Last Night's Obama Victories

Posted Sun, 02/10/2008 - 08:22 by carol white
Well, I for one was pleased to see Obama have such a sweeping victory yesterday. Perhaps its a case of the devil I don't know as opposed to the Clintons who in my opinion planted the seeds of the present policy and economic debacle. PLEASE DON'T GET ME WRONG the Democrats including of course the Clintons live in a different universe than the Bush Administration. I would vote for Bill, for Hillary. for anyone on the Democratic ticket this election. But I am voting for Obama in next Tuesday's VA primary. I think that much of our disquiet about Obama is based on the things he is not saying. The things that John Edwards said so eloquently. However I do not think we should ignore his ability to organize an actual--as opposed to virtual--movement of enthusiastic supporters. These are the folks whom Howard Dean and Move-On tapped into in the 2004 elections but now they are showing up in person to do the on-the-ground campaigning it takes to ensure victory in the next election and to turn out new voters. IMO this is an essential ingredient of an effective progressive movement. I think that one reason that Obama is not making the same programmatic pitch that John Edwards did is in fact the race factor. If he comes on strong with a "class struggle" message he will be vulnerable to the kind of innuendo that made Bill Clinton's reference to Jesse Jackson so ugly. David Sirota wrote a commentary on this, The Democrats' Class War that argues persuasively about the problem faced by Obama in navigating his campaign.
But while this pressure to keep quiet affects all politicians, it is especially intense against black leaders. "If Obama started talking like John Edwards and tapped into working-class, blue-collar proletarian rage, suddenly all of those white voters who are viewing him within the lens of transcendence would start seeing him differently," says Charles Ellison of the University of Denver's Center for African American Policy. That's because once Obama parroted Edwards' attacks on greed and inequality, he would "be stigmatized as a candidate mobilizing race," says Manning Marable, a Columbia University history professor. That is, the media would immediately portray him as another Jesse Jackson — a figure whose progressivism has been (unfairly) depicted as racial politics anathema to white swing voters. Remember, this is always how power-challenging African-Americans are marginalized. The establishment cites a black leader's race- and class-unifying populism as supposed proof of his or her radical, race-centric views. An extreme example of this came from the FBI, which labeled Martin Luther King Jr. "the most dangerous man in America" for talking about poverty. More typical is the attitude exemplified by Joe Klein's 2006 Time magazine column. He called progressive Rep. John Conyers, D-Mich., "an African American of a certain age and ideology, easily stereotyped" and "one of the ancient band of left-liberals who grew up in the angry hothouse of inner-city, racial-preference politics." The Clintons are only too happy to navigate this ugly cultural topography. After a rare Obama attack on Hillary Clinton for supporting policies that eliminated jobs, Bill Clinton quickly likened Obama's campaign to Jackson's, and the Clinton campaign told the Associated Press Obama was "the black candidate." These were deliberate statements telling Obama that if he talks about class, they'll talk about race.

Comments

New Yorker article on Cory Booker, Mayor of Newark

by cho - 02/10/2008 - 08:54
by Peter Boyer in the February 4th issueThe Color of Politics profiles a young politician who decided to actually try to fix things, instead of just talk about it. Interesting discussion; unfortunately, the entire article is no longer online. Key quote from the print article:
When the racial tumults came, Sharif saw mostly futility and kept his distance. "You had all the new people who were talking revolution," he told me recently. "After all the philosophy and chatter and talking, and the brilliant speechmaking, and all the rest, none of those people who did all that were able to come here, infuse any resources, make the circumstances better for the people who were living on the ground. They talked about it. They said brilliant things about it. But they didn't open a single storefront. They didn't create a single job. They didn't do any of the things that needed to be done."

Another nice quote about Booker

by cho - 02/10/2008 - 08:56
..Booker renounced what he called the "old paradigm" of big-city mayors who used race-based machines to dole out entitlements, and thus maintain power. Booker counted himself as part of a new paradigm -- "quick thinkers, people who are trying to make their governments engines of economic opportunity and judge them not by how many jobs they can provide but by how much wealth they can create and how efficiently they can deliver services withint their own city."

Have you followed DC's Mayor Fenty

by carol white - 02/10/2008 - 10:01
I haven't except for hearing an interesting interview of him on NPR radio a month or so ago. He as discussion plans to revive some of the Districts most down-at-the-heels neighborhoods and his plans seemed to include affordable new housing for people currently living there. He sounded interesting and perhaps another example of a new brand of black public officials.
carol

The key quote from Sirota's piece for me is

by standingup - 02/10/2008 - 11:04
As the campaign heads to the struggling Rust Belt under banners promising "change," this bizarre class war may end up guaranteeing no real transformation at all.
I can't begin to tell you how utterly disappointed I am with the blogs, netroots and even the so called new media. They have failed us miserably by abandoning the work we have done over the last 4,5 or 6 years. Where is the criticism of the media for their bias in the coverage of the candidates? Where is the digging down beyond the surface to see what moneyed interests are supporting which candidates? Where is the critique of the candidates policies when they fall short of the policies that the grassroots have been pushing to get for years? It's as if the work of the last 4 - 6 years can be erased because there is finally a candidate that speaks to them, inspires them and gives them hope.

