I’m getting a lot of predictably angry email about my column today. Lots of people say I’m naive, un-conservative, a suck-up, blah, blah, blah. I think the vast majority of this stuff is knee-jerk silliness that is almost entirely unresponsive to what I actually wrote in my column. Meanwhile, my friend Michelle Malkin also takes great exception to the column. I was just on Mike Gallagher’s show and he played a clip of her objecting to it.

I think she’s over-reading what I wrote. I do not believe that Obama will usher in a post-racial America, and I do not believe I said that. Also, Michelle takes particular exception to this bit from the column:

Conservatives who try too hard to belittle the importance of this milestone are mistaken on several fronts. First, this is simply a wonderful—and wonderfully American—story. Any political movement that is joyless about what this represents risks succumbing to bitter political crankery.

She says something like “well then call me a crank then.” I won’t do that. But I will say that I think she misses my point.

Of course the hype from the left about Obama and the significance of his race has been over-the-top. But that doesn’t mean that the majority of the country isn’t rightly proud of the fact that we’ve just elected the first black president. Acknowledging and participating in that pride and joy is not a sign of intellectual capitulation, it’s a recognition that conservatives are part of the American mainstream too. You would think by now, after the lessons of Reagan’s success and conservatism’s various post- and pre-Reagan failures, that more of us would recognize the importance of being joyful about America.

In my mailbox, I’ve yet to see a really thoughtful critique of the column that responds to what I wrote, rather than what some imagine I wrote. But let me just say that the idea that every partisan victory for the other side must be seen as a zero-sum loss for ours, or vice versa, is not well supported by history. Liberals opposed Reagan’s foreign policy, welfare reform and tough-on-crime policies, but the success of those efforts made voters willing to risk putting Democrats in office again. Obama’s election was a serious defeat for conservatives, but that doesn’t mean his race can’t be a silver lining.

No where in my column do I say — as Mike Gallagher somewhat jokingly put it — that racial quotas and the rest will disappear tomorrow. But I do think I’m right that Obama’s election makes the race issue less relevant in American life in ways not entirely helpful to racial liberals. The average American — according to countless polls — does not like racial quotas. Indeed, I think the average black American doesn’t either. These policies endure in part because racial liberals successfully argue that racism is still a burning issue in America. Well, doesn’t that argument become more difficult to make when the President of the United States is black? I’m not saying activists — or even Obama himself – won’t continue to make very liberal arguments about systematic racism in America. What I am saying is that I think Obama, simply by being president, makes such arguments less, not more, persuasive.