gurus are finding that millions of the white men who helped put Barack Obama in the White House are leaving the Democrats in great numbers, and this could lead to really bad news in November. Gallup finds that white male support for a Democratic Congress has fallen 8 percentage points since last summer, while the support of women has remained remarkably steady. White women who voted for Mr. Obama continue to support him, but only 38 percent of white men support him now. Unless the president and his party find a way to reverse this trend they must prepare for an epic bath nine months hence.

Accomplishing such a turnaround would require first of all for Democrats to pipe down about what a tough life they have. Life is real, often hard, and, as Damon Runyon famously said to a whiner at the poker table, "three out of three people die, so shut up and deal." Democrats in Congress who got their way in the health-care "reform" debate are frightened now that the people they abused are angry and determined to do something about it. With the help of the compliant mainstream media, so called, they have created the spectre of a tsunami of hate, bigotry, racism, slander, rock-throwing, spitting, irritable bowel syndrome and seven-year itch. Sarah Palin has got the Democrats particularly spooked.

Everyone with a pulse and a working lung knows the "facts" by now, even if some of the facts are mere factoids, as Norman Mailer famously described assertions that "seem to be facts, are taken as facts, but in fact are not facts." A (white) neighbor called the police when she saw two men she thought might be breaking into the professor's house, a police sergeant arrived and got into an argument with the professor when he tried to find out what was going on and the argument grew to a public entertainment for a growing crowd of neighbors watching from the street. The professor was black, the cop was white, and alas, that's all it takes to get something started in America, circa 2009.

But what seems to be about race isn't always about color. Mr. Gates accused the cops of asking impertinent questions simply because he's black (or "African-American," in the current fashion). President Obama agreed. In the endless retelling of the tale, the white neighbor who called the cops told the police dispatcher that "two black guys" were trying to break into the Gates abode. A review of the police 911 tape revealed Monday that the caller actually told the dispatcher that "two gentlemen" were trying to get into the door; she subsequently referred to one of them as a "gentleman" and to both of them as "individuals." Nothing about color.

Hundreds, perhaps thousands, of oppressed people are no doubt eager to line up for their apology, waiting to be rewarded for slights real and imaginary, ranging from inability to find a parking space to ancient indignities suffered by long-forgotten ancestors. Everybody likes buttered bread, and it's even better with a little jelly on it.

Some appeals are more legitimate than others. Congress is considering a resolution thanking the slaves, most of them dead and gone beyond the reach of Congress since late in the 19th century, for their work on building the Capitol. There will be a plaque to be put up somewhere. This is only right; every workman, the Bible tells us, is worthy of his hire. But a resolution apologizing for "the peculiar institution" is threatened by the Senate's insistence that an apology must exclude anything about reparations for descendants of slaves.