The electorate who wasn't there.

I don't know if this qualifies as a Freudian slip per se on the part of National Review columnist Byron York, but it's pretty telling nonetheless:

On his 100th day in office, Barack Obama enjoys high job approval ratings, no matter what poll you consult. But if a new survey by the New York Times is accurate, the president and some of his policies are significantly less popular with white Americans than with black Americans, and his sky-high ratings among African-Americans make some of his positions appear a bit more popular overall than they actually are.

Than they actually are. What, pray tell, could that mean? I mean, if African-Americans are people, and those people have opinions, then presumably their opinions matter just as much as everyone else's. But according to York, Obama's actual popularity, his white-people popularity, is actually a bit lower, and those black people -- who are invisible, or holograms, or are maybe just figments of the imagination of some all-powerful being, perhaps Oprah -- are just artificially pumping his numbers up with their non-actual approval.

You hear this from time to time, not just from conservative commentators but also from people in the media who should know better -- the whole "Well, if you take out the black vote" argument, as if black folks were somehow less than human and there's some alternate Earth where black people don't exist, McCain got elected, Bill Clinton never got any higher than governor of Arkansas, and everything is way better than it is here. Unless one of them finds a way to open an interdimensional portal to this alternate reality, though, all of these discussions about taking out the black vote from this thing or that thing seem kind of pointless. They're humans, they're American citizens, they vote just like the rest of us . . . why don't you ever hear anyone say stuff like "Well, Sharpton would've wrecked shop in the 2004 election if it weren't for all those white voters"?

Maybe what we need is a compromise, so that we count the black voters but not to the extent that they can all rush in and skew things the wrong way. What if their votes in elections and polls and whatnot only counted 3/5 worth? Would that make Byron York feel better?

(Hat tip: Mac G on Twitter)