There were three interesting developments within the past couple weeks that, taken together, cast some light on the intersection of race and politics in America.First came news reports predicting that the number of children born to minority parents will surpass the number born to white parents within the next two years. If so, whites will become a minority of the American population even sooner than originally thought.Second came a column by Frank Rich in The New York Times arguing that opposition to Obamacare flowed from the racial insecurities produced by such trends. He declared that whites are “a dwindling and threatened minority” whose “anxieties about a rapidly changing America” have been brought to the surface by a black president.Third was a Gallup Poll showing that more people disapproved than approved of Barack Obama. The overall decline in his approval rating from more than 70 percent a year ago to 46 percent is virtually unprecedented for a president so early in his term.What tied these three developments together was an article in the Weekly Standard magazine by senior writer Jonathan Last. Dissecting Obama’s sinking poll numbers, Last found a remarkable incongruity-that although he had lost ground with every other demographic group, the president was more popular than ever with black voters.With a Rasmussen survey showing his approval among blacks at 96 percent, it is possible that the creature most difficult to find in Americanpolitics is a black man or woman opposed to Obama. It doesn’t take much dicing of the numbers to realize that if his overall numbers have tanked while his support among blacks has actually gone up, his support among the majority white population has largely evaporated. There is an increasing scarcity outside the ranks of the “chattering classes” of white Democrats-the media, academe, Hollywood-most especially white males.The Democratic Party is becoming ever more the party of American minorities while the Republican Party is, more than ever, the party of white America. There is a reason, then, why there are so few black or Hispanic faces at tea-party rallies. The problem is that it isn’t the reason that Rich and other liberal race-mongers suggest. Indeed, any theory positing race as an explanation for opposition to Obama founders on the fact that he only became president in the first place because of substantial white support.While blacks obviously support him because he is black, minorities in general have long supported the Democratic Party because it is the party of government and minorities, disproportionately located near the lower ends of the socio-economic ladder, are disproportionately dependent upon government. They share the collectivist, welfare-state vision of Obama because they are net recipients from rather than contributors to welfare state programs.In marked contrast, middle-class whites suspect that they are the ones who will end up paying for Obama’s governmental largesse. They believe that they put more into the public treasury than they get out, and that this disadvantageous ratio is likely to shift even more against them in the future as Obama’s goal of growing government continues.It isn’t racism, but ideology and the differing views of the role of government that ideology produces that is at play here. America is a center-right nation because it has an increasingly right-leaning if demographically dwindling white majority. Conversely, the most loyal component of the Democratic coalition is blacks because blacks are both the most left-leaning group in American politics and the group most dependent upon the welfare state.America is sharply divided politically on the basis of race, but it is the different ideological leanings of the different races, not their pigmentation per se, that has produced this. How strange that the man whom many voted for because they wished to “transcend” America’s racial divide has in some ways made it worse, not because he is black but because he has chosen to govern from the radical left.