Devil's Advocate Division

The Fire This Time: The GOP’s Line of Attack on Obama

2009-02-04T10:28:00.000-08:00

Watching the process of the stimulus package that’s being proposed by President Obama and the Republican Party’s reaction to it, it would seem that Mr. Obama didn’t win last year’s election.

The president wants to play nice for the benefit of the country. He campaigned on going beyond partisan politics, which made him an attractive figure to the general electorate. The stimulus package has yet to be passed and no doubt there will be elements of it stripped in order to ensure bipartisan approval.

However, with the collection of Tom Daschle’s scalp on the GOP’s trophy wall, one can delineated the GOP’s general line of opposition to Obama, and it will certainly be obstructionism by another name (as in wrecking the stimulus package to prevent healthcare reform). Granted, the Daschle debacle was of the Obama administration own making, and Mr. Obama manned up to it, something that the previous occupant of the White House would never do. Remember, Republicans don’t make mistakes, which is why they’re in control of the White House and the two chambers of Congress today.

However, in the search for bipartisan comity by nominating Sen. Judd Gregg (R-NH) as Commerce Secretary, Mr. Gregg, as reported by TPM, said that he would "recuse himself from congressional votes while his nomination is considered -- a setback for the Dems' attempts to pass Obama's stimulus with the help of at least one Republican."

So, Mr. Obama's gets a GOP member of his administration but not a GOP vote on his major stimulus package?
The GOP’s game plan, however, is simply based on a plan that they are tactically suited for: engage in death by a thousand cuts by issuing forth a stream of propaganda and misinformation about Obama’s agenda. If one watches TV you’ll probably see more GOP representatives, senators, policy wonks, and conservatives pundits who are against the stimulus package than those who are for it. Most people have probably heard of the bad things about the bill, which according to some people only amounts to less than 2 percent of the entire spending package.

What this means is that the GOP noise machine still dominates the nation’s political narrative, and the MSM has a tendency to follow its leads and pulls it punches when it comes to engaging conservatives more so than liberals or progressives.

Also, as noted by Glenn Greenwald, a second line of attack, a “discredition” process, if you will, is the neo-conservative argument that Obama is engaging in defense “cuts” despite an actual eight percent increase in proposed spending for DOD’s 2010 budget. Couple that scary scenario with Dick Cheney ominously warning about future terrorist attacks if Obama changes any of the Bush administration’s tactics in handling the so-called war on terrorism.

In short, the Republican Party’s road back to the White House is predicated on wishing for the country’s economy to decline even further and hoping for another terror attack on Obama’s watch. Also, the GOP’s selection of Michael Steele makes is possible for it to appear not out of synch with the nation’s triumph of electing its first black president by having the Republican Party's first black chairman dumping on him.

Despite the country wanting a change in tone and practice, the Republican Party hasn’t changed. If the president is willing to admit that he was wrong about Mr. Daschle, will he also admit that he was wrong about the illusion of bipartisanship?
So, the question is this: Did the president really win the election?

Mr. Athens? Commander Sparta?

2008-09-09T13:25:00.000-07:00

Last night I watched Zack Snyder's 2007 film version of Frank Miller's graphic novel, 300; an account of Sparta's King Leonidas and his brothers-in-arms defense of Sparta from Persia, led by Xerxes. (Persia, led by King Xerxes, attacked Greece, which was made up numerous city-states, and King Leonidas and his personal bodygaurds of 300 men and others held them off at a narrow pass called Thermopylae in 480 BC for two days before being slaughtered to the man.)

What struck me was the sense of militarism and the unabashed Greco flag waving and the rhetoric of "free men" and "freedom." It was a highly testosterone affair with slightly racial overtones.

For instance, ancient Persia, is the forerunner of moden day Iran (that's a problem right there). According to Wikipedia, Iran is a "cognate of the of Aryans, and means land of the Aryans." Now, Aryans have been mostly seen as "white people," aka "caucasians," but in the film Xerxes, the king of the Persian empire was "black," meaning he had bronze skin coloration. Put less graciously, the dude looked like a bona fide nigga with a serious bling-bling problem.

Now, I understand that this was a film based on a graphic novel, which means historical inaccuracy was a foregone conclusion. But one would think that the filmmaker would try to at least get the demographic right. Most, if not all of the Persians, looked to be "people of color."
Not only was Xerxes "black" but also a less than flaming faggot while Leonidas, was the epitome of Spartan masculinity. In the film, Leonidas disparaged his fellow Greeks in Athens as being merely "philosophers" and "boy lovers" to an emissary of Persia.

As a matter of act, when Leonidas wife puts in her two cents , the Persian emissary questions how is it that a Spartan woman can partakes in men-talk (affairs of the state)?

She replies that's due to the fact that Spartan women give birth to "real men." (Latter in the film she ably dispatches a Spartan politician who had abused and betrayed before the council of men.)

Where is this going? Well, read the last lines of John McCain's speech:

I’m going to fight for my cause every day as your President. I’m going to fight to make sure every American has every reason to thank God, as I thank Him: that I’m an American, a proud citizen of the greatest country on earth, and with hard work, strong faith and a little courage, great things are always within our reach. Fight with me. Fight with me. Fight for what’s right for our country. Fight for the ideals and character of a free people. Fight for our children’s future. Fight for justice and opportunity for all. Stand up to defend our country from its enemies. Stand up for each other; for beautiful, blessed, bountiful America. Stand up, stand up, stand up and fight. Nothing is inevitable here. We’re Americans, and we never give up. We never quit. We never hide from history. We make history.

Stating the obvious, McCain, as a former military man, is emblematic of the Spartan warrior ethos. Hence his stake in supporting the surge and using his past expericence as military man to become the commander in chief. McCain is known to be a hot head, which means to some degree he is a man of passion, however erratic.

Mr. Cool, Obama, is a lawyer, and constitutional one, embodies the Athenian ethos: deliberative, reasonable, and contemplative. One example of this is his response to aquestion at Rick Warren's Saddleback Church.

When asked about when does life begin, Obama replied "...That's above my pay grade." Cool. Rationale.

As as matter of fact, Washinton Post columnist Richard Cohen wonders if Obama is "Too Cool to Fight?:

Stephanopoulos vainly tried for some genuine reaction [from Obama]. In choosing Palin, did John McCain get someone who met the minimum test of being "capable of being president"? Everyone in America knows the answer to that. They know McCain picked someone so unqualified she has been hiding from the media because a question to her is like kryptonite to what's-his-name. But did Obama say anything like that? Here are his exact words: "Well, you know, I'll let you ask John McCain when he's on ABC." Boy, Palin will never get over that.

This has generally been Obama's response: calm, cool, and collected. However, it is that very sort of lack of obvious passion when not giving a speech that makes some people believe if he won't do battle in the campaign, how will he do battle if the wins the White House? This is the general view of most voters who watched as John Kerry allowed his record to be torn to shreds.

As Cohen notes:

What Obama does not understand is that he is being Swift-boated. The term does not apply to a mere smear. It is bolder, more outrageous than that. It means going straight at your opponent's strength and maligning it. This is what was done in 2004 to John Kerry, who had commanded a Swift boat in Vietnam. Kerry had won three Purple Hearts, a Silver Star and a Bronze Star and emerged from the war a certified hero. It was that record that his opponents attacked, a tactic Kerry thought so ludicrous that he at first ignored it. The record shows that he lost the election.

As is stands now, the "maverick" label appeals to people who want a leader(s) to fight and buck the system. Or, the McCain/Palin ticket is now appealing to base conservatives who believe they now have a ticket worth believing in.

Perhaps, we should keep the faith that Team Obama knows the real deal; he's sticking to his game plan and organizing in key electoral states. Perhaps this is the "new kind of politics" that Obama is talking about: a kind of bloodless politics that is more cerebal than visceral.

Perhaps. But people want a "leader," a man or woman who will plant the standard of their hopes, dreams and principles in the earth and say: "This is what I stand for, and this is what I will die for."

Politics doesn't have to be bloody, but is should have some passion.

Course Correction: Now It is Personality, Not Experience

2008-09-04T09:22:00.000-07:00

Although McCain was a navy aviator you can tell he knows how to maneuver the war-torn USS Straight-Talker. Remember when Obama came back from his successful European and Mid-East jaunt? He dazzled the world and gave a brilliant speech, which McCain took issue with at the American Legion. He said that Obama’s speech was confident about himself but not about America.

Senator McCain, speaking before the Legion audience, took Senator Obama to task for his Berlin speech for it displaying “confidence in oneself” and but not “confidence in one’s country” regarding the Cold War.

What was Mr. Obama’s near treasonous utterance in the eyes of Mr. McCain?

“…there is no challenge too great for a world that stands as one.”

For the Arizonian, “The Cold War ended not because the world stood ‘as one,’ but because the great democracies came together, bound together by sustained and decisive American leadership.”

Yes, and the instruments by which the U.S. expressed its “decisive leadership” were the Marshall Plan and NATO, which Mr. Obama mentioned the latter three times in his speech.

“Look at Berlin, where the determination of a people met the generosity of the Marshall Plan and created a German miracle; where a victory over tyranny gave rise to NATO, the greatest alliance ever formed to defend our common security,” said Obama.

Then the presumptive GOP nominee took to task, once again, the presumptive Democratic nominee for mentioning the US “failure to lead” in the aftermath of the Russian invasion of Georgia.

If “…America somehow set a bad example that invited Russia to invade a small, peaceful, and democratic nation, then he should state it outright,” said Sen. McCain.

This critique by McCain is tied up with his general view he has of Obama: no experience. Hence, Obama’s greatest strength is that he is popular, meaning a mere celebrity like Britney Spears or Paris Hilton. In other words, Obama is a frivolous waif.

But something changed…something really changed. The USS Straight-Talker did a mid-course correction after lobbing numerous video artillery charges at the USS Change, chasing it around as a celebrity cruise ship. The charge was no longer about experience, especially about McCain’s; it’s now about personality. In other words, the USS Straight-Talker deployed the USS Palin.

What must have shaken the commander of the USS Straight-Talker was the sight of Obama giving his acceptance speech before 80,000 fired-up Democrats. Perhaps the sight of the waif taking command and putting on a masterful albeit scripted nomination convention and unifying the party’s faction really gave officers of the USS Straight-Talker something to think about.

They needed a game-changer, and Gov. Sarah Palin appears to be that for the base. Without stating her obvious conservative creds, she is basically someone who’s attractive, vivacious and can give “good speech.” She’s a “hockey mom,” a regular American.

Palin, articulate, attractive, poised, hitting Obama with sarcastic remarks à la Ann Coulter, is the perfect, sleek missile cruiser.

Just as traditional family values and abstinence education no longer means anything to the party’s base since Gov. Palin’s 17-year old daughter is great with child, experience doesn’t matter now. A good example of that criterion’s irrelevance evidenced by the exchange between a CNN reporter was unable to get a straight answer from the McCain campaign regarding Gov. Palin’s foreign policy experience.

This is about course correction. Now, the liberal media elite, McCain’s original “base” before the Christian conservative weighed in, is now the evil empire that dares to question an unknown politico for the office of the vice presidency. But by questioning the ship worthiness of the USS Palin, the media is essentially questioning the judgment of Commander John McCain.

It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is the will to win, not putting the country first.

The War at Home: Out of Sight and Out of Mind

2008-09-03T12:10:00.000-07:00

Listening to the events of how Democracy Now!’s Amy Goodman and her colleagues were arrested in St. Paul during the GOP convention while credentialed, and looking at videos of Glenn Greenwald who spoke to St. Paul residents whose home was stormed-trooped clearly shows that America has whole heartedly accepted the “terror regime” at home that has been the hallmark of the Bush Administration.

Not only has the country accepted the more security is more freedom paradigm, but one virtually sees no and reads no reporting of it in the media. The prime motive of the police seems to be to intimidate the media from reporting on police actions and to prevent the press from reporting on the march in St. Paul before the Republican Party convention.

When the Chinese government, however, arrested six Americans in during Beijing the Olympics that was covered and editorialized. However, the police intimidation tactic in St. Paul is hardly a blip in the media, except for photo in the Washington Post GOP convention coverage section, they was virtually mentioning.

However, there was an article in the Post about a Chinese protestor whose mother was being harassed by Chinese officials because his family are pursuing financial claims against the government, and did so during the Beijing games.

But any corresponding reporting by the major organs of the established media on questionable police actions aimed at intimidating freedom of the press and the right of the people to peacefully assemble? Not much...

With warrant less spying, torture, Guantanamo, never ending encroachment on the Constitution, the land of the free and the home of the brave is becoming high-tech, consumer police state with the shell of a democratic republic.

Before turning to the local Pacifica affiliate station, NPR was cheerily babbling about how to watch the fall line-up of the television shows.

Which begs the questions, is NPR really a news-oriented station anymore or merely an audio brand of smugly packaged life-style shows?

Annals of Stupid Media: Obama's Gay Fathers

2008-09-03T09:17:00.000-07:00

Add this to the list of stupid media. A reporter for ABC stated that Obama had a black father from Kenya and a white father from Kansas. There's nothing like keep the public duly informed.

MIA: Alaska's "First Dude"

2008-09-03T08:53:00.000-07:00

Year ago Nation columnist Katha Politt made astute observation regarding social conservatives and Republican Party public policy. They decried feminism’s influence on the family, arguing that it caused women to leave their homes for work and neglected child rearing; however when lower-income women did so, stayed home, especially on AFDC, those women were decried as lazy and shiftless.

The current edition of the “mommy wars,” the “campaign edition,” underscores this same double-standard thinking that’s become a hallmark of conservative thinking. This all has to do with Gov. Sarah Palin’s nomination as Sen. John McCain’s vice president, and the fact that she has five children.

Conservatives who have touted stay-at-home moms now revel in the fact that she is a working mother and one who has decided not to abort her recent child, a son with Downs Syndrome. Even more interesting is listening to and reading how conservatives find compassion for Palin’s 17-year old daughter, Bristol, who is five-months pregnant. For years conservatives have railed against out-of-wedlock teenage pregnancy when it happened to lower-income families of colored.

And let’s be clear about this point. If this had happened to, say, Obama's 17 year-old daughter, this would have been been proof-positive that Obama was unfit for office. That if he couldn't control his own daughter, how could he be steward of the nation? When you read how Republicans spin this, it really truly underscores the GOP's sense of "traditional family values."

Those people are always having children out of wedlock. However, when the right sort of people have children out of wedlock, it's just a "personal family problem." But now that it has happened to one of their own? Republicans collectively shrug their shoulders as if saying, “Shit happens.”

However, what makes this even more interesting is that upon reading the Times’ article by Jodi Kantor, “A New Twist in the Debate on Mothers .” One pivotal actor wasn’t even mentioned in the Palin family drama: Todd Palin, Alaska’s “First Dude,” the governor's husband. As a matter of fact when the Today Show did its sophomoric take on the “mommy wars,” Todd Palin was seen but wasn’t even mentioned as possible helpmate in child rearing.

The basic, generic assumption, once again, is that real men don't engage in child rearing. They are not seen as doing their 50 percent. In the Times article and the Today Show segment, fathers were missing in action. All the responsibility of child rearing is solely in the realm of women, who are no longer respected or exalted as MOTHERS but have been reduced to being mere "moms" or "mommies, " the latest metric of domestic consumption. "Five out of ten moms like Momex because..."

Once again, the obliviousness to society's double standard goes by the way side. When Obama gave a speech on fathers being missing in their children's lives on Father's Day, he was upbraided by some, especially Jesse Jackson, for talking down to black people, but other saw it as a message that applied to all fathers.

In his Democratic Party convention acceptance speech, he said this about fathers: Yes, we must provide more ladders to success for young men who fall into lives of crime and despair. But we must also admit that programs alone can't replace parents, that government can't turn off the television and make a child do her homework, that fathers must take more responsibility to provide love and guidance to their children.

However, when reading and listening to the tracts of the so-called mommy wars, Todd Palin seems to be missing in action while in plain and obvious sight.

"Betrayal": Houston Baker on Black Intellectuals

2008-09-02T11:02:00.000-07:00

In the eyes of some, the public function of black intellectuals has changed from speaking truth to power to turning away from the kind of social justice activism that was the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. Houston A. Baker, Jr., Distinguished University Professor at Vanderbilt University, has turned his critical eyes on this transformation in his book Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era (Columbia University Press, 2008).

Baker looks across the spectrum of black intellectualism—left, right, and center. One of the founders of Black Studies, forty years ago, we talked about the role of black intellectuals, the good, bad and the ugly. We spoke days before Barack Obama accepted the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s heralded speech at the 1963 March on Washington. Below is an edited version of our conversation.

