By all measures, Martin Luther King Jr. was a true leader. Barack Obama, on the other hand, is just another politician - one who has demonstrated far more regard for the interests of teacher unions than for the children they are paid to serve, far more regard for the pro-abortion lobby than for the future of the black community, and far less good sense than the average person has when it comes to picking a spiritual mentor.
The positions and values of Senator Obama stand mightily against those espoused, and what's more, practiced, by Martin Luther King Jr. Based on all these considerations, I think it is quite probable that King, were he alive today, would not vote for Barack Obama.
Oy. As Matt Yglesias says, perhaps the National Review should leave the divining of political leanings of slain civil rights leaders to conservative rags that weren't around in the 50s and 60s. You know, the kind that didn't write such racist tripe as Will Herberg's commentary on King's Nobel Peace Prize "'Civil Rights' and Violence: Who Are the Guilty Ones?" . I'm just sayin'...
On a related note, PFAW offers a look back at the way the GOP has tried to continually paint themselves as the non-racists by looking at their origins during the Civil War and ignoring their actions from the 60s forward.
