It's Always Changing, Sometimes For the Better

In this, one of the most racially and culturally homogenous states, the only uninteresting thing about Love is that she is black. This is not just progress; it is the destination toward which progress was directed during the brisk march to today’s healthy indifference to the fact that Love would be the first black Republican woman ever in the House. Some “stalemate.”

In March 2008, in the speech ostensibly explaining the inexplicable — his 20 years in the pews of the raving Rev. Jeremiah Wright — candidate Barack Obama referred to “a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years.” Hardly.

He was then eight months from winning 43 percent of the white vote — two points more than John Kerry won four years earlier. Obama carried three states — three more than Kerry — of the Confederacy (Florida, Virginia and North Carolina). In states outside the South, Obama received substantially more white votes than any Democratic candidate since Lyndon Johnson in 1964 — more than Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Jimmy Carter, Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton or Al Gore. This is part of the “racial stalemate” in which Mississippi has more black elected officials — not more relative to population; more — than any other state.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/george-will-utahs-mia-love-and-the-myth-of-the-racial-stalemate/2012/09/21/a41da834-0348-11e2-8102-ebee9c66e190_story.html