Norman Kelley: Your book echoes Julian Benda’s “The Treason of the Intellectuals” (Les Trahison des Clercs). Benda argued that intellectuals of his era–the modern era–were increasingly responsible for inflaming the passions of nationalism, racism, and war. He wrote: “Now, at the end of the nineteenth century a fundamental change had occurred: the “clerks” [his word for intellectuals] began to play the game of political passions. The men who had acted as a check on the realism of the people began to act as it stimulators.”

If I understand you correctly, your book pivots off his central thesis but in a different direction. You see a betrayal in black intellectuals not fulfilling their public intellectual role.

Houston Baker: That’s right. I had a section in an earlier draft of the manuscript that addressed the treatment of the “clercs” directly, and I remember saying that at least a direct reversal, a mirror image. I remember saying that the situation would find the intellectual outside the grand salon, the dining table that uses them in a public way. While in the present economy black intellectuals are invited to the grand salon and are asked to sit down at the table, and discuss the next issue of neoconservative declaration of bad black behavior. It’s kind of astonishing from a perspective of intellectual history.

Kelley: Now, you cited Martin Luther King as the model of an engaged black public intellectual while most people would see him as a moralistic preacher rather than as a public intellectual, although he did write books.

Baker: Historically, one of the chief institutions of the black public sphere has been the church. I would use an example of an engaging analysis of the public sphere Du Bois’s essay in The Souls of Black Folk, “The Faith of the Fathers.” Du Bois’s claim—well, he doesn’t say it directly but it’s true—because black folks are excluded from politics, from the social policy of the country that suppose to be their native land, he kind of sees that they have had to develop a microcosm within the church and the development of spirituals. So, King’s legacy, heritage, geneology, through generations of black preachers is the start of his unconscious and conscious engagement; made to go to youth groups and prayer meetings during the week; being the preacher’s son.

That would be the beginning of the engagement, and then the other institution, which has fallen upon hard times in many instances but was glorious at the time that King was coming along, would be historically black colleges and universities; his Morehouse years in Atlanta; his father the preacher of the church. I would say his formative years found him in a black public sphere because of segregation through housing. The move into Montgomery, Dexter Avenue Baptist Church would not have been, I think, at all disconcerting to King. This is all speculation, but it would have been seen as a destination church, a destination city, a destination region in the South.

What was unknown to him when he moved in Montgomery was the long history of building a counter public sphere, a black resistance movement, a black liberation impulse that was there and that was rolling through a middle age generation, and I use the middle age advisedly, of Rosa Parks. Bourgeois, wonderfully situated in Montgomery, and as they would say, “You are the chosen one. You are chosen to lead us: you got the look, you got the education, you got the eloquence to do it.”

And I think what was astonishing the kind of background, formative work in the public sphere, the kind of coming together of the public sphere, the ideology, the population, the demographics, the social interconnections of Montgomery; it was an almost natural, organic connection that took place between King and “the people,” although King considered himself one of the people. He was empathetic; he had compassion to go with it.

I have to say people have said this to me, and quite rightly, how can you use King as a model? Those are shoes no one can fill and we have moved temporally to a different plane completely unlike what was going on at the time when he assumed a leadership role. That is true, but as you have pointed out in your book the fact that Leo Strauss as quirky and dead has not stopped Harvey Mansfield from trying to be Strauss. The model is there. You are required to do your own kind of spatial-temporal adjustment. What is critical is that King was so engaged through his entire life that he realized that the stake was his life. “This is really dangerous work, my house has been bombed. I’ve been thrown into jail. I’ve been hit with bricks and so forth.” He’s engagement was full tilt. He lived his life in the midst of American violence, contrarianism. And as you have said, he wrote books.

Kelley: I’ve often mused to myself how things might have been different if he had taken some time off after 1965 or 1968, to think things through. He kept doing the same things he had been doing for the last thirteen years.

Baker: …Even had King delivered on bringing people into the purview of the community, with an effective strategy, it still would have been comprador, brokerage kind of politics. People also have to keep in mind the John Henry syndrome….King was clinically depressed; he was a sick, ill man. People said that he was muttering to himself; all the sexual activity going on; now he’s coming out with all these radical statements… I guess this is particularly true with men in general and specifically with black men. How many of us would admit that we are in therapy and medication?

Kelley: With King as that model—as an engaged black public intellectual-- what is the role of today’s black intelligentsia?

Baker: I think a person like Angela Davis is amazing. The fact that she is not on television all the time is understandable. The fact that she doesn’t get op-ed New York Times pieces is understandable. I think it was Z magazine some fifteen years ago, in an article by Ed Hermann, had counted up—and I’m going to be broad here—the neoconservative spokespersons’ op-ed as seventy, and then he looked over specifically at Cornel West and Manning Marable and they were, like, five [articles] in the same period of time. So we know we have a closed media, but never the less when Angela shows up it’s always SRO; it’s always a mixed audience of people. For example, sons, daughters, uncles, aunts in the prison-industrial complex. It’s scholars; it’s community organizers. I think she’s an example of somebody who has decided “This is what my life is going to be dedicated to.”

I think of Lani Guinier working out of Harvard Law School, and with her father working out of Harvard; it was a generational thing. He was the first director of Afro-American studies there. So, here’s Lani in combination with Charles Ogletree and Henry Louis Gates situated at the pyramid of the academy saying, “I’m sorry, How are you guys counting the black population here? Shouldn’t we think whether or not that the people who you are calling black or Afro American here were slaves or whose grandfathers had been slaves?” Let’s break the statistics down. I’m sorry, but shouldn’t we be talking of insurance companies and their complicity in slavery and see if we can find a way to do a class action suit, which replicated what [President] Ruth Simmons of Brown [University] did. I think the eradication and identification of social amnesia, which America takes great pleasure in, is a function of the contemporary, productive, dedicated and committed black intelligentsia.

Kelley: There’s been a development over the last 40 years a black intellectual academic apparatus, mostly in the humanities, but there seems to be a lack of development of black intellectuals who can develop policy issues positions on poverty, education, declining infrastructure. That may no be a fair question…

Baker: That’s a very fair question…. Institutionally, I think, that the education that is given by Peer-One universities, and that includes in my mind, some beautiful state universities, the kind of education that’s given at the Ph. D. level is hermetically sealed off, for the most part, from what I warily called the real world. There truly are campuses, like the University of Chicago, that are walled off. You are petty much expected to use all those technological resources and to march lock-stepped to meet the requirements leading to the Ph. D. degree. If you wanted, say, to a write a paper on rurality, say English rural studies and Tennessee’s post-forming of agriculture planting era and you wanted to use two books but also use policy planting reports, I don’t think you could find anyone to advise you. There’s the cutoff in the education… You pretty much have to do that on your own

Kelley: But look at how people like John McWhorter and Shelby Steele came out the university and have plugged themselves into the neo-conservative policy apparatus, which positioned them. You don’t seem to be seeing that, by and large, from black intellectuals on the left, per se.

Baker: Dinesh D’Souza, my understanding is, was first connected to Irving Kristol. So, he did that at Dartmouth and then moved directly to the White House [as a White House Fellow] and then to the American Enterprise Institute. So we’re talking colossal financing. So, if some student came to me and said, “Houston, I want to do this something for the left. Could you get me $45,000 just to do an internship somewhere and not have any obligations. I would [laughs] have to say, “I’m sorry, man. I can’t even do that on my credit card.”

So, I think were taking here of the marriage between the corporation and something putatively called disinterested intellectualism. Then you look at Glenn Loury’s career. I’m in the academy. Nope, I’m out of [American Enterprise Institute] mainly because of Dinesh D’Souza’s book, The End of Racism, as I understand it. So, we have to look at the corporate factor.

Kelley: You used an anachronism in your book, “race man” or “race woman.” You referred to Dr. King as being one.

Baker: The reason I used those terms, and I have to be honest about that, it seems to me that when I conceptualized this project 10 years ago, I’d been taken aback by the “Little Tree” essay in the New York Times by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.
I began to get concerned about the impulse it seemed to me, to disappear race, the word, and as a variable in analyses in anything to do with the U.S.

Kelley: You mean counter posing that to the whole notion of being “colorblind”?
“We see no color because we are colorblind, but our policies coincidentally just happen to have a greater effect on people of color”?

Baker: Exactly. An unexpected consequence… I began to act like a pre-Raphaelite painter who said, “The more science becomes destructive toward the soul, the more angels shall I paint.” The more people kept saying, “This is old school, brother. We’re going to have to get rid of this race thing. Racial thinking. We have to think beyond race. I’m not sure if is a legitimate term.” In the special issue of Critical Inquiry, on “Race Writing and the Difference It Makes,” edited by Anthony Appiah, I think, and Gates, and I also believe Eric Lott, a white scholar at the University of Virginia, who’s in the current issue of PMLA. Why is race in inverted commas?...

Kelley: This is a reaction to the biological sciences that have begun to argue that there are no basic “racial” differences between blacks, whites, Asians, and others.

Baker: This is fantastic work. I’m engaged by it and enjoy it, but here, too, is the failure of the precision of that work to get out and affect public policy, and institutional and national amnesia. It’s what Langston Hughes said, and I quote him in the book, “I love Ralph Bunche/ But I can’t eat him for lunch.” Hughes again, “The average Negro hadn’t heard of the Harlem Renaissance and if he had, it hadn’t cured pneumonia or lowered their rent or anything.”

That work is fantastic and I don’t want to sound like some stupid, anti-intellectual guy, but one understands, for me, in the forefront of what goes wrong for black people in this country and in the Americas begins with race. Marcus Rediker in The Slave Ship: A Human History—which is a hard book to read; he really goes through the chronicle, and such brutality is perpetuated in the trans-Atlantic slave [trade]—but he says the slave ship is the one institution that is often missed in accounts of slavery. There’s the slave plantation, of course. On the slave ship two things were produced; one was race and the other was labor. They are absolutely brought together in the New World taxonomy and structures of feelings, in politics, economics, and education.

I think, historically, that race has been the over determined area that has excluded and subjected and subordinated the black majority in the Americas and elsewhere. The scientific and empirical work [de-emphasizing race] is great, but on the sociological and day-to-day plane, it doesn’t really stop that store clerk from following you around.

Kelley: Well, let’s follow this up with, How have you seen race played out in this election?

Baker: When Thomas Clarence had his hearing, black people were debating one another in the proverbial places—the barbershop, the beauty salon—“Is he a good man? Is he a bad man? Did he do these things?” “Is she a sister speaking truth to power or is she being used by white feminists?” The debate was on; it was on. “We should support him. We shouldn’t support him.” If I get the percentage right, after he made that remark about “high-tech lynching,” seventy-five percent of black people said, “We got to support him.” If you read his book, My Grandfather’s Son, it’s an outrageous book. The NAACP supported this man. The notion was: he’s just shuckin’ and jivin’ and puttin’ on the mask. Once he gets on the Supreme Court, he’s going to recognize affirmative action for us.

So, I want to get on with Obamaphilia. I don’t understand this kind of thinking already demonstrated at one branch of government, that once in office we’re going to find someone deeply committed to the eradication of the prison industrial complex, a strict addressing to and budgetary allocation targeting the horrible education of black children. It ain’t gonna happen.

Kelley: Why do you think that’s not going to happen?

Baker: It’s not going to happening because, number one, the financing of the presidency; it not happening. The analysis of Norman Kelley regarding blacks and the Democratic Party is shrewd and on point: you’re locked in. You’re a voting component of the Democratic Party. Obama himself hasn’t touched it [a black agenda] and hasn’t been near these disastrous things that have been going on, the devastation of the black majority in this country. He has nothing but a passing interest in it. He’s a centrist. I don’t think he has any interest in it.

Sam Smith of the Progressive Review has a piece. It starts “Let’s imagine you’re a progressive and you’re asked to support a candidate who…” and then he goes through the policies and votes of Obama. And he ends up saying, “This is kind of a trick; who do you think I’m talking about?” Then he winds up saying, [indicating the true reality that Obama isn’t as progressive or liberal as some people think]:

“Look, guys, it’s not going to happen.”

Less Is More? The Disappearance of a Black Agenda

2008-09-02T08:10:00.000-07:00

While interviewed by radio WPFW (Pacifica Network) former Mayor Richard Hatcher of Gary, Indiana, who chaired the famous black political conventions of the 1970s, mentioned that when Rep. Maxine Waters (D-CA) approached the Obama wing of the Democratic Party about including the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC) in the convention’s events, she was rebuffed.

Hatcher ruefully noted that at convention that had nominated its party’s first black candidate for the office of the presidency, there was no articulation of a black agenda.

As noted by public intellectuals, such as Adolph Reed and Houston Baker, Sen. Barack Obama has studiously avoided any association with a so-called black agenda, which would be nominally targeting money and resources to distressed black communities. Such an agenda would be the death knell to a politician who is trying to be post-racial.

“Obama himself hasn’t touched it [a black agenda],” said Baker, “and hasn’t been near these disastrous things that have been going on, the devastation of the black majority in this country. He has nothing but a passing interest in it. He’s a centrist.”

By any estimation, Obama, while not the first choice of the political black establishment, had become the overwhelming choice of the black electorate in the primary, and is expected to get over 80 percent of the black vote in the general election.

For a number of black Americans, the excitement about electing the first black president may well overwhelm any concern about a so-called black agenda. The first job, in the eyes of many, may well be merely making sure that Obama gets the keys to the White House. When he gets in the brother is going to work it out.

But as Baker noted when Clarence Thomas became a Justice at the Supreme Court, “I don’t understand this kind of thinking already demonstrated at one branch of government that once in office we’re going to find someone deeply committed to the eradication of the prison industrial complex.”

Obama may well feel free to go forward without considering a black agenda due to the simple reason that the CBC has been demonstrably weak in actually articulating an agenda blacks themselves could reasonably implement.

While CBS have various “freedom” agendas or progressive budgets that sought to alleviate the stress of black and working class communities, it is interesting to note that the late Adam Clayton Powell, while in the minority as a then-Negro congressional member, got more progressive legislation passed during the 1960s than the more than 40 members of the CBC has passed in the thirty-five years or so in its existence.

For example, Powell, as chairman of the Education and Labor Committee, passed landmark legislation that provided either legislative impetus or funds for federal programs for minimum wage increases, education and training for the deaf, vocational training and standards for wages and work hours, as well as aid to elementary and secondary education. In a record that’s still unbroken, Powell had steered 50 bills through Congress.

Even more interesting, Powell, who was certainly more fair-skinned than Obama cultivated a sense of “blackness” and talked about “audacious” black power when those concepts were incendiary, yet he got the job done of being a legislator who could be said to have improved the life-chances of millions of Americans, black and white.

To be sure, the last 30 years of Republican dominance has been predicated on demonizing any advance of blacks as coming at the expense of whites, especially stressed lower class and middle class whites. Black intellectuals on the right, aided and abetted by well-funded think tanks, have help create the kind of talking points that pare down a “black” agenda to a list of grievances or just plain racial pleading.

However, the last 30 years or so have also meant that the national black political class, as represented by the Congressional Black Caucus, has sorely missed an opportunity to organize and utilize whatever resources that African Americans have. The black middle class makes up roughly 60 percent of the black population, but has pretty much receded as the leadership class. Instead, it has pretty much tied the fate of black Americans as a whole to that of the Democratic Party, which sees the black vote as a reliable bloc of votes that only occasionally causes discomfort to the likes of Bill and Hillary Clinton.

Increasingly, if there is no black agenda could it be that, at least according to a 2007 Pew survey (“Blacks See Growing Values Gap Between Poor and Middle Class”), that blacks themselves, 61 percent, think the values of middle class and the poor have become more dissimilar? What would be a common black agenda?

Perhaps in Obama’s sotto voce of a black agenda, less truly is more.

But as John W. Rogers Jr., the founder of Ariel Investments, the country’s first black-owned money management firm and one of Obama’s top bundlers said in the New York Times, “I think the good news is once Barack is elected, he is going to be a beacon of hope for all of us.”

McCain's Baby Mama Drama

2008-09-02T07:13:00.000-07:00

I'm not going to attack or engage in classic schadenfreude regaring the news about Bristol Palin, the daughter of the GOP's veep nominee. However, I must note, for the record, that if this had happened to, say, Obama's 17 year-old daughter, this would have been been proof-positive that Obama was unfit for office. That if he couldn't control his own daughter, how could he be steward of the nation. When you read how Republicans spin this, it really truly underscores the GOP's sense of "traditional family values."

Those people are always having children out of wedlock, but when the right sort of people have children out of wedlock, it's just a "personal family problem."

Intersting....

Time Magazine Does an "OJ" Photo of Obama

2008-08-28T09:11:00.000-07:00

Fear of the dark is a primordial one, and just as Time magazine ran an infamous one darkening OJ Simpson during his darkest hours, Barack Obama is getting the same skin-tone treatment as he embarks on the question to the become the 44th POTUS.

