Policy more important than color

As a white male on a diversity-crazy campus, I often find myself being lectured to about diversity by some mindless Russell House bureaucrat. They constantly remind me about slavery, Jim Crow and a whole lot of other things that I didn't do and I wasn't around to witness.

After examining the polling data done by many news organizations during the current election cycle, I began to see a pattern developing among voting demographics. Above 90 percent of blacks plan to vote for Barrack Obama, while the white vote was much more diverse, with an almost even split. Which leads to the million-dollar question, why doesn't the black community have more diversity in their vote and when is someone going to give them a lecture? Today, when political correctness reins supreme, white people can be openly criticized. But if you do the same for the black community, you know what's going to follow - someone chasing you down telling you that you need to take a cultural awareness or racial sensitivity class.

But let's really dive into this Election 2008 voting issue and see what both candidates have to offer. John McCain offers a tax policy which rewards success by offering tax breaks to small businesses. Small businesses create most of the jobs in this country. In fact, in these troubling economic times, small businesses are the only group of the economy that has created jobs this year. Companies with 50 or more employees have posted net job losses for six straight months. So, if I was a college student thinking about starting a small business, the obvious choice would be McCain.

Now lets say you're a student who wants to own a home one day and are troubled by the recent financial woes of government-backed mortgage lenders Freddy Mac and Fanny Mae. If you look at the money senators between 1998 and 2008 have taken, most of it comes from the two companies. Sen. Obama ranks second among elected officials on that list. I am not sure I would really trust Sen. Obama to properly manage this housing problem when he has been taking money from two companies that just created a huge taxpayer burden via the government bailout.

Lastly, if I am a student with a car and I am worried about the cost of commuting to work or school and I realize that the oil off the coast of California could be tapped in less than two years, I would wonder which candidate wants to tap it. Well, Sen. McCain supports offshore drilling while Obama and the Democrats are more concerned about protecting the walrus than the blue collared workers and students.

Black students have a right to be proud of how far our country has come from the days of sitting on the back of the bus to having someone from their community possibly being our next president. It says volumes about how far this country has come. But I would urge these same students to examine the men not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.