Barack Obama as David Dinkins? And 2012 as 1968?

I'm taking this from a post I wrote back in early 2008....a New York Times editorial endorsement:

"What no one disputes is his most evident characteristic. America knows Barack Obama to be, above all, a conciliator. His instinct is to unify. This decency can help the country confront its biggest forseeable problems: a sagging economy and tension between the races. The two go together. Mr. Obama seems better qualified to persuade all Americans to share the burdens ahead. That's also true for another reason: race. Mr. Obama would be America's first black president - a fact likely to instill a sense of pride and participation by blacks and other minority groups."

Well, almost..  Swap out "Barack Obama" and "President", insert "David Dinkins" and "Mayor", and you have the verbatim endorsement the Times gave Clueless Dave back on October 29th, 1989.

How did things work out?  Same link:

Delicately, ever so delicately, The Times made a point that was widely held that fall: that Dinkins would lower the crime rate because disempowered blacks would feel a sense of belonging.
Instead, Dinkins' election fired the starting gun for a racial free-for-all and the four worst years, murder-wise, in the city's history. It was Latinos vs. whites in Washington Heights (1992), blacks vs. Koreans in a heated grocery-store dispute (1990) and, in Crown Heights, four nights of unchecked rioting by blacks against Hasidic Jews (1991).

No, we have't seen race riots yet, but we have seen a lawless "Occupation" that most Democrats support and that liberal mayors seem loathe to stop. An "Occupation" that is rife with antisemitism, mind you. Could we see Crown Heights redux?

Mickey Kaus goes stream of consciousnesses:

Was Occupy Wall Street on the verge of Dinkinsizing Obama? After all, one social malady Obama hasn’t had to contend with, until now, has been a rising crime rate or, more broadly, a general sense of things spinning out of control in cities–something that is almost invariably toxic for incumbents (ask David Dinkins and Jimmy Carter, or Bill Clinton in 1994**). But now Occupy Wall Street has provided at least a whiff of authentic 1960s semi-anarchy, and the Democrats’ attitude toward the protests has been generally supportive (or “permissive”). I remember the President who got elected in 1968. Not a Democrat. …

One Richard Milhouse Nixon, if I recollect. The scourge of the left, of the universities, and of the media.  A man mocked & parodied by the Hollywood elite, and deemed un-electable by the cognoscenti.

History is going to repeat itself, although I am not altogether sure who will play the role of Nixon this time.  What I am sure of, though, is we can thank Occupy Wall Street, and the dumb-as-dirt Democrats who couldn't wait to throw their support behind them, for making it all happen...