Contrast and compare a 2006 cover of Time of Obama with its 2008 DNC edition. Back then he was light, bright, and damn near white. Now he's...Well, you decide.

Fox's Ministry of Truth re Mrs. Obama and the "World"

2008-08-26T12:19:00.000-07:00

Doing a post-mortem on Michelle Obama's DNC speech, Fox News' Megyn Kelly did a neat trick with Mrs. Obama's statement: "The world as it is just won't do."

Kelly said: "If you replace 'world' with 'country', you are back to the same debate, arguably, that you have been having about Michelle Obama's feelings about the country."

Huh?

Let's take Kelly's argument at "face value." Even if she wants to exchange "world" for "country," according to a USA Today poll, Mrs. Obama would be in good company:

"The electorate remains deeply pessimistic. Eight in 10 say they are dissatisfied with the way things are going in the USA, and even more rate the economy as "only fair" or poor. Seven in 10 say it's getting worse."

This is Fox News, which means the distorted record is more important than what was actually stated.

Colorblind Media in Denver

2008-08-26T08:33:00.001-07:00

Is it a naive belief that if an organization, or organizations, is constantly reporting on race or using race as a prism for understanding the nation's politics, shouldn't that organization also fairly reflect the nation? After all, the media, traditionally called "the press," acts in the public's interest.

The media's mission is often to gauge the state of race in America, but often doesn't reflect the fact that it has a tremendously bad record in reflecting that American reality. As Media Matters has noted in one of its reports, media racial and gender equity has gotten somewhat better but not by much.

If one watched the major broadcast networks' coverage of the Democratic National Convention in Denver, hardly a black, Hispanic/Latino, or Asian face appeared as a reporter or news analyst.

On NBC there was Brian Williams as anchor, along with Ann Curry, David Gregory, Andrea Mitchell, Chuck Todd, Savannah Gutherie, and Tom Brokaw.

On ABC Charles Gibson served as the anchor with Diane Sawyer, Jack Tapper, Kate Snow, and George Stephanopoulos.

CBS, with Katie Couric as anchor, had Bob Schieffer, Jeff Greenfield and Byron Pitts, the lone reporter of color.

A week ago, Michelle Martin posted a concern on the Root.com about the selection of PBS's Jim Lehrer, CBS's Bob Schieffer and NBC's Tom Brokaw to host the three 2008 presidential debates. To state the obvious, it's the same color and gender scheme despite the fact that a white woman and black man waged an epic battle for the Democratic Party's nomination.

While the rest of the nation is given a critical examination or taken to task if it doesn't live up to the nation's ideals about equality of opportunity, equal rights or diversity, the nation's media doesn't hold itself to the same standards.

As matter of fact, if an intelligent, articulate, gay woman gets her own show on a TV, as has Rachel Maddow, some of the purported liberal intellegentsia will have a bigger problem with that than if a black commentator trafficks in spurious assertions about a black candidate's wife.

What does say about a society where its armed forces are more integrated than its own Fourth Estate?

On Super Tuesday, last February, this pallor color scheme was in effect. The only major difference between then and now was that Tim Russert was alive. Now his son, Luke Russert, is "reporting" from Denver, along with Brian Williams' own daughter, Allison, who is also "on the NBC payroll."

Why is it that candidate Barack Obama has to constantly answer questions about affirmative action when the questionable affirmative action practice of hiring Luke Russert or Allison Williams goes unquestioned?

A Gay Swimmer at the Olympics? NBC Ain't Saying So

2008-08-25T09:08:00.000-07:00

It was interesting watching the Olympics. The Team USA won a total of 110 medals; of that number, 36 were gold medals. The host nation, China, won 100 medals; of that total number, 51 were gold.

Now, we do recognize that China, formally the People’s Republic of China is a police state; a Communist police state at that. The America media, including Bob Costas at NBC, constantly reminded people that China has problems despite putting on a spectacular show and hosting the event, and beating the Red, White and Blue in the total number of gold medals won. We all know that China does not brook dissent, mostly in regard to issues like Tibet and Darfur, etc. It has allowed its people to get rich but not have an overt say in the affairs that govern them.

For example the New York Times said this about China in a post-Olympics editorial:

Along the way, government critics were pre-emptively rounded up and jailed, domestic news outlets tightly controlled, foreign journalists denied full access to the Internet and thousands of Beijing’s least telegenic residents were evicted from their homes and out of camera range. On Friday, the Chinese police confirmed that six Americans protesting China’s rule in Tibet had been sentenced to 10 days of detention.

As stated above, China, after all, is a police state.

Given that the United States, the leader of the free world, is dedicated to liberty, freedom and basic democratic and human rights, an openness to a diverse array of people, how is it that NBC neglected to mention that a gold medal-winning swimmer was gay?

No, not Michael Phelps who has ADHD, but Australian diver Matthew Mitcham, who won the gold in the 10m platform diving event, scoring an upset over the Chinese team.

NBC, taking a page for China’s Thought Police, seems to have screened that out from its broadcast.

Censorship has its uses here in the land of the free and the home of the brave.

The Right Comes Full Circles with Corsi's Obama Book

2008-08-21T11:25:00.000-07:00

Rick Perlstein's seminal Before the Storm chronicles the fall and rise of the Republican Party before and during the 1964 presidential election. What made Before the Storm an interesting history was to note that what later made the conservative movement successful was the routing of liberal/moderate conservatives like Nelson Rockefeller, and how conservatives like William Buckley led a movement to kick out the crazies: the anti-Semites, rabid race-haters, and other crazies that made conservatism a backwater joke since the New Deal and up to the election of Ronald Reagan.

But a funny thing happened to the conservative movement/Republican Party: it picked up some new crazies if not exactly the same ones. While conservatism and the Republican Party had become the so-called party of ideas, it had also picked up allies--fundamentalists/anti-civil rights Southerners--and an unholy whole host of those who have essentially used their assocation with the GOP to spout hate and contempt for all their enemies. I won't bore you with the odious wit and wisdom of Rush Limbaugh or Bill O'Reilly, but the chickens have come home to roost with Jerome Corsi's Obama Nation tome.

Just as Buckley sought to kick out the crazies from the GOP/conservative movement, there now appears to be a knot of like-minded conservatives who refuse to any association with the kind of work that Corsi has produced. Huffington Post's Tom Edsall has cited four who have denounced Corsi's work: Peter Wehner, Ross Douthat, Jon Henke and John Hawkins.

Edsall writes :

"All four make the case that Corsi presents a greater danger to the conservative movement and the Republican Party than to Barack Obama -- that for the right to take Corsi under its collective wing represents a moral and intellectual failing. This breakaway faction does not pull its punches as it challenges."

Edsall quotes Wehner writing at Wehner's Commentary blog as saying:

"Conservatism has been an intellectual home to people like Burke and Buckley. The GOP is the party that gave us Lincoln and Reagan. It seems to me that its leaders ought to make it clear that they find what Dr. Corsi is doing to be both wrong and repellent. To have their movement and their party associated with such a figure would be a terrible thing and it will only help the cause of those who hold both the GOP and the conservative movement in contempt."

Interesting, but Corsi doesn't seem to be a friend of the GOP; he has stated that he's more likely to vote for the Constitutional Party rather than for the Republican Party. Corsi claims that he's even been critical of John McCain. What's even more interesting is that the imprint for Corsi's book, Threshold, a subsidiary of Simon and Schuster, is headed by a well-known GOP operative, Mary Matalin. However, books like Corsi's makes it seem questionable if conservatives were ever really concerned with the movement's "moral and intellectual" foundation. The rise of the conservative/GOP foundation has often rested on pure power politics and strategic thinking, and marketing.

If this dissent is truly the case, as Edsall has written, then the Republican Party has come full circle:the crazies like Corsi have returned; it doesn't matter if someone like Corsi isn't a member of the GOP. He engages in the same kind of smear tactics that McCarthy, Limbaugh, Coulter and others have trucked in for years. The contempt for the truth and facts is so palpable, the hatred so thick that is no small wonder that recent shoots have focused on "liberals" at the Universal Unitarian Church in Knockville, or the Democrat Party chairman in Little Rock.

The crazies have come back, locked and loaded.

The New York Post Follows the Party Line

2008-08-21T08:51:00.000-07:00

If you want to see a good example of how journalism has replicated into party-line formulation, as practiced by the New York Post, read the article re Obama's down and out half-brother in Kenya. Notice how the senator and soon-to-be nominated Democratic presidential candidate is reduced to being an example of the C-word.

Where have seen this characterization before? Hmmm?

Obama's 1995 TV Interview

2008-08-20T06:50:00.000-07:00

Interested in the real Obama? Take a look at a 1995 TV book interview, in which he discusses his memoir "Dreams From My Father."

Obama's "Exotic" and "Foreign" Background

2008-08-19T12:39:00.000-07:00

A few days ago I received an email from a friend I've neither seen nor heard from in years. After sending me pictures of her grown daughter (graduating from high school to adulthood), I asked her how did she feel about having a fellow Hawaiian run for the presidency. Not only is she a daughter of Hawaii (not native born but raised there), but she also attended the same prep school as Obama, Punahou. She blogged at Daily Kos about Obama and I want to share with readers her views on the significance of Obama's aloha years.

McCain Plays the Race Card?

2008-08-19T07:50:00.001-07:00

It was interesting reading that one of the people that John McCain cites as a fount of wisdom is someone he doesn't even talk to John Lewis.

Asleep at the Wheel and the Real Liberal Media

2008-08-18T08:35:00.000-07:00

If one carefully reads about and listens to the Bush administration regarding the Russian-Georgian conflagration, the administration’s response was typical: slow response to an obvious problem coming down the pike. For example: ignoring warnings regarding al Qaeda’s attack on the United States; the mismanagement of the war in Iraq; diverting attention from the war in Afghanistan to fight the war in Iraq; inadequate preparation and mobilizing for Hurricane Katrina; and missing the signals that Russia would pursue its interests in its historical sphere of influence.

Reading a recent New York Times article, shows quite clearly that the US thought it could manage the situation, but it sent multiple mixed signals to the Russians and the Georgians, which haphazardly led to Russia flexing its muscles in the Caucasus.

In his weekly radio broadcast , Mr. Bush said nothing about how the Georgians had behaved badly toward the residents of South Ossetia and Abkhazia. Instead, one hears the traditional “emerging young democracy” boilerplate that this administration has spouts.

Likewise, if one saw Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s appearance on Meet the Press, with David Gregory, one would have heard her speak of how Russia’s reputation will pay a price for her invasion of Georgia. Well, this administration would know that since America’s reputation has headed south since the USA’s invasion of Iraq.

This is an administration that only sees diplomacy as an after-thought to a crisis rather than as means to preventing one.

Interestingly, Gregory then engaged in a bit of an international cheap shot when he showed a clip of the Saudi Arabian Olympic team in Beijing.

MR. GREGORY: Here's a picture of Saudi Arabia's flag bearer as it parades in front of the delegation for these games and you'll notice no women and that's because Saudi Arabia does not allow women to compete in their Olympic Games. As an element of the freedom agenda of this administration here in 2008, how do you react to that?

SEC'Y RICE: Well, look, I think Saudi women ought to be able to participate. I've said Saudi women ought to be able to vote and I think that when, when woman can vote and they're empowered, you're going to see them in the games, but I would also note that if women wish to participate in Afghanistan's team, they can. If women wish to participate in Iraq's team, they can. That in most of the Middle East now, women athletes are participating. Those are positive developments. But certainly, I look forward to the day that there's a Saudi woman athlete in that parade.

As if the US government has any control over the International Olympic Committee, which would be the proper organization to address this issue.

Perhaps Rice should have said: “I also look forward to the day when a black woman, or another person of color, male of female, is made the host of Meet the Press. Now, talk about an American freedom agenda.”

As a matter of fact, while watching the Olympics one can view MSNBC promoting it’s vanilla political talking heads: Keith Olbermann, Andrea Mitchell, Chris Matthews, and David Gregory.

Now, that’s the real liberal media…

Phelps Phatigue?

2008-08-15T11:08:00.000-07:00

NBC's positioning/marketing of Olympian Michael Phelps going after the gold is beginning to have the makings of a personality cult.

The Today show's host Matt Lauer asked swimmer Ryan Lochte, who had won a gold medal in one competition but lost to Phelps in another competition, how he thought people would have responded if he'd had "derailed" Phelps, bested him in a competition.

Lochte responded he hope people would have been happy if he’d won. After all, the Olympics are about competition, right? No, marketing it seems. Later, the host asked Lochte about his thoughts about, once again, the Phelpian pursuit.

In Olympics 2008, there are no other games being played; the world eyes are directed on Phelps, whose physique, in another segment, was described as having a "genetic" superiority.

NBC has vested so much time and money in hyping Michael Phelps it seems sacrilegious if another athlete were to win. Lauer's question seemed to infer that there would have been a lynching party waiting for Lochte back home had he won.

If so, Lochte would have not been remembered as an athlete who performed to the best of his ability but as the man who'd derailed the Olympian Chosen One.

New Media Concept: Practicing Journalism

2008-08-14T13:31:00.000-07:00

According Think Progess, CBS News is going to air 35 segments that focus on--Get this!--policy issues facing the American people during an election year. May wonders never cease...

Some Days You Eat the Bear, Some Days the Bear Eats You

2008-08-14T09:51:00.000-07:00

What is one to make of Russia’s attack on Georgia?

Georgia, the birth of Joseph Stalin, had once been a Soviet “republic” and had become a sovereign state after the collapse of the USSR. If one is to accept Russia’s rationale for intervening on behalf of South Ossetia, it is not okay for Georgia to want to territorially reconstitute South Ossetia (and another breakaway Georgian province, Abkhazia) back into its sovereignty; however, it is fair and right for Russia to violently bring Chechnya back into its fold?

Let’s first look at the Russian list of grievances. Since the break-up of the Soviet Union, the West, especially the U.S. under presidents George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton, asserted that NATO would not expand eastwardly. Well, in the eyes of Russia, it was bad enough that former Warsaw Pact nations like Poland and Czech Republic joined NATO, but adding insult to injury, NATO wanted to expand and incorporate the Baltic nations and the Caucasus region, meaning Georgia.

Also, the fact that the United States wanted to place a missile defense system in some of the former Warsaw Pact nations merely increased Russia's sense that she felt encircled and disrespected.

Now, on the other side of the ledger is Georgia, led by President Mikheil Saakashvili . Once again, a former Soviet republic that has become a fledgling democratic republic, but with its own minority issues, noticeably in South Ossetia and Abkhazia. An “ally” of the United States, it sent troops to Iraq (and recalled them back under this current crisis). It has also gotten drunk on the rhetoric of being an “ally” of the United States, taking at face value that the U.S. would do something: come to that nation’s aid when attacked by Russia when Georgia sought to reassert its control over South Ossetia.

That must have been a rude awakening. For Vladimir Putin, now Russia premier and its de facto leader, had traveled to Beijing for the Olympics Games, and then traveled back to Russia to oversee the attack while the Leader of the Free World stayed in Bejing to watch a basketball game and hang out with volleyball players.

So far, all President Mikheil Saakashvili has gotten was a declaration from Sen. John McCain that “We are all Georgians,” and who recently said, without the slightest trace of irony, “In the 21st century, nations don’t invade other nations.”

Notwithstanding Russian aggression and cynicism, the most cynical thing about this international incident is how the U.S. encouraged Georgian behavior within the shadow of Russia. It’s been reported that the US had told the Georgians not to antagonize the Russians, but nation-states, like other nation-states, hear what they want to hear and believe likewise.

The United States knows that its option are limited, but it gave Georgians the belief that they could join NATO knowing full well that to do so would antagonize Russia, but believing that the bear would growl and turn away.

The United States’ behavior eerily recalls how it encouraged the Hungarians to revolt against the Soviets in 1956, yet did nothing when Hungarian freedom fighters did so. The U.S. also did this when it encouraged the Shia in southern Iraq to revolt against Saddam Hussein in the first Gulf War, but did nothing when he and his minions slaughtered them.

The Russians at this time have played a great game. It knows that the U.S. is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, and understands that America needs Russia more so than Russia needs the United States. For example, the United States will most certainly want Russia to use its influence with Iran to make sure that it does not pursue its nuclear ambition. Or, the U.S. would want Russia to back any sanctions that the U.S. would introduced against Iran at the U.N. Russia, if pushed by the United States on Georgia, will ask the U.S. to make a decision: Iran or Georgia? Given the price of oil and its natural gas reserves, Russian undoubtedly feels that it is in the driver seat.

However, the greatest irony in this sordid affair is that Russia’s action, despite her historical relationship with Georgia and her imperial past, has it roots in the United States’ policy of pre-emption, and the actuality of that policy is the present war in Iraq. Regime change has now become the international norm, a gift bequeath to Georgia by the United States.

