There is much I disagree with in Peter Beinart’s piece on racial preferences, but he makes one excellent suggestion. He urges Barack Obama to call “for the replacement of race-based preferences with class-based ones.” He explains:

That would confront head-on white fears that an Obama administration would favor minorities at whites’ expense. It would be a sharper, more dramatic, way of making the point that Obama has made ever since he took the national stage (but which some whites still refuse to believe): that he represents not racial division but national unity.

This is smart on multiple levels. First, whenever race-based preferences are put to the test of the ballot box, voters reject them (e.g. the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative, California’s Prop. 209). Again and again Americans have expressed their belief that it is fundamentally wrong to treat citizens differently according to their race. And aside from the Constitutional and fairness concerns, there is now increasingly voluminous literature (see here, for example) that racial preferences do not help the intended beneficiaries. So it would be a smart policy and a popular move.

But more than that, Beinart is on to something fundamentally more important from the perspective of Obama’s candidacy. Obama really hasn’t lived up to his billing as a post-racial candidate. He never satisfactorily explained his long-time association with his hate-mongering preacher. And worse still, he foolishly resorted to playing racial victim with no provocation. His media supporters haven’t helped matters any with wild accusations of implied racism behind every word and snippet of campaign film and the implicit promise that Obama’s critics will forever be labeled as racists. If he is not in fact the captive of the racial victimization industry, there is no better way to demonstrate it than by rejecting racial preferences.

And even beyond race, it would signal for the first time that Obama can stand up to his left-wing base. Other than retreat on Iraq, a strict pro-choice stance and stringent environmentalism, there is probably nothing dearer to the Left than the perpetuation of racial set asides, preferences and the like. If he can stand up to them on this, it bodes well for his ability to truly navigate a new political course for his party and the country as a whole. He can forever put aside the notion that he’s nothing more than a conventional ultra-liberal.

Now it would be another flip-flop. It’s true he cut an appallingly misleading ad in opposition to the Michigan Civil Rights Initiative. It is also true that he excoriated John McCain for favoring a similar measure in Arizona. But really. The man has changed on virtually everything else. He might as well take the plunge on something that really matters.

Will he? I am very doubtful. But I hold out hope.