Did you see the Peggy Noonan dreck in the WSJ yesterday?

by cho - 02/10/2008 - 11:34
Can Mrs. Clinton Lose? Ms. Noonan seems to think that Obama is "bullet proof" and that the sainted republicans would never go after him:
The biggest problem for the Republicans will be that no matter what they say that is not issue oriented--"He's too young, he's never run anything, he's not fully baked"--the mainstream media will tag them as dealing in racial overtones, or undertones. You can bet on this. Go to the bank on it. The Democrats continue not to recognize what they have in this guy. Believe me, Republican professionals know. They can tell.
Forgive me my skepticism, Ms. Noonan, but the swiftboaters do come immediately to mind. Willie Horton comes to mind. I don't doubt for a moment that the Republican dirty tricks folks who brought you phone jamming in New Hampshire, mob shut down of vote recounts in Florida, or secret vote counts in Ohio because of "terrorist threats" will hold back from attacking Obama after the Democratic National Convention -- see Swiftboat and Tang memos for refreshers. Oh, and for the record, if Ms. Noonan is trying to give democrats advice -- they'd better check the sheepskin to make sure that the wolf underneath isn't snarling with glee and laughing again at the suckers who buy salvation from the repo man.

Noonan

by standingup - 02/10/2008 - 12:31
has really been pushing the meme that Republicans are afraid of Obama. For me, that says it all. Of course, I have seen posts on liberal blogs that quote her as if she is speaking the truth without question. Was I just dreaming the last four years instead of researching and learning how the Republican noise machine works?

What if Obama is the candidate and the racists are unleashed

by carol white - 02/10/2008 - 12:45
Maybe we would be better off after a hard fought battle against racism even if we lost it than capitulating to our fear of racism in advance and putting forward a candiate like Clinton who appears to be cynically willing to use the race card herself. We are not going to build a progressive movement without fight hard and bitter battles. There will always be setbacks but I think it is uncontestable that the Civil Right's Movement achieved significant victories that are not nullified by the continued reality of racism today.
carol

I think we are probably polar opposites

by standingup - 02/10/2008 - 14:47
I prefer to let the people choose the candidate based on the candidate and rather than by the voters being manipulated by the pundits, media and opinion columnist. I think Bill Press hit the nail on the head:
But, of course, this isn't the first sign of media bias, intended or unintended. What's most disturbing about Shuster's pimp remark is that it reinforces the impression of media bias in this campaign. It began with the networks' deciding which candidates were serious and which were not -- and therefore ignoring qualified contenders like Joe Biden or Ron Paul. It continued with the media's admitted infatuation with John McCain and Barack Obama. It culminated with the media's declaring open season on the Clintons. In contrast to fawning reports about Obama crowds, every story about the Clinton campaign is sprinkled with snide, critical, even crude, comments about Hillary or Bill. Now not even Chelsea is spared. Enough's enough. The media's role is to report on the primaries, not decide the primaries. No candidate deserves favorable treatment. The media should treat all of them equally badly. That's their job. And there's a big difference between their job and ours. To bend a phrase: "They report. We decide."
Maybe this race is a moratorium about race but I would really prefer we choose the candidate that will be the best for the country. And I have to say, although there have been comments that should not have been made about race, do you honestly believe they have hurt Obama's campaign? Personally, I saw a lot of spinning from Obama's camp that was just as disturbing to me. What about the way the creeping sexism in the primary? Do we give Obama a pass for that? No comment about Obama being cynically willing to use the gender card? Can't we get to a point where we hold both campaigns to the same standards and tell the press we have had enough of them not doing their job? The last thing I want is another fiasco repeated in the White House like we are hoping to end on January 20, 2009.