Blacker Than Black? The Obamas' Marriage Gets a New York Treatment

2008-08-14T07:08:00.000-07:00

"In a fascinating story in this week's New York magazine, Vanessa Grigoriadis takes on the racial dynamics of the Obama marriage, and along the way offers a complex portrait of Michelle Obama,” wrote Salon.com’s Sarah Hepola, who posts at that site’s “Broadsheet.”

Fascinating, huh?

Reading Vanessa Grigoriadis’ Obama article, “Black & Blacker: The Racial Politics of the Obama marriage,” was an excursion into the banality of utter superficiality. Essentially the Obama marriage is “racialized” in the sense that he’s black, or had to become black (“Obama struggled to incorporate blackness into his life…”) while she is authentically black (“She grew up in a strong black community on the South Side of Chicago…”). It is somewhat obvious that they are a married black couple, but so what?

The description of the Obamas’ life together displays no evidence of their connections to black culture, especially now that it’s not prudent for them to join a new church before the election.

For someone like Grigoriadis, there has to be some kind of obvious marker of black culture or blackness—whatever that is in her eyes. Attending an “angry” black church like Trinity is one.

But if the Obamas don’t display any “evidence of their connections to black culture,” then why is their marriage viewed as evidence of racial politics?

What we get are assertions like this: The Obamas, who embody a drama with race as its central theme, know the score, racially speaking, even if they can’t say that they do.

In reality, Grigoriadis doesn’t offer anything new or revealing about them as a married couple. The article merely repeats the same issues or tropes about blackness, anger, Obama being all things to all people, etc. It doesn’t explore what makes them work as a married couple or how they are raising their children in any depth.

On their first date, Barack and Michelle ate ice cream from a Baskin-Robbins and went to see Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing. It’s a heavily symbolic moment, so perfect that it could’ve been scripted.

Now, this is the level of insight this article offers. Michelle makes a routine observation about the character Mookie throwing a garbage can through the window of a neighborhood pizzeria, which causes a riot. However, one is hard pressed to understand why going to see this movie is “symbolic” since it was seen by millions of black couples when it came out and they probably had the same conversation.

No, this article symbolically underscores that attempts regarding dialogue or conversation about race in American is nothing more than a deceitful conceit. Most Americans are not interested in a conversation; they are mostly interested in titillation. Speaking of race in this society is like talking about sex: everyone has an opinion about it because they have either done it or are the products of it, but that doesn’t mean they know anything about it.

What most Americans are interested in is opining about race without understanding anything about the Other. For a good example of this listen to NPR’s Weekend edition (Sunday) series on race and politics.

Not having any depth of feeling for them as human beings or the ability to probe them journalistically, lazily, Grigoriadis pegs her entire story on simpleminded tropes about race and blackness (or the lack thereof). There is no sense that either Obama had any reservations about each other being “too black” or “not black enough.”

This article is just another lazy and cynical example of “race” as titillation, not as a thoughtful explanation of the American experience.

The End of “Old” Black Politics and the Rise of Neo-Black Politics

2008-08-11T07:33:00.000-07:00

Matt Bai’s NY Times Magazine article, “Is Obama the End of Black Politics?”, was an interesting read. The nut of the argument is that Obama, if elected, will signal a generational shift, the coming of age of a new generation of black political leaders who are not of the civil rights era but who also don’t concern themselves exclusively with race. Bai wrote:

Obama joined the Congressional Black Caucus when he arrived in 2005, but he attended meetings only sporadically, and it must have been obvious that he never felt he belonged. In part, this was probably because he was the group’s only senator and thus had little daily interaction with his colleagues in the House. But to hear those close to Obama tell it, it was also because, like Booker and other younger black politicians, he simply wasn’t comfortable categorizing his politics by race. One main function of the black caucus is to raise money through events, because many of the members represent poorer districts. Obama, already a bestselling author by the time he was sworn in, should have been a huge fund-raising draw, but he never showed much interest in headlining caucus events, and he was rarely asked.

And:

This point about whether Obama was “black enough,” a senseless distinction to most white voters, came up often in my discussions. It referred to the perception among some black leaders that not only had Obama not shared their generational experience, but also that he hadn’t shared the African-American experience, period. Obama’s father was a Kenyan academic; his family came to America on scholarship, not in chains.

What’s been developing over the years is the rise of neo-black politicians like Obama, politicos who tended to be elite-school educated, comfortable with whites and have, to varying degrees, passed through America’s dominant institutions: Massachusetts’s Gov. Deval Patrick; Rep. Artur Davis of Alabama; Newark’s Mayor Cory Booker; D.C.’s Mayor Adrian Fenty; Philadelphia’s Mayor Michael Nutter.

They are not part of the “race first” crowd of the old guard of black politics, officials who came to a position of leadership during the civil rights and black power eras, where an elected official had to take a “black line” to show his racial bona fides. But because they could parlay “blackness” into elected office, they didn’t have to necessarily deliver.

A case in point is the Congressional black Caucus (CBC). As I’ve noted elsewhere, the late, controversial Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. passed more legislation as the chairman of the House Committee on Education and Labor— Medicaid, Medicare, Head Start, etc.—than anything the CBC has done collectively in the numerous years of its existence. And given the rise of conservative politics of the last 30 years, the CBC has never significantly organized their constituents to push back against the Republican agenda. Instead, black political power was organized and channeled through the Democratic Party, not outside it.

The Democrats have used blacks to boost themselves into office, but have jettisoned them when becoming concerned about their close association with their most loyal voting bloc.

As political scientist Robert Smith noted in “We Have No Leaders,” most black Democrats, despite the rhetoric of blackness or black solidarity, are more institutionally wedded to the Democratic party than to their actual constituents, which would explain why most members of the CBC, like most blacks, sided with the Clintons initially. Bill Clinton, until Barack Obama’s arrival, was the titular head of the Democratic Party, and lest we forget: the “first black president.”

What this generational shift also portends is that if Obama does become president, it’s more likely that he will usher in the era of black political leaders who are identifiably black but who do not make overt or covert racial appeals to blacks; they want to either transcends race yet don’t want feel that they have to hide their “blackness” much the same way that some politicians don’t have to deny their Irish or Italian ethnicity.

However, what we should watch isn’t whether or not an Obama presidency would be speaking out on racial matters or support issues like affirmative action. What should be of concern is whether or not Obama and his cohorts, represents the outlines of a neo-black politics that has incorporated the certain aspects of Bill Clinton’s neo-liberalism: attack the weak, reward the rich, and triangulate oneself on enough issues so that what is said is heard differently by different audiences.

In an interview with Adolph Reed, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, he argued that Obama’s rap basically is that “that structural problems are too big, that real solutions come from the neighborhood, grassroots and from churches and NGOs, and that’s like a hallmark of neo-liberalism.”

Furthermore, in Reed’s view, what “Obama has to offer is not a policy program that addresses inequality; he never talks about inequality. He talks about opportunity and responsibility…”

And “opportunity and responsibility” are essentially GOP talking points, which are under-girded by the economic marketplace and the marketplace of personal virtues.

Because Obama doesn’t generally speak about inequality, according to Reed, he has yet to galvanize white lower class voters who may be attracted to a series of programs that go beyond and revitalize the New Deal.

That’s a long shot, for Obama, like most neo-liberals, tends to favor marketplace solutions that farms out the government’s role in providing a level playing field to the less than $200,000 crowd. After all, he’s spoken about increasing the government’s budget to faith-based organizations rather than strengthening the laws to protect union organizing, despite Wal-Mart’s fear that an Obama presidency would undermine its concerns.

At the end of the day, a potential Obama presidency wouldn’t really mean the end of black politics, for effective black politics had ended years ago. Given that 25 percent of blacks are still mired in poverty and social dysfunctions, it is striking that African American leadership of the past thirty years has never tried to effectively mobilized black America for internal redevelopment while at the same time press for more government programs to help alleviate what’s going in the country’s urban Bantustans and in third world-like rural enclaves.

Old school race leaders like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton may talk about poverty, but their personal track records have been one of using racial politics as a means of personal self-aggrandizement, of becoming the latest HNIC that whites have to defer to. John Edwards may well have been the last American politician to talk frankly about what everyone really knows: that the “two Americas” is not necessarily either a black or white one, but one that is increasingly composed of socio-economic blocs that are fractured along class lines.

Americans, including blacks, are much more comfortably talking about race than class since race is literally is in everyone’s face, and when you speak of race there’s no demand that one know facts. Just one’s visceral opinion will do. Class, however, and the economic structures that support it, makes most Americans uncomfortable because that could entail just having to do something about it.

What an Obama electoral win might portend, however, is a black version of Clintonism, a combination of neo-black politics and neo-liberalism, in which policies that affect lower and middling classes are passed as a form of tough love while the wrecking crew that has pretty much destroyed the nation’s economic, social and political infrastructure over the past twenty years wait out their exile.

Pay close attention to Obama’s Democratic acceptance speech in Denver on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s seminal speech at the storied March on Washington. Will he present a racial healing or unity speech that will seek to transcend social rancor or rank political partisanship, or will he offer the nation a bold set of ideas and programs that will strike at the heart of the nation’s ravages of social and economic inequities?

In other words, will he have the audacity to truly audacious?

The “2 A.M. Booty Call”: Q&A with Adolph Reed

2008-08-09T07:55:00.000-07:00

Adolph Reed is perhaps one of America’s most incisive thinkers, scholars and activist. However, when one thinks of today’s black public intellectuals, unlike Henry Louis Gates, Cornel West or Michael Eric Dyson, on the left, or Shelby Steel or John McWhorter or Thomas Sowell, on the right, Reed’s name infrequently comes up. Despite being an author of several books and a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and activist, he is often under the radar. This is due to the fact that unlike the aforementioned “market intellectuals” who either sell attitude or provide glib rationalizations for audiences that have become markets, Reed tries to inform people of what they really need to know rather than what they what they want to hear.

In the May 2008 issue of the Progressive magazine, in which he writes a monthly column, he offered a trenchant argument regarding Barack Obama. We spoke for about forty-five minutes one Wednesday morning.

***

Norman Kelley: You have taken a pretty tough position on Obama. You have termed him: (a) “vacuous opportunist”; (b) a “performer with a good ear for how to make white liberals like him”; and then described him as: (c) a “neo-liberal.” Let’s go over those in some detail. If you hadn’t met him directly, you were in Chicago the same time that Obama came on the scene, right?

Adolph Reed: Right. I’d worked closely with his opponent [Alice Palmer] on the [Illinois] state race, who was the incumbent. There a set of unfortunate dynamics that played out there, which I don’t want to bore readers with, but we wind up having some negotiations with him. She had actually introduced him around as her successor and, primarily at the urging of people like myself and others in her inner circle, she decided to take back her commitment and hold onto her state senate seat.

So we were around the Obama people, as well as his broad camp of supporters at Hyde Park, there were a couple of fairly open meetings where we tried to discuss a way of solving this issue and couldn’t. And it turns out that what Obama did was get her thrown off the ballot by challenging her signature petitions.

That’s one interesting thing about Obama; he’s only had one real opponent for elective office prior to this [campaign] and that’s when he ran against Bobby Rush for a congressional seat and lost very, very badly.

Kelley: You also called him a performer who has a good ear for how to make white liberals like him. What’s your example of that?

Reed: Well, I guess the way I would put it in a different context is that he has a talent, and I think maybe his greatest talent, for saying enough of what the constituency that he’s talking to at the moment want to hear and saying it persuasively that he can leave them believing that’s he with them, while at the same time packing enough qualifiers so that he can deny the next day that’s what he’s actually meant. We saw him do that in the AIPAC speech even though he didn’t pack the qualifiers around it. He was very clear that Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel, and he said a couple of days later, “Oh, no, that’s not exactly what I meant.”

Kelley: That sounds like a talent that people said about Bill Clinton.

Reed: Absolutely. He’s a black fulfillment of Clintonism, and I should put that in a different way: he is a fulfillment of Clintonism so thoroughly partly because he is black, at least nominally. Because you remember, Clinton, at least for some of us, had this infuriating practice and knack for connecting emotionally, or emotively, with black audiences. So he gets props for being able to connective emotively with a black audience while at the same time speaking through the black audience to a white racist audience, ultimately, telling black people they needed to take personal responsibility. He shilled for that hideous crime bill at a black church in Memphis and that kind of thing, and Obama can get a way with being even more vicious and victim blaming than Clinton because he is black.

And he’s done that consistently as well; the Philadelphia speech, the Houston speech where he’s going about “We have to stop feeding our children Popeye’s Chicken for breakfast,” the haughtiness at the NAACP. As I said in another interview last week, I might accept that this isn’t beating up on a racialized imagery of the black underclass, that’s attacking poor black people in a victim-blaming way, if he would go and tell the hedge fund operators that he talks to that that shouldn’t feed their kids the equivalent of Popeye’s Chicken in the morning or they need to be responsible fathers.

Kelley: You also used the term neo-liberal to describe him. Let’s explore that.

Reed: This connects in a certain way because what Obama has to offer is not a policy program that addresses inequality; he never talks about inequality. He talks about opportunity and responsibility…

Kelley: Which are Republican talking points…

Reed: …If you noticed when he met with evangelicals a few weeks ago, he pledged to them he would give them more HHS [Health and Human Services] and HUD [Housing and Urban Development] budget because government can’t solve the problems that afflict poor communities in inner cities. And this has been part of his rap from the very beginning, this line that structural problems are too big, that real solutions come the neighborhood, grassroots and from churches and NGOs, and that’s like a hallmark of neo-liberalism.

In his meeting with evangelicals he got behind all the faith-based stuff; he basically gave them a promise to give them more of the budget than the Bush administration had while reiterating the claim that government can’t provide social services effectively. He has never taken a position on any kind of redistribution and his fiscal and economic policies are, as [New York Times columnist] Paul Krugman has pointed out, were to the right of Clinton who had begun as the DLC’s standard bearer. His foreign policy is no less imperialist than Bush’s foreign policy. Like Kerry before him, his argument is that the war on terrorism hasn’t been fought efficiently enough. He’s on record for wanting to expand it; to redeploy troops to Iraq to Afghanistan and even into Pakistan.

What’s interesting about this is that I noticed that Tom Hayden, who been slurping down that Kool-Aide on an IV for sometime, seemed to notice last month finally that Barack Obama wants to expand the war. Well, Obama said that more than a year ago. I mentioned that in my November column in the Progressive. So one of the things that is interesting and mind-boggling, and I don’t mean interesting in a good way, is the will to believe in Obama even from people whose political identification is with the left, liberal-left and have been for sometime.

Kelley: So, you don’t see the Obama campaign as a potential opportunity, opening a door, for progressive forces to set the national agenda?

Reed: Well, I know one isn’t, technically, suppose to answer a question with a question, but I’ll start out with one. If we can’t get him to pay attention to us now when he needs our votes, why do we think he’ll pay attention to us when he’s elected, if he’s elected? I’m feeling less and less likely that he’ll be elected. This is like the logic of the 2 a.m. booty call. We’re saying in effect, “Well, I know he’s always out in public with her and he seems happy, but he’s told me that he really wants be with me.” There’s no reason to believe past a certain point that if this is what he does, this is what he really will do.

Kelley: So, what does this say about left of center, progressive organizing? The left doesn’t seem to be able to make politicians pay attention to issue it considers important, so the left is forced to go along with the lesser of two evils. There doesn’t seem to be any substantive organizing on the left. This has been the most organized that the left has been in a while. What’s been going on?

Reed: Well, I think you hit the nail on its head. The election season is too late to think about; it’s already happened. It’s a little bit like what happens with these urban renewal projects: by the time we find out about them, it’s too late to do anything about them except to try and find some way to negotiate the best possible terms of surrender, and this is the way this election stuff is.

Over the last 25, 30 years, and this is what I’ve been trying to get a more elaborate argument about, is that of all of American left of center politics—the labor movement, civil rights movement, women’s movement, public interest movement, environmental movement, you can go down the list—apart from disconnected individuals and small group list, sectarian activists, that is to say, all the left of center groups that have any institutional foundation for traction have long since fallen into a groove that assumes, or a groove that reproduces a political praxis assumes that the equivalent post-[Second World] war bargaining system is still in effect, and it hasn’t been. It hasn’t been for a long time.

For instance, I’m on the board of Public Citizen. Two of the most important things we’ve have done is lobby and litigate. Now, we can still win some victories on both those fronts; the Global Trade Watch campaign and Lori Wallach have both obviously successful in maximizing opportunities to win lobby and legislative victories on the trade front. Most of them, still no fault of our own, is more about stopping bad stuff than about winning good stuff.

