“Operation Vote will function as a large, centralized department in the Chicago campaign office for reaching ethnic, religious and other voter groups. It will coordinate recruitment of an ethnic volunteer base and push out targeted messages online and through the media to different groups, such as blacks, Hispanics, Jews, women, seniors, young people, gays and Asian Americans.”
“Now even as we speak, there are those who are preparing to divide us, the spin masters and negative ad peddlers who embrace the politics of anything goes.
“Well, I say to them tonight, there’s not a liberal America and a conservative America; there’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.”
That was state Sen. Barack Obama in his keynote address to the 2004 Democratic convention. His rejection of tribal politics, his stirring call to national unity, vaulted him into the Senate and was the first step on the path that took him to the White House.
Well, that was then, but now is now.
According to The Washington Post, Obama’s 2012 campaign is today busily subdividing the nation into racial, ethnic and religious enclaves for targeted appeals to find a “narrow path to victory.”
Setting one tribe against another, one faction against another, divide and conquer, is among the oldest tactics of politics and war.
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