THE ROBERT W. WHITAKER ARCHIVE

Bill Clinton is far and away the greatest fund-raiser the Democrats have. He could have given the Massachusetts liberal Kerry a big boost by being a visible Southerner.

Bill got heart trouble. Hillary disappeared.

If you spent your life in politics as I did, you tend to be a bit suspicious. If you insist, as I did, that the last thing Bill and Hillary wanted was the election of Kerry and especially of his running-mate John Edwards. I was astonished that the Augusta Chronicle published two of my Op-Eds on this subject.

This astonished me. I lost count of the number of big-time Op-Eds I wrote for others that got published, but nobody publishes one under my name.

For some reason, I'm not considered respectable.

But this one was so unique and so obviously true that the Augusta Chronicle had the guts to publish it under my name. I thank them and I congratulate them. I am surprised they are still in business.

As soon as the election was over, I heard a commentator announce the exact same point. Like so many people who repeat what I said long before, he got credit for a novel and ingenious idea.

My wife used to get terribly upset at this, bless her. But I told her, "My ideas were made to be stolen. That's the only way to get them out."

It is hard for a person who can take criticism to become really nasty or really mean. It is the people who cannot imagine that they are anything but wonderful who get really small and nasty.

If you can look at yourself from the outside there is a limit to how bad you can get. If you assume you are practically perfect in every way there is no limit to how bad you can get.

At the turn of the twentieth century Europeans thought they were wonderful as their sophisticated brilliance led them into World War I.

Europeans in the 1930s thought they were sophisticated and wonderful as their continent divided between Communists and Fascists.

Western Europeans insisted they were brilliant after World War II, when a third of them voted for the silliest kind of democratic socialism, a third of them voted Stalinist and the other third became Catholic theocrats.

In the run-up to the Iraq War, Europeans once again insisted they were being brilliant.

European opinion opposed the Iraq War because they said Americans were awful and low and ignorant and selfish. They said, as usual, that Europeans were True Intellectuals and True Sophisticates and that Western Europeans were the only people who were capable of Generosity and True Compassion.

In other words, Europe went back to the same old crap. But this time some Americans actually noticed how silly they were.

The latest James Bond movie is famous because of its co-star. She is black and she is the girlfriend of the white James Bond.

When they want a white person to do a first in interracial coupling, they do it with an English white person and an American black. The first time a white girl was shown in a romantic scene with a black on American television, the couple was Harry Belafonte and English singer Petula Clark.

James Bond in the person of Roger Moore was the first white man to kiss a black girl in a major movie. As far back as the 1950s every single newspaper had a picture of the queen of England dancing with the black president of newly independent Ghana.

British accents often front for leftists in America.

The media has long had a desperate shortage of liberal radio talk show hosts. They used to have a guy with a British accent who, like a good little Englishman, repeated every conceivable liberal cliché with a perfectly straight face.

Another Englishman, Christopher Hitchens, was the token Marxist on American television. But be made a fortune on Public Television and is becoming too American now in his political opinions. They might have to find another Englishman to front for the nut left in America.

I think the reason for this use of Englishmen for interracial couplings and liberal clichés is that an American who did it would be laughed at. But, for an American, an Englishman is one step removed from reality.

The Queen of England wants anybody in the old British Commonwealth to be able to come to England. A peasant, she says, is a peasant, no matter what "colour" he might be. Anybody who is loyal to the Queen, says the Queen, is as English as anybody else who is loyal to the Queen, and has just as much right to live on that cold little island as someone who was born there. So the Queen is everything because of how she was born. A white Englishman is nothing because of how he is born.

The modern Englishman eats that up.

The English do not discriminate. To be able to tell one thing from another is one meaning of the word "discriminate."

Truly, the trendy Englishman does not discriminate. That makes him the perfect shill for American leftists.

Every year the Democratic Party spends millions to get out the black vote. They assume that one black skin equals one Democratic vote.

Blacks will sometimes give a heavy vote to a Republican when the Republican gets 70% of the rest of the vote. They joined the Eisenhower landslides in 1952 and 1956 and they joined in the last Bush landslide for governor of Texas. That's what makes Republican strategists throw away real votes to "appeal to the black vote."

But when blacks join in the landslide, it doesn't matter. The election would have been won without them.

Blacks never vote Republican when it counts. In every real electoral contest, a black skin means a Democratic vote.