The same is true in the courts, but in both of those areas, both in the legislature and in the courts, a logic of diminishing returns have set in because success in either of those domains depend being able to assume neutrality, if not some measure of good will, from the courts and the legislature. It is less and less possible to assume that.

The problem here is, to some extent, the changing of praxis, the changing of grooves is like trying to steer a battleship, and there are internal pressures that keep those institutions moving along the same path even though the returns are getting less. If you poked you head up and look down the road, you can see that this groove is going to run you into the ocean or onto an oncoming train, some place that isn’t good.

In this context what politics has been reduced to is the election cycle and going to elect your Democrat.

Kelley: Now this is interesting. It seems that the right understands just the opposite, they seem to understand that there’s another election that takes place between every four years; they mobilize, they organize…

So, this leads this question: How would you characterize the general state of left of center organizing as compared to the right? I mean, over the past 30 years the right has won the White House, controlled Congress, and have placed conservatives on the Supreme Court while the left has only been organizing itself on the Internet and has been unable to make any decisive policy victories that improve people’s lives

Reed: I think that’s absolutely right. In a way, and this is a simplistic account, but you can take the Goldwater defeat [of 1964] as a kind of iconic moment for the right. For them, that was kind of like the Canton uprising of 1928, they got routed and they figure out “We have to do something different,” and they had sense enough to understand that the result of the [1964] election they didn’t have the constituency that they needed, or the constituency that they needed to push the policy agenda that they have didn’t exist and they needed to create it.

And you don’t create in it in two years or four years; you create it by digging in real places that have names and addresses, and organizing people with who have real names and addresses, to implant a different way of conceptualizing what the pertinent issues are in politics, and building alliances that knit together constituencies around them.

I would recommend to everyone taking a look at Shapiro and Graetz’s book “Death By A Thousand Cuts,” which is really a nice examination of how the rightwing termed the estate tax into the “death tax” and built a durable alliance to defeat it even though no more than 2 percent of the American population has ever paid it. And as with everything else, part of the story is of acquiescence and the abetting of the liberals, for that’s what made the victory of the right possible along the way.

Part of the story that is true on our side of the ledger is a kind anti-politics strain that emerged of a section of the New Left. One vantage of the right had been that they knew what they were organizing for; they were organizing to win power. A lot people on the left were skittish about the idea of power.

Kelley: That’s an interesting point. I’ve had said that if you look at what’s going on the left is more interested in theory. Generally, the academic left is interested in theory, (I have coined the term the “theoriocracy”), but the right is interested in power. They organized to go after the economy, they went after the Supreme Court, they went after the White House and Congress, and then built these media outlets to get their message across and to challenge or denigrate, but the left doesn’t appear to be interested [dealing with the lack of effective power] or is slowly waking up to that reality.

Reed: I agree with your analysis completely, but I would also add in addition to theory is self-expression. Our politics tends to recede to being smart, and one of the things that the logic of being smart does it tells you that there is no way that you can win because the right is too powerful. But one of the other features is, bearing witness, and the politics of bearing witness and the politics of movement building don’t run on the same track. They are often in conflict.

Kelley: In what way?

Reed: It happened in the anti-war politics, and overlaps with a couple of the other pathologies, that have afflicted the left. The idea of the object of political action is to have a demonstration mistakes the tip of the iceberg for the iceberg. People like it because it gives them something to do, because they can get the sense that they are taking action in some way; in the sense of buying a red tee shirt takes action, ultimately. And it is a kind of low cost way of feeling that you’re doing something; so you got to the rally, you take your sign, you chant your slogan, you go home, you feel good about yourself.

Kelley: Your feet are tired but your soul is rested…

Reed: There you go; that would make a good tee shirt; put it on the cover and the back. But it doesn’t add up to anything, especially since we have fallen into— in the politics of demonstrations—what I have called the “permit regime.” We first of all go get a permit for the march and the authorities over the last 30 years have gotten really smart about this. They make sure you walk some place where nobody will see you, where you won’t disrupt anything, and where you gather some place where you won’t have contact with someone outside the demonstration, and they can’t see you or hear you.

The culture of demonstration has evolved to acknowledge this material reality, because I think that’s where all the young people juggling on unicycles, dressed up like from where turtles come from, from the fact that the mass demo is going on some place in a gully and will have no impact on anything. The last thing that Todd Gitlin wrote that I thought was any good was his book “The Whole World is Watching and the Unmaking of the New Left.”

Kelley: That’s one of the best books out there…

Reed: That’s something else that people ought to read. Unfortunately, I have to lay a lot of that at the feet of my generation and the New Left. The social fractions that make up the core base of this kind of leftism, are people whose lives are not going to be much affected no matter who wins. I mean, The Nation crowd, in so far members of the academy or elsewhere, are by and large well connected enough that they have got good stable jobs with decent access to healthcare and benefits and maybe pensions. No Democratic politics or no presidential candidate on the Democratic label has been able to go out and offer concrete proposals for making better the lives of most working people in this country.

Kerry’s so-called healthcare proposal was going cost a trillion dollars and by his own acknowledgment—and it was a complex Rube Goldberg contraption that was complex because he wanted to make sure that insurance companies were brought in—and by acknowledgement was going to leave half of the 46 million who are uninsured still uninsured. His antiwar stance of fighting it better and sending in more troops wasn’t going to do anything to ease the concerns of those Wal-Mart workers and public schools teachers, who along with their kids in the National Guard were otherwise being called up. You end but don’t mend the other…Not exactly privatize the pension system but you don’t shore it up, either.

Kelley: If either party is not going to address the needs of working people, why do you think there is no third party of some sort of independent political apparatus that can place demands on the system?

Reed: That’s a very good question. I spent more than the last fifteen years trying to build an independent labor party and it’s hard because of the kind of institutional factors we’ve had talked about before. We founded the labor party a few months before the ’96 election and we assumed that every one in the labor movement would be focused on election, and stuff usually starts a year or so before the actual election. And then you’re not doing anything except taking care of the everyday business that needs to be taken care of. And then all of these institutions [of the left] have shrunken revenues bases and are trying to do more with less, and some of it is just something, frankly, as venal as, “Well, not that I’m just doing okay,” but there’s a staff stratum that moves back and forth between unions and public interest groups, congressional staff to the DNC.

So they move back and forth and there’s a logic of not wanting to piss anyone off so they keep their options open, which really translates into a different version of “Well, I’m doing okay with things are they are, so why should I try to do anything different that might tick of the congressman at men that could prevent a bill from getting through. Some people might think that I’m an irresponsible radical.”

Kelley: If McCain doesn’t win the November election, you know the right will be mending itself. However, I get the feeling that if Obama wins, the left will sigh, let down its guard and just say what, “What is this guy to do for us?” instead of having a set of policies that they would like implemented.

Reed: Unquestionably, with Obama, as with Kerry, as with Gore, as with Clinton, in some non-trivial ways, our side would likely be better off, at least for the first four years of an Obama presidency, with Obama in office than with McCain, but that’s only one level of calculations. We also need to think of a long-term view. You go back to Clinton; Clinton was able to do things that would have been arguably difficult for a Republican do.

Kelley: Like the repeal of welfare….

Reed: The repeal of welfare, the elimination of the federal government’s 60-year old commitment to federal housing for poor people, NAFTA, those two hideous crime bills, and something else that people have only begun to pay a little attention to. It was under the Clinton administration that you saw the first significant burst of financial deregulations, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall [Act], another edifice of the New Deal, which kicked off the speculative wave of the dot.com boom that became later the dot.com bust. And the same thing that I have confirmed recently has been true of housing speculation, but even beyond those specific policy entailments that wound up wreaking a lot of havoc on so-called traditional Democratic constituencies, the longer term cost of Clinton’s victory was much more of a consolidation of his notion of neo-liberalism is what legitimate political aspiration is on the left. That’s what makes it possible for Obama, who is even to the right of Clinton, to proclaim himself as the boundary of progressive politics.

I want to reiterate what I said both in the Progressive and the Black Agenda Report. I am not arguing that people shouldn’t vote for Obama. In fact, what I’m arguing is that it is not clear that whether you vote for him or don’t vote for him is an important issue, or whether the cost and benefit of doing one of the other can be calculated clearly enough to come down on either side of that question.

I’m just not going to do it because I’ve just gotten to a point where I’m not going to ask someone to come and do it to me. I’m not going to offer to toss somebody’s salad; they may make me do it, but I’m not going to ask for it. But that’s just a matter of personal idiosyncrasy; I can’t argue against for voting for him. What I would argue against is for trying to justify voting for him [in the belief] that in the short term that he’s likely to be less dangerous than McCain.

Kelley: That’s something to keep in mind. I’ve been telling people that if he gets into office you have to watch him.

Reed: But once you vote him.… He hasn’t even counted up all the delegates, yet; he didn’t even leave an equivalent of cab money on the table, you know what I mean? He just got what he wanted and was gone. I think one thing that comes true in that New Yorker article ["Making It; How Chicago Shaped Obama"], although they are too much in support of him for it to come through quite clearly, is that is what his entire political career has been. There’s been nothing there but ambition. There’s been no alliance that he hasn’t sold out.

You can talk to people in Hyde Park about that, too. Some of my friends, including my doctor, who’s a longtime activist, who’s also Obama’s doctor and Jesse Jackson’s doctor—I told him the last time I saw him that he’s probably the only man in the world who can claim that he has had two fingers stuck up the behind of Obama and Jesse Jackson—well, he was a supporter of Obama earlier and before Obama went to the U.S. Senate, he had soured on him.

###

In a brief phone conversation days later, while clarifying a point, I asked Reed what did he make of Jesse Jackson’s castration remark regarding Obama “talking down to black people.” Reed observed: “That Jesse’s remark was consistent with his pettiness and it also reflects how the old school ‘race first’ crowd has been trying to get a handle on the Obama campaign.”

"I'm Just Hot." Paris Hilton Offers Her Energy Policy

2008-08-06T07:15:00.000-07:00

Paris Hilton coolly dismisses McCain as the "white-haired dude" in her presidential video and offers a "hybrid" of both McCain's and Obama's energy policies, which echoes what the bi-partisan Senate "Gang of Ten" has offered as a compromise, if not a direct steal.

What to do about being "Black and Blue"

2008-08-04T08:53:00.000-07:00

Some interesting insights from Drew Westen, whom I interviewed a few weeks ago, on what Team Obama's response should be to the recent ads from Team McCain.

Westen is the author of "The Political Brain," which ought to be the handbook of every Democratic strategist. The real problem, however, is that the Republicans already understand what he's talking about.

The Black Bimbo (with a correction and apologies)

2008-08-02T07:03:00.000-07:00

Note: In an earlier post regarding the McCain campaign's video association of Obama with two current pop female pop celebrities, I mistakenly cited Lindsay Lohan instead of Britney Spears. Usually when I cite a reference to an article or ad, I check the original source and make a link to it. For some odd reason, I didn’t and thus my obvious mistake. Although blogs are mostly opinion oriented, I strive to make whatever I post fact-based since facts as well as the truth are important.

My apologies to TPM readers, to Ms. Lohan, and the McCain campaign.

***

What is McCain really inferring by his association of Obama with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? It’s not merely being a celebrity, for his campaign could have chosen George Clooney, a liberal Hollywood hunk, or Brad Pitt.

No, these gals are just frivolous, airheads, the kind who suck up more media airtime like that frivolous two-book writing, Harvard-trained, University of Chicago lawyer professor, first-term senator from the Land of Lincoln. He’s like numerous other blondes in America pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smith, or Pam Anderson, all airheads, all frivolous, some gold-diggers.

Women like Spears and Hilton are, after all, the essence of trophy wives; nice to look at, but you don’t take them seriously.

There’s nothing serious about this guy Obama. He doesn’t inspire people; he ain’t cool like the Senator McCain, who has a war record and years in Congress.

Obama isn’t a real nigga, black man; the kind that America fears but is used to: Mr. T. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Le Bron James, Samuel Jackson, These men exude some kind of niggatude that make them a known entity, and useful. You may hate them, but they are the black devils you know rather than the Obama devil you don't know.

Obama? He’s slim and sleek, which makes him suspicious in the eyes of some of the electorate who may not vote for him because he ain’t fat. He’s has nice smile, too.

In a word, a bimbo. No, two words, an Obama bimbo.

The Black Bimbo

2008-08-01T09:04:00.000-07:00

What is McCain really inferring by his association of Obama with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan? It’s not merely being a celebrity, for his campaign could have chosen George Clooney, a liberal Hollywood hunk, or Brad Pitt.

No, these gals are just frivolous, airheads, the kind who suck up more media airtime like that frivolous two-book writing, Harvard-trained, University of Chicago lawyer professor, first-term senator from the Land of Lincoln. He’s like numerous other blondes in America pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smithe or Pam Anderson, all airheads, all frivolous, some gold-diggers.

Women like Lohan and Hilton are, after all, the essence of trophy wives; nice to look at, but you don’t take them seriously.

There’s nothing serious about this guy Obama. He doesn’t inspire people; he ain’t cool like the Senator McCain, who has a war record and years in Congress.

Obama isn’t a real nigga, black man; the kind that America fears but is used to: Mr. T. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Le Bron James, Samuel Jackson, These men exude some kind of niggatude that make them a known entity, and useful. You may hate them, but they are the black devils you know rather than the Obama devil you don't know.

Obama? He’s slim and sleek, which makes him suspicious in the eyes of some of the electorate who may not vote for him because he ain’t fat. He’s has nice smile, too.

In a word, a bimbo. No, two words, an Obama bimbo.

Obama = Hitler?

2008-07-29T10:57:00.000-07:00

It's been interesting noting how some conservatives keep trying to make a leap in logic and equate American left-of-center politics with fascism or Nazism. As I noted before, the mere fact that Obama is able to draw thousands of people to his rallies seems to make the Right down right hysterical. They know he's charismatic and a gifted speaker, and can draw in numerous people who could help him affect change. Obama is more Christ-like than Hitlerian, and not because he walks on water.

So, let's compare the leadership qualities of Barack Obama and Adolf Hilter. And who would know better about the latter than Joseph Goebbels, who wrote in a 1929 essay, Der Fuhrer, celebrating Hitler's 40th birthday.

"A leader must possess character, will, ability, and luck. If these four characteristics form a harmonious unity in a brilliant person, we have a man called by history.

Character is the most significant factor. Knowledge, book learning, experience and practice do more harm than good if they are not based on strong character. Character brings them to their best expression. It requires courage, endurance, energy, and consistency. Courage gives a person not only the ability to recognize what is right, but also to say and do it. Endurance gives him the ability to pursue the chosen goal, even if apparently impossible obstacles stand in the way, and to proclaim it even if it is unpopular, even if it makes him unpopular. Energy mobilizes the strength to risk everything for the goal and the persistence to keep at it. Consistency gives his eye and mind the sharpness of knowledge and logic in thought and action that gives truly great people the ability to reach the eternally wavering masses. These manly virtues together comprise that which we call character. Character, in short, is style and behavior in the highest form."

By any stretch of the imagination, to varying degrees, the above qualities could be attributed to any American figure from George Washington to Abraham Lincoln to Teddy Roosevelt to Martin Luther King, Jr. Or, diverse historical and contemporary figures such as Joan of Arc to Gandhi to Daw Aung San Suu Kyi. What Goebbels is expressing is the romantic German leader, who possesses singular will, the will to triumph.

Once again, Goebbels:

"...The will distinguishes the man who acts from the man who merely thinks. It is the intermediary between knowledge and action. It is much more important for us to want that which is right than it is simply to know what is right. This is particularly true in politics. What good is it for me to know the enemy if I do not have the will to destroy him!"

Also, as Goebbels said, "Knowledge, book learning, experience and practice do more harm than good if they are not based on strong character." Obama seems by temperment an intellectual, albeit a practical and pragmatic one, and one guided and humbled by faith, that irrational quality of human existence that unnverves some people.

The mere fact that Obama sought to analyze lower-income whites as "clinging" to guns and relgion caused him to be charactrized as an "elitist." Often he was rerided as soft, a chump, not having the will to win simply because he adovocated a "different kind of politics," and in some cases, viewed by others, as emasculated by his wife.

Obama was recently recorded talking to David Cameron, the Tory leader, just on having the time to think and reflect. Now, one would think that is exactly the kind of quality one would want in a modern leader facing a complex world.

Here is a man in his prayer to God, pulled from the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, asking for the wisdom to do what's right and protect his family--not the self-centered motive to be the maximum leader.

Obama & Adolf: the Right's Guilt By Non-Association

2008-07-29T10:08:00.000-07:00

You have to love these guys, they never miss an oppotunity to smear. Fox News panel's Charles Krauthammer alluded to Obama's Berlin speech as having the whiff of Der Fuhrer.

Interestingly, Krauthammer neglected to mention the numerous American flags waving at the same speech.

