Whose Votes Count?

Today's wingnut freakout is over the President of the United States daring to encourage the black people, brown people, red people, yellow people, female people and young people who helped elect him last year to stay involved and vote again this year.

Do you see it? Look closer. Yes, that's it: that Kenyan Usurper Hates White Men. Impeach him!

This is the most blatant manifestation to date of a phenomenon Digby has been documenting for months. From March:

Amanda Marcotte makes an important observation about all this, as it relates to my earlier post about the right's seeming inability to accept the idea of democracy. This is correct:

Well, it’s simple, really. They assume, if they don’t state it outright, that large numbers of American voters shouldn’t have the right to vote. That’s the implicit argument when Sarah Palin praises white rural voters as “Real Americans”, when Birthers obsess over the idea that the first black President simply can’t be eligible for office, when tea baggers yell racist and homophobic slurs at politicians, and when they insist that you eliminate black voters from the count if you want to find out how popular a politician “really” is. When Bart Stupak laughed out loud at the very idea that nuns have opinions worth listening to---and listed a bunch of men whose opinions were the ones that counted---you had a similar sentiment being expressed. Universal suffrage seems like a fundamental part of democracy to liberals, but it appears that conservatives think it de-legitimizes the results of elections. And that if you do something without Republicans on board, you’re eliminating those who represent the only people who count.

These people believe they represent a majority and they do: of white people. Obama only has a 35% approval rating among whites, (which is down from the 42% of whites that helped elect him.) If you have white supremacist tendencies, you're going to believe that he isn't representing a majority of Real Americans.

Indeed, it explains why Democratic presidents in general can't ever be legitimate. They are, after all, always elected with the support of African Americans, Hispanics and feminist women. That wasn't what the founders intended, now was it?

Read Amanda's whole piece. She's answered this riddle.

That's why Dems are wasting our time trying to demonstrate to the repugs that nonwhite voters are properly registered and resident citizens who meet the voting requirements. The repugs don't care about documentation - the fact that those people are not white means they're not legitimate voters.