EXTORTION

Posted at 8:37 a.m. ET

We've written before at Urgent Agenda about the possibility of a kind of extortion in this campaign:  Voters would be told there'd be some type of "trouble" unless Obama were elected.   Well, we're starting to see it, as The NewYork Sun reports:

LONDON — Are American voters susceptible to blackmail? Ever since Sarah Palin lifted John McCain's campaign, it is becoming increasingly clear that America will be branded racist if Europe does not wake up on November 5 to find that Barack Obama has been elected.

Here is what Jonathan Freedland of the Guardian had to say last week: "If [the election] is deemed to have been about race — that Obama was rejected because of his colour — the world's verdict will be harsh."

I wonder who decides if it was about race.  Is there something like the Nobel Prize committee?

Now both American democracy and American capitalism are on trial in the court of European public opinion. And the only plea that the court will accept from America is: guilty.

Well, I'm sure they wouldn't want convicted felons participating in their defense, so why don't we bring those troops home?

Europeans find American culture wars at once fascinating and appalling. But their view of the debate is filtered through the liberal press: CNN and the other networks, the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the Washington Post, and the Huffington Post.

No wonder they think we're guilty.

I'm not shocked at this, for it was bound to happen.  It will probably get worse.  Last week a distinguished black law professor wondered, in the pages of the Washington Post, how blacks would react to an Obama defeat.  In fairness, it was a dignified and restrained article.  But the idea that voters should worry about how others might "react" if Obama loses is offensive to the very idea of democracy.  Will there be some implication of violence?  Of social upheaval?

This could be a Sister Souljah moment for Obama.  He should publicly, and dramatically, denounce any hint of extortion, and name the perpetrators if he has to.

September 18, 2008.