Gal Chat: Meredith Vieira Interviews Nancy Pelosi

2008-07-29T07:17:00.000-07:00

What is one to make of Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, the first woman to become hold that position? Politician, wife, mother, grandmother, a woman often personified as a “San Francisco liberal.”

A woman with a killer political smile (or grimace), she was on NBC’s “Today Show” promoting her book, “Know Your Power,” a slim motivational tome that’s suppose to help women achieve their potential.

Dressed in a suave, summery, light green two-piece suit, she cheerfully answered some non-challenging questions from co-host Meredith Vieira in a five-minute segment.

Now, the “Today Show” is a supremely vacuous program; the show’s personalities— Vieira, Matt Lauer, Al Roker, and Ann Curry—are certifiable chatter-heads, clucking away endless about nothing most of the time, listening to the sound of their own voices, and spending a great deal of airtime on personality and culinary flotsam and jettison.

The “Today Show” model is so influential that all the other networks and even cable shows have the same format: chatter-heads sitting around running their mouths. Even Fox has the same format on “Fox and Friends,” and some Spanish stations have also adopted it.

(If one wants a good example of how utterly inane “Today” is, the show invited the Miss South Carolina airhead who couldn’t intelligibly answer a basic question about why Americans are so mis-educated, unable to find their own country on a map! She was invited on the show to "laugh" at herself.)

On “Today,” for almost every day of the last two weeks, there was a segment on the economy and how viewers could: save money budgeting; how to pick coupons from Coupon.com; picking the right city to retire in; looking after one’s finances; how to plan your retirement in these economically straitened times; along with emotionally manipulative stories that always spell "tragedy" (i.e., an injured or dead loved one), etc.

Not missing a beat, however, the show then turned around and did a segment on how the economy is stressing people, but never once admitted that one of the main instruments of stress is the constant television reporting of the economy’s hard times—especially by shows such as “Today,” and when "Today" does its lifestyle features, it’s basically only five-minutes of talkin- points captions.

So, not only is it stressing people, but it’s questionable if its lifestyle/service reporting is giving viewers much of anything of substance to help improve their lot, just tidbits. “Today” is a national show, so factor in that local news shows, as the Washington’s area WRC-Channel 4, are doing the same kind of “news” reporting ad infinitum.

Let’s face it, like everything else in America, this is about entertainment, not keeping people reasonably informed.

True to it’s time-honored format, Meredith Vieira only “substantive” questions were centered on asking Speaker Pelosi if Senator Hlillary Clinton had breached the marble ceiling, or her tampering down expectation that Barack Obama ought to pick Sen. Clinton as his running mate.

Now, it has often been alluded that Pelosi was a closet Obama gal, and some have wondered if that position was due to a philosophical/political kinship with Obama, or the fact that Pelosi was engaging in some classic political cock-blocking.

Had HRC won the nomination and then win the presidency, who would be the most powerful woman in America (and the world)?

Even if Obama loses, and he has a 50-50 chance of doing that as well as winning, Speaker Pelosi would still be the most politically powerful woman in the United States among powerful men.

Back to my original question: What is one to make of Pelosi, and the House Democrats?

Speaker Pelosi and the Democrats took over the House of Representatives in 2006, and have almost squandered every opportunity to show leadership. Skillful at winning elections, they have shown themselves to be bad at governance, handing lame-duck president George W. Bush unprecedented victories. They have shown themselves to be a party of capitulation unable to scale down the war and end it, or challenge the ever-increasing and unlawful expansion of presidential power that serially violates the Constitution.

Instead of aimless girl chat about empowering women (not that there’s anything fundamentally wrong with that), Ms.Vieira could have asked some real questions of the Speaker, such as:

1. Why haven’t you and your Democrat colleagues use the power of the purse, i.e., the means to fund, to shut of money for the war in Iraq?

2. Why have you only recently allowed the House Judiciary Committee to hold hearings on the expansion of presidential power, which could lead to impeachment, rather than initiate them in early 2007?

3. Could you explain the news stories that you and other Democratic leaders had earlier knowledge of the torture and "enemy combtant" imprisonment policies of the Bush administration? Are House Democrats afraid of being called soft on terrorism?

4. Why have House Democrats become complicit with the egregious updating of FISA, giving immunity to telecommunication firms who broke the law? Once again, are House Democrats afraid of being called soft on terrorism?

So, what has Nancy Pelosi done with her new-found power? Given how craven the Democratic Party has behaved recently, will winning the White House, gaining more seats in both chambers, actually give them impetus to really change the direction of the country? Or, will the American people just be given more hype than actual hope regarding the possibility of actually doing something substantive?

Inquiring minds want to know.

Why Conservatives Fear Obama: Like Reagan, He Gives Good "Head"

2008-07-26T09:05:00.000-07:00

Recently I’ve made comments about the increasing trivialization of politics. My examples were the Nation magazine’s sex column and TMZ, a syndicated celebrity show, which had mused about coming to Washington to chase around the nation’s political class, which pretty much means getting into politicians’ sex life.

Well, an epiphany occurred to me while listening to the Diane Rehm Show’s “Friday News Roundup” sextion, uh, section. (DRS Hour 1 Fri 07-25-2008)

One of the panel’s commentators, Tony Blankley, referred to the media "fellatus coverage" of Obama’s overseas jaunt. Fellatus is the polite Latinate form of the male specie's most favorite sex act after the old in-out, in-out. You know, head.

Well, maybe there is something to this sex and politics business. After all, the McCain campaign had released a video critical of the media called “Obama Love.”

Obama truly unnerves the GOP and the broader conservative movement. That Obama, often called the rock star of American politics, attracts large, adoring, worshipful crowds and has a formidable political apparatus has caused some on the right side of the political aisle to quiver.

This is truly an interesting stretch of logic, given how often Obama is cited as the most liberal member of the Senate. Yet one should not be too surprised about that given how Jonah Goldberg has uniquely cited the rise of, the instinct for fascism on the left.

Media Matters has often noted this comparison, how various conservative chatter-heads have invoked a comparison between Obama and Hitler, or how his crowds of admirers echo the Nazi rallies.

Blankley’s consciously contemptuous characterization of the media may have unconsciously disclosed something else.

What truly unnerves conservatives about Obama is that he, like the conservatives’ favor iconic politician, Ronald Reagan, gives good head. You listen and observe, and, to some degree, Obama either tells you what you want to hear, or you hear what you want to believe.

It’s a seduction; and, to borrow from Prince, morning, noon and night, he gives you head. The next day, you wake up and say, “Yes, I can.”

In others words, Obama is a master communicator, giving people food for thought, talking to them as if they were adults (the only people who are sanctioned to receive head).

To be blunt and crude: he gives them a good mental fuck, rather than fucking with their minds.

What he says, to varying degrees, makes sense to people. People listen to his words and hear something that they like about the man. He gives good head, good intellectual head, as well as food for the heart and soul.

Republicans, the conservatives, have always argued that ideas do matter, and the only way for ideas to be received is through one's head. Obama’s basic idea is that we ought to come together as a nation--regardless of race and ideology, sex and gender--to solve some basic American problems.

There hasn’t been a master communicator like this since Reagan (and Bill Clinton), and that’s what scares the Republicans. They know that any meaningful political realignment in American politics, such as FDR’s “New Deal” or the “Reagan revolution,” requires a masterful articulator who inspires and explains to people his agenda.

Obama is a man who gives hope as well as good head; good, intellectual, soulful head.

Bill O'Reilly Blacks Up!

2008-07-24T13:29:00.000-07:00

If you want to see a classic example of how Fox News blacks up, watch Bill O'Reilly call MoveOn.org the "new Klan,"aided and abetted by two blacks, NPR's Juan Williams (also a Fox commentator) and Republican strategist Angela McGlowan. With Williams, getting into the right-wing scheme of things, shouting "Fascist!"

A classic moment in neo-racism.

The Continuing Trivialization of American Politics

2008-07-24T06:27:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I noted that The Nation magazine was beginning a sex column called "Carnal Knowledge." This column undoubtedly will explore the intersection of sex and politics in all of its myriad forms, and represents, as I also stated, Neil Postman's view, as expressed in his book "Amusing Ourselves to Death," that serious discourse in American society is increasingly driven by entertainment values, especially by television. Pop culture, for better or worse, rules America, not knowledge, wisdom or expertise. To even possess the such taints one as an "elitist."

This explains, to varying degrees, the success of Fox News and why cable programs on MSNBC have become successful with conservatives; they adhere to entainment values while promoting a conservative agenda. But as Salon's Glenn Greenwald has noted this has also meant that the nation's political press has tended to focus on petty, personality aspects of politics, especially in regard to defining Democrats in unflattering terms--particularly the menfolk of that party as essentially pussywhipped.

Recall the constant replay of the video of John Edward's mussing his hair, or the inane commentary voice by Chris Matthews about Barack Obama's bowling skills or the fact that he asked for OJ instead of coffee while in a diner. Or Ann Coulter referring to Edwards as a "faggot." Or Maureen Dowd calling Obama "Obambi." Or the number of items discussing Hillary Rodham Clinton's laughter, cleavage, hair style, etc.

Stating the obvious, American politics, more than ever before, is essentially personality, not policy, driven.

"What drives politics is celebrity," Wypijewski told [ MarketWatch's Jon Friedman ] during a phone conversation. "What drives celebrity is sex appeal."

Yesterday when it was reported that the dark prince of American punditry, Robert Novak, had hit a pedestrian, ThinkProgress.org ran a piece on it. However, what caught my eye was that TMZ, the celebrity-based website had something on it. Now that site runs a section called "Celebrity Justice," and it's based on the foibles of the rich and famous' run-ins with the law, and how they tend to escape John Law's grip unlike common mortals.

Now, none of these is of much importance, but TMZ, which broadcasts in the DC area on a local Fox TV affiliate, has been musing about doing a similiar show on the nation's political class in Washington, DC. What this would probably mean is the further trivialization of American politics, with paparrazzi chasing around the nation's politicos and getting transgressive shots of their peccadilloes, which then becomes the stuff of chatter for the nation's chatterheads who influence, if not control, the agenda of the nation's political narrative.

Now, I'm not arguing that our political class ought to be isolated from reporters duly reporting on their conduct when it affects their jobs, as in the case of former NY's governon Eliot Spitzer's serial dalliance with call girls. But what is increasingly happening on the left, right and center is the use of sex and the reporting of sex-driven issues to occlude the more important issues of the public. Let's face it; sex sells, but do you want it constantly in your face?

The left, especially the academic left, has made a cottage industry of talking about "transgressing boundaries," and Rupert Murdoch's News Corp. has had a history and practice of titillation in some of its holdings. If the boundaries separating politics from sex hasn't totally collapsed, the Nation's sex cloumn, TMZ's proposed Washington DC show, the MSM's prurient interest in sex all tend to point to the constant trivialization of American politics.

What this form of trivialization also underscores is a passive-aggressive schadenfreude in which the sexual foilbles of the political is exposed, but no action, except watching TV, is taken to combat detrimental policies.

Increasingly, politics is treated as another part of the media's spectacle, and politicians as merely another form of "celebrities." Or as some have noted, "Politics is for people too ugly for Hollywood."

SexNation: The Nation gets a Sex Column

2008-07-23T12:35:00.000-07:00

For years I've stopped reading The Nation. I simply found it, well, kind of predictable and boring, telling me things I already knew but not challenging my basic assumptions. But now The Nation is going to tart things up; it's getting a sex column, That's right SEX. You know, that nasty but fun stuff.

According to JoAnn Wypijewski, the columnist for "Carnal Knowledge,"

"It's sex, man! I think that's why they call it popular culture."

Now to some degree, what this confirms to me is an observation that the late Neil Postman made in "Amusing Ourselves to Death," namely serious discourse in American society is driven by entertainment values, and what this means, as I've noticed with some stories about Obama, that column will be interrogating the intersection of sex and politics, which surely mean it will be hot! Hot! HOT! now that a sexy black man and his bitch-goddess wife may occupy 1600 Penn. Avenue.

But what this may also mean that serious political discourse can't even survive in The Nation without a political analysis of the old in-out, in-out.

The left has made a cottage industry out analyzing pop culture, which I think has ruined the left's mind, especially the academic left with has produced all sorts of studies—black, gender, queer, post-modernism, deconstruction, etc. It has basically produced a theoriocracy that can analyze text but not explain the economy or any relevant sociological facts.

Generally, the left is interested in theory and pop culture while the right is interested in power and has organized over the last 30 years to obtain it.

So, let's see how interesting this going to be. If Wypijewski doesn't delve into the sex crowd wisdom of YouPorn, you know she's faking it.

[Disclosure: I've written one book reviews for The Nation and had a book published by its imprint, Nation Books.]

Man Crush: the Bitchification of Barack Obama

2008-07-22T10:21:00.000-07:00

A recent article post on The Root, “The Obama Man Crush,” wondered why such men as diverse as: “Colin Powell, Michael Eric Dyson, Andrew Sullivan, Tom Joyner, Ted Kennedy, Bill Richardson, Christopher Hitchens and numerous others, appear to have such a "man crush" on Sen. Obama?”

According to the writer, Jewel Woods, a male gender analyst specializing in men’s issue and executive director of the Renaissance Male Project, the answer is “white-collar masculinity.”

Put another way, it’s his lack of bona fides “niggatude.” To break it down even more, he doesn’t act like a textbook nigga: on the dole, in jail, and the father of umpteen out of wedlock children.

And the man also speaks Standard English.

According to Jewel: “With degrees from Columbia and Harvard and a background teaching constitutional law at the University of Chicago, Obama surely represents a break from ‘traditional’ images of masculinity. But it must be more than his educational bona fides.”

Because Obama can blend the aforementioned attributes and still play basketball, he is viewed as “smooth,” and “smooth” is a subset of cool, and “sexy.”

This is continuation of what I’ve called the “bitchification” of Obama, in which an intelligent, educated black man of mixed parentage has been interpreted as “female” in this campaign cycle.

It’s interesting to note the continuing “bitchification” of Obama. One of Salon’s political reporters months ago mentioned something of a similar nature: how Obama sounded more “feminine” because of his non-bellicose rhetoric, and how Clinton sounded more “masculine” because of her position on the war, and that reporter was merely writing about how an Iowan, a woman, was noting her perceptions of the two candidates. Well, that Salon reporter was roundly rebuked by Salon’s readers, accused of manufacturing Republican talking points.

Maureen Dowd had reduced him to “Obambi.” Friedman invoked “Tony Soprano, or Obama’s “inner Jimmy Carter.”

The point is Obama is considered a “bitch” or a “punk faggot” because he isn’t obsessed with bombing every other third world nation. Mind you, Obama mentioned dipping into Pakistan if actionable intelligence was obtained by the US on bin Laden, but he was then ridiculed as a rookie.

But now the McCain campaign has noticed this “man crush” but has sough to center it within the media. Salon.com has posted that campaign’s contempt for the Man from Illinois by running an ad called “Obama Love.”

The ad, with the Frankie Valli singing “Can’t Take My Eyes Off You,” has a series of video clips from the media’s chatterheads and some reporters gushing over Barack Obama. Of course, this totally ignores the fact that John McCain has also gotten good press and has considered the media his “base,” and Media Matters has noted how McCain’s foibles often go unchallenged.

But what this ad also shows is the utter contempt that McCain has for the pretty boy politician. What this ad also underscores is the “cult” of Obama, that his supporters are a crew of zombies who have attended too many love-ins.

Obama has once stated that he is aware of how people have a tendency to foist their projections onto him, but never has one politician meant so many different things to some many different people.

It’s the power of interpretation without being grounded in any of anchor reality.

The Dearth of the Cool

2008-07-21T09:37:00.000-07:00

While at my local library I noticed the August 2008 edition of Ebony magazine, which featured an essay by William Jelani Cobbs and comments by others on “The Genius of Cool; the 25 Coolest Brothers of All Time.”

Who are the coolest Two-Five?

1. Barack Obama, politician
2. Don Cheadle, actor
3. Billy Dee Williams, actor
4. Sidney Poitier, actor
5. Quincy Jones, music producer
6. Lenny Kravitz, musician
7. Jimi Hendrix, musician
8. Richard Roundtree, actor
9. Denzel Washington, actor
10. Sammy Davis, Jr., entertainer
11. Bob Marley, musician
12. Ed Bradley, journalist
13. Tupac Shakur, rapper
14. Adam Clayton Powell, politician
15. Gordon Parks, photographer
16. Muhammad Ali, boxer
17. Miles Davis, musician
18. Walt Frazier, basketball player
19. Jay-Z (Shawn Carter), rapper
20. Samuel Jackson, actor
21. Malcolm X, nationalist leader
22. Snoop Dogg, rapper
23. Prince, musician
24. Michael Jordan, basketball player
25. Marvin Gaye, singer

Without a doubt each of these individuals do possess what essayist William Jelani Cobbs called the “key elements of coolness”: “self-possession, elegance and the ability fluent in body language…” One might add grace under pressure.

