How You Gonna Keep 'Em Down on the Farm?

From the indispensable Charles Krauthammer:

Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. ... It took a president to get it done. — Hillary Clinton, Jan. 7

So she said. And then a fight broke out. That remarkable eruption of racial sensitivities and racial charges lacked coherence, however, because the public argument was about history rather than what was truly offensive — the implied analogy to today.

[SNIP]

Forty years ago, that arrangement — white president enacting African-American dreams — was necessary because discrimination denied blacks their own autonomous political options. Today, that arrangement — white liberals acting as tribune for blacks in return for their political loyalty — is a demeaning anachronism. That's what the fury at Hillary was all about, although no one was willing to say so explicitly.

The King-Johnson analogy is dead because the times are radically different. Today an African-American can be in a position to wield the emancipation pen — and everything else that goes along with the presidency: from making foreign policy to renting out the Lincoln Bedroom (if one is so inclined). Why should African-American dreams still have to go through white liberals?