Surely not

by carol white - 02/10/2008 - 17:19
We both agree on the main point which is we must have a Democratic victory. I do not think the media should shape the debate but I also do think that the eight years that Bill Clinton was president gave us many of the problems we now face.
carol

A Frank Rich in today's New York Times analyses the Clintons

by carol white - 02/10/2008 - 12:27
He focuses on their use of the race card--attempting to gather Hispanic support by appealing to them as a separate constituency, sees this as a worrying harbinger of the lengths to which they might be willing to go if she looses the delegate vote. Next Up for the Democrats: Civil War
But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.” It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.” ... But the wholesale substitution of Hispanics for blacks on the Hallmark show is tainted by a creepy racial back story. Last month a Hispanic pollster employed by the Clinton campaign pitted the two groups against each other by telling The New Yorker that Hispanic voters have “not shown a lot of willingness or affinity to support black candidates.” Mrs. Clinton then seconded the motion by telling Tim Russert in a debate that her pollster was “making a historical statement.” It wasn’t an accurate statement, historical or otherwise. It was a lie, and a bigoted lie at that, given that it branded Hispanics, a group as heterogeneous as any other, as monolithic racists. As the columnist Gregory Rodriguez pointed out in The Los Angeles Times, all three black members of Congress in that city won in heavily Latino districts; black mayors as various as David Dinkins in New York in the 1980s and Ron Kirk in Dallas in the 1990s received more than 70 percent of the Hispanic vote. The real point of the Clinton campaign’s decision to sow misinformation and racial division, Mr. Rodriguez concluded, was to “undermine one of Obama’s central selling points, that he can build bridges and unite Americans of all types.” race-tinged brawl at the convention, some nine weeks before Election Day, will not be a Hallmark moment. As Mr. Wilkins reiterated to me last week, it will be a flashback to the Democratic civil war of 1968, a suicide for the party no matter which victor ends up holding the rancid spoils.
I recently came on The Politics of Freedom by David Boaz, in which he is touting for a bi-partisan third party campaign--Bllomberg/Lieberman ticket perhaps. What was really interesting is his admission that he is presently a consultant to Mayor Bloomberg while his erstwhile partner Mark Penn is a heavyweight in the Clinton campaign.I thought that that might be the basis for an interesting article or review. Certainly the Clinton's seem to have adopted many of Rove's tactics. But what purpose would such an article or book review serve right now?
carol

Lots of Evidence

by D E Ford - 02/10/2008 - 13:16
There is truth to the assertion that the two groups are at odds. In LA prisons, gangs are arranged along racial lines and the Hispanic and black gangs are murderous toward one another. Farrakhan has gone on record to say that Hispanics bleed off resources that he feels should go to blacks and has gone so far to say that deportation is just the ticket. This is ultimately more economic than racial but it does fall along racial lines with many. I think the Republicans are overjoyed at the prospect of running against Obama because the distrust ingrained in both blacks and whites since the days of slavery will rear its head, making dialogue impossible and raising many fears--real or imagined. They know this and plan on exploiting it. Since the number one leadership trait in national politics is that the leader will protect the country from the risk of internal and external disintegration, they will play upon the distrust and the latent images of Afrophobia. The one image that keeps recurring in popular media lately is of the uprising in Kenya with the image, recently shown by McClatchy, of the man in the burning vehicle with the upraised machete and the maniacal grin on his face while ,in the background, others wielding machetes are running amok. Interestingly, last night a man in South Charlotte was attacked by a black man with a machete. He came staggering out of his home with his face split in two. Recurring images have a tremendous impact upon the conscious and unconscious psyche. And don't forget that Obama is half Kenyan. The GOP won't. They will play up the drug use, the parentage issues, the Afrocentric church and all of the other issues that contribute to racial distrust. There is much that we do not understand about cultural differences between the white community and the black community--especially how deep African American distrust is of whites and why. It often seems that blacks have two sets of rules with special dispensations for themselves--which is exactly how blacks view whites sense of entitlement. There is much to exploit that lurks below the surface of polite society. The GOP is just lying low--why wouldn't they?

What about Condaleeza Rice and Colin Powell

by carol white - 02/10/2008 - 13:49
They managed to function without race deterring them--their problem was their politics. I think that had Edwards been running a fear of a racist backlash would be something I would consider, but now it is a race between Clinton and Obama. I think the way to defeat Republican efforts to stir up racism is for those of us pale-faces to be very present and vocal in opposing such tactics. Obama can only win the majority of delegates with WHITE SUPPORT. States like Massachusetts that went for Clinton will surely support Obama should he be the candidate. Younger Americans carry around much less racist baggages than their parents or grandparents. And hey, many of us boomer and older were around during the glory days of the civil rights movement. It is pretty exciting to see a black candidate for President of the stature of Obama, poised to become the candidate. That's something that couldn't have happened in Martin Luther Kings day.
carol

He as discussion plans to

by Cristiano - 09/11/2008 - 15:37
He as discussion plans to revive some of the Districts most down-at-the-heels neighborhoods and his plans seemed to include affordable new housing for people currently living there. He sounded interesting and perhaps another example of a new brand of black public officials.

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