But if one looks at the list one notes that not one black thinker or activist, except perhaps Malcolm X or Adam Clayton Powell, is “cool”—not even Martin Luther King. The vast majority of the these cool brothers are in the entertainment/performance industry.

Black Cool is not of the mind and the intellect and how it is expressed in any cohesive, elegant form, except in the case of Barack Obama, whose cool confidence is often called arrogance. No, the coolness on this list is of the body, which reinforces that “black achievement” is physical, not of the mind and body working in unison.

A majority of those selected are actors and entertainers, men who are paid to exude “coolness” in an artificial arena or to appear as “black coolness.” Black thugs, pimps, and rappers are the essence of black body coolness in post-civil rights America.

Who are the truly cool dudes who exude grace under pressure as an “antidote to the heat of hateration”?

The Political Brain: Q&A with Drew Westen, author of “The Political Brain"

2008-07-16T13:02:00.000-07:00

The Role of Emotions in Voters’ Political Decisions

For the past three decades the Republican Party and the conservative movement have mastered the political game of controlling the narrative—the story and basic ideas of politics and governance—giving them competitive edge in dominating the national political scene. When you think of the GOP you automatically know its “brand.” Republicans seem to intuitively know how to construct and frame issues that go to the gut of the voter. Meanwhile the Democrats, placing policies before emotions, have lost elections and have had themselves framed as losers and weak on national security; in other words, they have led themselves to be branded by their opponents.

Contrary to what some Democratic politicos think, Drew Westen, a professor of psychology and psychiatry at Emory University, as well as a neuroscientist and political psychologist, argues in his book The Political Brain (Public Affairs, 2007), that emotions may well play a greater role in dictating how voters approach politicians and issues.

While Thomas Frank’s 2004 book What’s the Matter with Kansas? may have outlined how voters have been “duped” into voting against their own interests, Westen argues that this may well be possible because voters don’t feel that someone is looking out for the interests and values that give their lives meaning.

After several stops and starts in trying to conduct this interview, I spoke to him over the phone while he was in Washington, D.C.

Norman Kelley: Is it fair to say that your book, The Political Brain, makes an argument that humans are more structurally geared towards an emotional appeal first rather than an intellectual or rational one?

Drew Westen: In the broadest strokes yes. But although the real message of the book is that reason and emotion evolved together. We and other animals have been driven by emotional processes that we have had a lot longer, and that the quality that we like to extol and call reason. The best politicians understand that the strongest arguments you make are emotional arguments, which wedge information into a message that is emotionally evocative, compelling and draws people attention.

NK: Is it then fair to say that human beings are instinctually geared towards the gut reaction more so than a rational or intellectual reaction?

DW: We tend to have a gut level reaction first and a considered rational reaction only if that gut level reaction doesn’t solve the problem for us.

NK: So therefore that old saying “Trust your instincts…?”

DW: Yes. Most of the time our gut level reactions lead us in the right direction. If you think about how they evolved, when humans were evolving it wouldn’t be very helpful to stop, study the structure of the snake carefully and then decide whether or not to run from it, to catch a quick image of it and take off. Now, that’s not always the best way to make decisions, but if you think about how we make decisions. If you think about how we make the most important decisions in our lives, how to choose a spouse, by calculating the cost and benefit of a potential spouse’s attributes and then weighing them and comparing them to other potential spouse; we have a gut level judgment based on chemistry. Is this the kind of person I want to be married to? That’s how we really make our judgments in politics.

NK: Is the brain structured in such a way to [accept] an emotional [appeal] rather than a rational argument?

DW: Yes. I think it is fair to say that we tend to have rapid emotional responses before we have considered reasoned one, and that we also have value-based responses that are often quite well considered, but eventually become automatic so that we hear certain words, or images or metaphors, we know that this person is with us, that this person shares our values, and we respond to that immediately, to that emotionally.

This is where Republicans and conservatives have been much more successful than Democrats and progressives. They have branded a series of phrases, ideas, and narratives that are emotionally evocative, and that cues people right way that they are attentive to certain concerns.

I was listening, in 2006, to an exchange between a Democratic congressman and a Republican congresswoman on MSNBC about what Democrats and Republicans would do about taxes. And the Democrat was giving an answer—and he seemed like an affable guy—by signaling with his hands that something was going up and something was going down, I think subsidies. By the end of it I wasn’t sure what he said or exactly what he meant, but as a Democrat I wanted to think that I liked it.

The Republican then came on and said, “The difference between us is that they see this as a revenue stream. We see this as your paycheck.” And I remember thinking at the time that this wasn’t a fair fight. She [the Republican] wasn’t making this stuff up on the fly; she was well prepared not just with arguments, because it wasn’t an argument she was making, but what she was saying to people was, “ I understand that you work hard for your money, and I’m not going to take it away unless I got a really good reason for it.”

The Democrat wasn’t armed with some equally compelling on the other side. What the Democrat didn’t have was a crisp and emotionally compelling way to talk about the Democratic stand on taxes is. There was no mention…uh…Something as simple as…

NK: I can give you what the Republican was saying, “tax relief.”

DW: Right, they talk about tax relief…Saying that Barack Obama is going to raise your taxes. What the Democrats haven’t had is the kind of language that puts, in an emotionally compelling way, that describes both themselves and their conservative opponents, something as simple as “Well, the question isn’t who is going to cut your taxes. It’s whose taxes are going to get cut?” The reality is that in the last several years somebody made off with about seventy billion [dollars] in tax cuts, but it’s not the average middle class family that’s gotten five hundred bucks back.

That’s the kind of response that has a lot of information in it. My argument isn’t that we shouldn’t use that kind of information, but we should sandwich it into an emotionally compelling form that lets people know right away what our values are, what our priorities are. That’s what the Republicans have done so successfully by saying something like, “They see it as a revenue stream; we see it as your paycheck.” It’s conveying that we understand that you work hard for your money.

NK: At one point in your book you write, “Of particular relevance to understanding the political brain is the idea that much of our behavior reflects the activation of emotion-laden networks of association, and that much of this activation occurs outside our awareness.”

DW: Most of what we respond to—most of the time—we have no awareness of whatsoever. Consciousness—as neuroscientists often describe it—is a very limited processing mechanism, meaning there is only so much information that can get into conscious awareness, and we are responding to cues from the environment all the time; whether someone is being trust worthy, what their social class is, whether they share our values. There’s a whole host of cues we pick up on unconsciously.

NK: We’re speaking of unstated cue?

DW: Absolutely. If you ask people how did they know that a person is working class, or that person held a whitecollar job, they can’t you the cues that told them and if they tried they usually get them wrong. The same often happens in focus groups. If you ask people about Hillary Clinton’s “3 a.m.” ads; if you ask people to watch that and then describe, tell you how they found it effective, how did it make them feel about Barack Obama. They will tell you exactly what voters told exit pollsters in Ohio where she ran the ad, which was they found it unfair. In fact, a majority of Ohio Democrats thought that Hillary Clinton ran an unfair campaign against Barack Obama. That same majority also voted for her. Although the ad was consciously received as over the top or unfair as or fear mongering, unconsciously it did register.

My colleague Joel Weinberger and I did a study for CNN where we used the new technology that allows you to measure the unconscious association to a message or to an ad; it allows you essentially to measure people’s gut level feeling to what they can’t report. And what we found from people who watched the “3 a.m.” ad was what had become most active in their brain by ad were the words we tested: “weak,” “inexperience,” “terrorist,” and “Muslim.”

So, even if people couldn’t tell you what that ad activated, you could pick them up with some subtle test that can be run on the Internet that essentially measure how long it does take people to recognize a word or ignore a word. You can measure in milliseconds their response and that tells how activate that word is in their minds or brains after they been exposed to it, particularly a message or ad.

NK: I’m struck about how so much of this sounds classically Freudian, the sense that Freud had talked about the unconscious mind and how the unconscious mind is driven by wishes, fears, values, and aggression.

DW: Your point about Freud is a good one. The first person to do political consulting in America and one of the very first ad men was Edward Bernays, Freud’s nephew—

NK: —Freud’s nephew! His nephew, from what I understand, is considered the godfather of PR, public relations.

DW: That’s exactly right. I’ve been meaning to read one of his books, actually, that’s been sitting on my shelf. He understood that much of the action of an ad is unconscious….

NK: Then you need to read Bernay’s book, Propaganda. Once I read your book I automatically linked it to what Bernay was saying in Propaganda. A lot of what you’d had been saying in your book I’d picked up from Bernay’s. I could see the connections.

DW: I’ve been a practicing clinical psychologist for twenty-five years and as a clinical psychologist what you’re most attuned to, what Freud really taught psychologists, psychiatrists to be attuned to is what network of associations are whirring around in the background of a person’s mind that they may not have any awareness. That is, a network of associations is simply a set of inter-connective thoughts, feelings, images and memories and emotions. In politics, if you understand what’s active when someone is angry about immigration, or if they say they believe in abortion in some circumstances but not others. Or, they want us out of Iraq but they’re concerned about a precipitous withdrawal. If you understand what’s whirring around in the background. It puts you in a much better position to be able to figure out how to speak about your position and values in a way that people can hear.

It does create an opportunities for manipulation, but I think the biggest danger is when one side understands how the minds work and the other side doesn’t. This has been the situation we’ve been in for much of the last thirty years where the Republicans understood that were are driven by our wishes, hopes, fears, aspirations, and Democrats are trying to convince [us] with rational arguments.

NK: You also stated that the Democratic establishment—especially its operatives—have “an irrational emotional commitment to rationality—one that renders them, ironically, impervious to both scientific evidence on how the political mind and brain works and accurate diagnosis of why their campaigns repeatedly fail.”

DW: Over the last year and a half I’ve given a number of presentations all over the country, both to bipartisan organizations and partisan ones and to party leaders, progressive donors, and I’ll some time be speaking in beautiful townhouses in New York City or in a beautiful home in Los Angeles, and somebody will invariably ask me: “What’s the matter with Kansas? How come these people are voting against their interests and voting for these Republicans who are giving big tax breaks to oil companies and for wealthy people? But giving them short shrift while losing their jobs and having theirs jobs shipped over seas and they can barely afford their mortgage and gas prices going up? What’s wrong with these people?”

My response was often, “Well, it’s the same thing that’s wrong with many of you, who are in the Republican tax bracket but are Democratic activists. Why is it that you care about things like poverty or the treatment of black people in this country when you are neither poor nor black? You care because you have values.” People vote on the basis of both their values and their interests.

In this election I think we’re going to see people vote much more on interests because they are getting frightened about the prospect of how they are going to pay their mortgage, fill their gas tanks, how they are going to send their kids to college. It’s those feelings that get people to vote, the feelings that are associated with values and opportunity, justice. Those are the values that drive people.

NK: While reading your book, I couldn’t help but equate some of your observations and ideas with advertising, marketing and branding. Is there a connection between the use of associative networks with advertising and branding?

DW: Yes. One of the biggest differences between Democrats and Republicans in
the last thirty years is that the Republicans have had a brand and the Democrats haven’t. When someone says “I’m running as a Republican,” you automatically know what they believe on a whole series of issues, unless they tell you otherwise. You assume that at least they espouse…

NK: May I offer what I think the Republican brand is?

DW: Yeah…

NK: National security, lower taxes, religion, a belief in God; strong family sense…

DW: You got low taxes, moral government, strong national security, family values, God and country, patriotism, Second Amendment, a whole series of things you know immediately are probably true and have been branded positively from their side. When some says they are a Democrat what comes to mind for most people is the brand that the conservative movement has attached to Democrats, which is they are the party of tax and spend; they are for big government; they are against the right to bear arms; they are for abortion on demand…

NK: They’re permissive…

DW: …They are weak on national security; they’re weak on crime, soft on terror…Look at how the two of us came up quickly with those negative associations [we threw] at the Democrats, and it’s because the conservative movement have spent thirty years and tens of billions of dollars doing the hard work of creating those phrases and creating the narratives of stories that go along with them, and having people repeat them enough times and with enough consistency that when average Americans hear the word “Democrat” and that’s what comes to their minds.

In that sense what we really have seen is a tremendously successful branding campaign by one side and virtually no branding campaign by the other. It’s almost as if you have Pepsi and Coke competing against each other; one is doing a terrific job at marketing its product and the other side is saying nothing while its competitor is saying the other tastes bad… In that sense we really are talking about branding…The same brain that buys cars and computers and laps also selects candidates and votes, and the processes aren’t identical because there are many more values involved in politics. But the process is more similar than many Democratic strategists have wanted to believe.

NK: What would you make of “Brand Obama?” And how the Democrats appealing to the political brain? Strength? Weakness?

DW: The strength of Barack Obama is that he is a phenomenally charismatic speaker, who has taken the idea of unity rather division, change, a new kind of politics, and develop that into the beginning of a [brand]. Although in many ways it’s not what he says as much as it is the ways he says it that inspires people about Barack Obama. There’s been a constant charge about him being all inspirational and has no message, but if you go to his website he has well-thought out, well developed positions on almost every major issue more so than John McCain. But he doesn’t have a well-established brand as John McCain.

He does have the problem that the other side has been working really hard for 18 months as “different,” “other,” “dangerous,” “unknown,” and “by the way, did I notice that he’s black and not like us?” That’s the branding he has to be careful of and what his campaign should be thinking of in virtually every statement that he or they make is two questions. One is, How do I not reinforce the brand that Republicans have created around Democrats for years? Such as a tax and spend liberal; the idea that Democrats are weak on national security. And how does he counteract the brand that they have attached to him? That he is “different” and “unknown” and therefore scary, aimed at activating those unconscious networks about race.

If Obama succeeds in defining himself and defining McCain and making the election about wanting to continue eight more years of Bush/McCain Republican foreign and domestic policies, then I think he’ll win by a landslide. If on the other hand, the campaign becomes a referendum on whether you really trust and feel comfortable with, really know Barack Obama, then I think John McCain will win the election.

NK: What about “Brand McCain”? Strength? Weakness?

DW: The strength of the McCain brand really is that story of his time in that POW camp, and is hard to question the courage of someone who went through that experience. And it has helped inoculate him from some of the branding problems that he could and should have at this point. He hasn’t shown in the last four years the same kind of courage of his conviction that he showed in 2000. I can tell you that the “Straight Talk Express” was his brand and it was a very successful one that appeal to people across the aisle—

NK: Yeah, I started to like him. I said, “Yeah, this is a Republican and he isn’t that bad…”

DW: I had exactly the same thought. But what has happened since then is that he has been on every side of every major issue. He opposed torture and now’s he for it. He was for comprehensive immigration reform, then he was against it, and now he seems for it again. He was against the Bush tax cuts because he thought they were irresponsible and now he’s for them. His brand is no longer working with Democrats and many independents. He also has the problem that every time he moves to the center, he makes it less likely that—particularly the Christian right—[the right] will come out to the polls and vote for him. And every time he moves right, he makes it less likely that the moderates will vote for him.

He has a real problem trying to find a brand for himself when Republicans seem to be unraveling. Ronald Reagan did a magnificent job of putting together fiscal conservatives who are often on a libertarian bent on social issues; their attitude is that they don’t want government intrusion in business and they don’t want it in their personal lives.

With Christian conservatism, which has been very much for government intrusion in people’s lives, having government can decide who can and can’t have abortion, or who can and can’t be married or have their relationships legally recognized, now that that brand is starting to crumble at the seams after eight years of George Bush being the brand manager, McCain not only has his brand of straight talker to figure out how to hold together, but also the Republican brand. It’s a pretty mighty task.

NK: Most of what you have written lends itself to political manipulation. If humans are more captive of unaware networks of associations, emotional one, how do we go about defending ourselves against manipulation? Exposing it? Is that even possible?

DW: There is an extent to which we are all vulnerable because the way in which are minds work. I guess you can say that we are all vulnerable to anyone trying to convince us to do anything, to being persuaded. When my wife says to me, “You know, I really like Indian food tonight.” Am I being manipulated or is she just telling me clearly what she wants? If she said it with less emotion, I might say, “I really want Italian,” but when she says it with that level of emotion, I know it means a lot to her. I say, “Sure, let’s have Indian.”

I think the really danger is when one side understands how to appeal to voters and the other side doesn’t. When one side understands that people are driven by their hopes and fears and that the other side thinks they are drawn by their facts and figures. That’s when you really have the danger of propaganda and manipulation that’s comparable to what you get in many respects to a one-party state, because only one side understands how to reach people.

