Will Obama's next flip flop be on affirmative action?If liberal Peter Beinart has his way - and if some hints from Obama himself prove to pan out - it may very well be that we will see Obama abandon his long-held belief in race based affirmative action and substitute instead a "class based" model:Obama can't make race go away by ignoring it, especially because the GOP and the media won't. He needs to acknowledge their fears and do something dramatic to assuage them. Paradoxically, his best shot at deracializing the campaign is to explicitly make race an issue. He can do that with a high-profile speech -- and maybe a TV ad -- calling for the replacement of race-based preferences with class-based ones. 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...(Read Full Post)