What I’m hoping that happens in this election, and certainly what I’ve tried to do with this book and with my work, is try to arm the left so that the fight is a little more even. Progressives and Democrats can speak honestly and openly about their values and stop running from issues like abortion, immigration or guns or taxes or national security, and instead can talk in emotionally compelling ways about their values and their policies. To the extent that both sides are communicating effectively, that’s when you see democracy working well. Elections aren’t primarily debates about issues, they are debates about values and priorities.

Do you fundamentally believe, for example, that it really doesn’t matter that we should let the market determine which jobs should go where? Let the chips fall where they may fall and sure let someone lose their job in Michigan, but they ought to stop whining about someone getting a job in Tennessee or Beijing? Do you believe that or do you believe that it’s the job of leadership and government to ease people through times of transition, and to not let big business write their own rules so that we have a government that works for working Americans rather large multinational corporations? That’s a pretty big difference in basic values and how much empathy you have towards people have been displaced from their jobs, about whether or not you have lost your job.

Those are the questions which election are about and come down to. So, I’m less worried about manipulation if both sides understand how speak their lines in emotionally compelling ways. I worry much more about manipulation when one side knows how to do it well and one side doesn’t even know what the basic principles are.

The “Hot Mic” Syndrome

2008-07-14T08:28:00.000-07:00

The reason Jesse Jackson wanted to radically alter Barack Obama’s outdoor plumbing fixture was due to Obama allegedly “talking down to black people.” Obama’s chief offense, it seems, on Father’s Day, was reminding blacks that too many fathers were absent in their children’s lives. Over the years Jackson himself has sounded this theme, and more controversially Bill Cosby.

In a Washington Post article, “Jackson Incident Revives Some Blacks’ Concern About Obama,” various members of the black intelligentsia voiced their concern.

Michael Eric Dyson, a Georgetown University professor, said that he was quibbling with the use of his speeches. The Post article then quoted a Time magazine article in which Dyson compared Obama’s “routine” with that of comedian Chris Rock, meaning that Rock is “just as hard on whites as on blacks.”

Supposedly a professor of sociology, Dyson’s shtick has long been a string of glib pop book that tries to critique current problems but actually underscores how bereft he is of any noticeable intellectual depth. Notice his reference to Rock as a measure of comparison to Obama.

Ronald Walters, who worked on Jackson’s presidential campaigns and teaches at the University of Maryland, said: “We’re not electing him to be the preacher in chief.” For Walters, Obama needed to give more speeches as to how he would help the black community, not preach.

Walters, a political scientist, must surely know that old adage that a president’s greatest power is the power to persuade, and he sometimes must use that power from the “bully pulpit,” as Theodore Roosevelt argued.

A blogger for Jet and Ebony magazines, Eric Easter, said that Obama’s statement smacked of calculated political expediency to attract white voters.

There was no mentioning of the fact that Obama may have also been genuinely speaking from his heart: his father, a Kenyan economist who was educated in America, had been woefully missing from the presumptive Democratic nominee’s formative years, a situation he had outlined in his first book, Dreams From My Father.

But the response by Jackson and Obama’s other critics recalls another controversy regarding the black family, the so-called Moynihan Report. Written in 1965, by Daniel Patrick Moynihan while serving in the US Department of Labor, the report, officially called “The Negro Family: A Call for Action,” stated:

“At the heart of the deterioration of the fabric of Negro society is the deterioration of the Negro family. It is the fundamental source of the weakness of the Negro community at the present time.”

In the eyes of many during that period, the civil rights era, this smacked of blaming the victim. After all, it whites, via slavery and segregation, had altered the black family and placed it under tremendous stress. This assertion is the root of the behaviorist school of conservative social criticism, better known as “personal responsibility,” which argues that social programs will not ameliorate social conditions if individuals, or group of individuals, don’t comport themselves to the general social norms of society, and one general societal norm is not having children out of wedlock. In other words, illegitimate births, Moynihan indelicately placed that within “a tangle of pathology.” And one needs to be reminded that Moynihan was primarily discussing the lower class black family that was the source of this pathology.

In 1965, Moynihan cited black illegitimate at nearly 25 percent (23.6%). According to the Center for Disease Control 2006 figure that percentage stands at nearly 70 percent. [see CDC, National Vital Statistics Reports, Vol. 55, No. 1; September 29, 2006, p12; see also Table 20, page 61.]

So in the 45 years since the Moynihan Report had been issued, black illegitimate births have risen to almost twice the original statistic cited. This may well have been what Sen. Obama was referring to; however, one is not supposed to state such in polite social company, and not before an open microphone.

Or put another way, in the last 45 years—the post civil rights era—established black leadership has never sought to mobilize the black lower-class for internal redevelopment aimed at ameliorating the kind of social conditions that lead to illegitimate births, a source of this pathology, along with lack of jobs, crime, and bad schooling.

Obama mentioning this social reality and wanting to use faith-based organizations (churches) strikes some as calculated posturing, and given that he has shifted recently on some issues, this view is understandable.

But Bill Cosby’s remarks at the NAACP’s 50th anniversary celebration of the 1954 Supreme Court school desegregation decision also set off a firestorm. Either attacked for blaming the victim or applauded for saying things needed to be said, Cosby’s remarks merely exposed a fissure that has coursed through black America for years.

But did the comedian really say anything that different from what W.E.B. Du Bois said over a hundred years ago?

The great deficiency of the Negro, however, is his small knowledge of the art of social life— that last expression of human culture. His development in group life was abruptly broken off by the slave ship, directed into abnormal channels and dwarfed by the Black Codes, and suddenly wrenched anew by the Emancipation Proclamation. He finds himself, therefore, peculiarly weak in that nice adaptation of individual life to the life of the group which is the essence of civilization. This is shown in the grosser forms of sexual immorality, disease and crime, and also in the difficulty of race organization for common ends economic or in intellectual lines. (emphasis added)

Cosby’s greatest sin, however, as in Obama’s case, was making his remarks before an open microphone and before an audience that had reporters and TV cameras, i.e., being a celebrity who attracted media attention. Du Bois, on the other hand, had delivered his speech, “The Study of Negro Problems,” before the American Academy of Political and Social Science in 1897; it was published a year later.

There is a general tendency amongst some member of the black community that one is not supposed to state such things. They give aid and comfort to those who are hostile towards black advancement. The logic is, “If we keep quiet, things will work out all right.”

But what this mindset may really demonstrate is that for the last 45 years African American leadership has not been able to construct a dual-track program of action and policies that can argue and advocate for two things at the same time: progressive social policies from the government AND mobilize the black lower-class community to clean up its act. (And that lower-class black America has had to fend for itself may well explain the rise of the most troublesome but dynamic art form of the late 20th century, hip-hop.)

The unique and bodacious thing about Obama is that he has actually organized himself to contest for the obtainment of state power. This of course means a certain level calculation, posturing, symbolic, and actual political mobilization.

But given how African Americans have systematically demobilized themselves over the last 45 years—meaning solely putting their energies into mostly the Democratic Party and to a lesser extent the Republican Party, but without developing an independent political apparatus that rewards and punishes—will black Americans be ready to take advantage of the unique historical set of circumstances that could become available if Obama does actual win the White House?

Given how black civil society has atrophied over the last few years, it may well miss an opportunity to regenerate itself, and most people, according to Thomas Edison, miss an opportunity because it comes dressed up in overalls and looks like work.

The Return of Mr. HNIC

2008-07-10T07:30:00.000-07:00

Jesse Jackson's "nuts" remark regarding Obama supposedly "talking down to black people" may well seal Jackson's fate as someone locked in the past and more concerned about his declining stardom in this presidential cycle.

Jackson represents the kind of HNIC politics that had become quite popular with some black leaders like himself, Al Sharpton and Farrakhan. These were self-appointed leaders who either ran presidential campaign that roused blacks and others, or brought them to numerous marches, but weren't serious about the one thing that politics is about: power.

Granted, Jackson's take on Obama talking down to black people could be read as a critique of the "personal responsibility" behavorist school that's been promoted by the conservatives for the last thirty years, and in which numerous promoters of such, Democrats and Republicans, have failed at, including Jackson.

But Jackson has talked down to blacks himself. When Bill Cosby was being roasted over "talkinhg down to blacks," Jackson said that he's had been saying that for years.

The essential problem with Jackson's remark is that established black leaders like himself never sought to deal with some of the social dysfunctions that characterized much of inner city life. For some odd reason they never devised a program, never mobilized the resources that blacks do have, to deal with institutional racism and the social dysfunction of black life that affects 25% of the black population.

This left a gaping hole for the right to expolit, and if you're an enterprising black conservative, you only have to follow the Shelby Steele and John McWhorter model, as noted by Houston Baker in his book about black intellectuals, "Betrayal." In other words, bash blacks for profit--which isn't Obama's motive.

Obama, to use Malcolm X' s apt phrase, is going to catch hell no matter what he says or does. Seen as not black enough by people like Jackson, he'll be suspect because he doesn't hewn to the black party line. He'll be under constant scrutiny by whites who'll suspect him because he is partially black and sat in Rev. Wright's pew for years, and has a funny name.

In the end, though, Jackson's remark may have done Obama a favor. In the eyes of some whites, if Jackson is talking about Obama like this, perhaps Obama can't be that bad?

The GOP’s Newest Colin Powell: Martin Luther King, Jr.

2008-07-02T11:06:00.000-07:00

That the National Black Republican Association is running ads stating that Martin Luther King was a Republican, without a chad of evidence, must surely underscore their fear of being wiped out by an Obama tsunami of overwhelming black voters in this fall’s election. The NBRA’s argument for why King must have been a Republican is:

"It should come as no surprise that Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was a Republican. In that era, almost all black Americans were Republicans. Why? From its founding in 1854 as the anti-slavery party until today, the Republican Party has championed freedom and civil rights for blacks."

So, because “almost all black Americans were Republicans,” it stands to reason that King must have been one also.

If you read through the rest of this tortured syllogism, the author, Frances Rice, the association’s chair, never states that King had joined the GOP. It’s inferred. There is no evidence of King being a member of the GOP, and a number of the GOP and Jim Crow Democrats accused him of being a communist.

The NBRA's roster of the black GOP history states that King registered as a Republican in 1956, but it doesn't cite how it knows this. It assumes that just because Kings father was a member of the Republican that he was also. King could have been, but it sure would ne nice to know if there is evidence of a voter registration card.

This all came about because the NBRA is, once again, running bogus ads claiming such. Now, it wouldn’t be a major surprise if King’s father was a member of the GOP, but King wasn’t like his father and had taken a radically different course.

For example, King said this in David Garrow’s Bearing the Cross:

“The Negro must make it palpably clear that he is not inextricably bound to either political party….We will not blindly support any party that refuses to take a forthright stand on the question of civil rights.” (119)

“Nixon has a genius for convincing one that he is sincere…he almost disarms you with his apparent sincerity. If Richard Nixon is not sincere, he is the most dangerous man in America.” (119)

And of Barry Goldwater, upon the Arizona senator winning the 1964 GOP nomination, King said the following:

Goldwater “articulates a philosophy which gives aid and comfort to the racist.” (340)

King went on to urge “all supporters to vote against the Republican nominee and other Republican candidates who did not disassociate themselves from him,” writes Garrow. (340)

Now, does this sound like a good member in standing of the Grand Old Party?

The Unitary Legislature, Or, How to Exercise Command and Control Over the Commander in Chief

2008-06-30T09:33:00.000-07:00

MoveOn.org went after the wrong person. It’s not about questioning the patriotism of a military officer subordinate to the nation’s 43rd Commander in Chief. It’s more about holding the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States, responsible for his incompetent mismanagement of the national security of the United States, meaning the safety and security of the American people. That portfolio, the Executive branch’s command and control of the nation’s armed forces, ought to be removed from the 43rd President since it has been repeatedly demonstrated that he, George W. Bush, and his national security civilian subordinates are grossly incompetent and have engaged in a willful series of factual misrepresentations to Congress and the People of the United States. These factual misrepresentation led the Unites States to initiate and engaged an unnecessary war in Iraq, while the nation’s main enemy, al Qaeda, stills resides in border region of Afghanistan and Pakistan, six years after that terrorist organization’s September 11th 2001, attack on the United States.

While this President, acting as Commander in Chief, has incompetently pursued a disastrous foreign policy in an already volatile region, his legal counselors developed a legal theory that allows him to do anything he wants as Commander in Chief when the nation’s in a state of national insecurity. This theory of executive power seeks to subvert a commonsensical and transparent reading of the nation’s Constitution; it seeks to imply that powers not stated in the Constitution are greater than those that are.

If there is a “Unitary Executive” theory that the Constitution, as argued by some of the President’s legal counselors, which gives the Executive Officer of the United States government unlimited power (“inherent powers”) because that Officer is the “Commander in Chief,” then the stated powers, as expressed by the Constitution, gives Congress even greater powers, supported by a concept called the “Unitary Legislature.”

Congress, as a whole, represents the collected, unitary voice of the People of the United States; and is it directly answerable and accountable to the People via elections, as opposed to the President who is indirectly elected by the Electoral College. As such, Congress, as represented by the Office of Speaker of the House, has the responsibility to create laws and see that the President, even while performing his role of Commander in Chief, faithfully executes the laws.
Congress, constitutionally, has explicit as well as inherent powers of oversight regarding the Commander in Chief since the U.S. Constitution explicitly states that Congress shall have the power to:

a. raise an army;

b. raise a navy;

c. congressional oversight over military and national security matters

d. raise taxes and appropriate funds to war and military efforts

e. and, most importantly, the power to declare war.

Thus Congress, the legislative branch, has constitutionally a right to check, challenge and remove a Commander in Chief for abuse of power or incompetency in administering that function. Section 2 of the 2nd Article of the Constitution says this and only this about the power of Commander in Chief:

The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States.

It explicitly says nothing about his powers as Commander in Chief. In reality, Congress grants the nation’s Executive Officer the right to wield the power as the Commander in Chief on behalf of the American people. Congress, and only Congress, can declare war. The President, by law, mandated to engage in basic national security defense such as guarding the Nation’s borders and coast, keeping a well-trained defense force. Just as Congress has the right and responsibility to remove the President for high crimes and misdemeanors if he abuses his role as Executive Officer, Congress can either impeached the President for his conduct as Commander in Chief, or remove those powers from him.

In other words, Congress, as the collective representative of the people of the United States, has the power to exercise its command and control over an errant Executive who abuses his power as Commander in Chief.

Thus it could be argued that:

President George W. Bush, Commander in Chief of United States Armed Forces, did engaged in the following high crimes and misdemeanors and warrants impeachment and removal as this United States’ Commander in Chief:

1. The President as “Commander in-chief” misrepresented facts to the Congress and the American people in regard to the country’s need to go to war (“casus belli”) against the state of Iraq. The principle reason was that former President Saddam Hussein was manufacturing and housing Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD);

2. And that Iraq had an operational relation with the terrorist entity Al Qaeda, which attacked the United States on September 11, 2001. No WMDs have been found and Iraq, as evidenced by the 9/11 Commission. Iraq did not participate in Al-Qaeda attack on the United States.

3. The Commander in Chief, as the executive commanding officer of the United States military apparatus, viz.-a-viz, the Department of Defense, had incompetenly prepared for the invasion of Iraq and its post-war occupation. Officers who stated the need for several thousand troops to fight and occupy Iraq were denigrated and isolated to the detriment of the security of the American people. By incompetently preparing for the war, the Commander in Chief failed to get needed material to troops in the field.

4. The National Security Council, Coordinated by the Commander-in-chief’s National Security Adviser, has performed in such as manner as to be more of a threat to the security of the people of the United States than to the country’s actual enemies. Its inability to anticipate, analyze, and coordinate executive departments mandated with the Nation’s security has undermined the Commander-in-chief’s ability to protect and defend the people of the United States, the prime responsibility of the President as Commander in Chief.

5. By invading Iraq, the President as Commander in Chief removed vital resources and personnel who had been fighting Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. To this day, the resurgence of the Taliban and Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan is attributed to the incompetent mismanagement of the war in Iraq and Afghanistan.

6. Contrary to basic United States’ principles and laws, international law, the Commander in Chief has sanctioned the use of torture.

7. The Commander in Chief has sought to undermine the writ of habeas corpus by declaring US citizens “enemy combatants” thus removing them from the jurisdiction and scrutiny of United States Courts.

8. The Commander-in-chief engaged in secret surveillance wiretapping in violation of U.S. laws.

The President, as Commander in Chief, of the United States armed forces, did willfully misrepresent certain facts to the United States Congress regarding the state of Iraq and its president, Saddam Hussein; that country’s relationship with al-Qaeda; Weapons of Mass Destruction, and that alleged state’s participation in the attack on the United States on September 11, 2001.

Congress granted the President an Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Iraq on October 16, 2002, which the Commander in Chief, the President of the United States, fraudulently used to justify an attack on the state of Iraq knowing full well that his Administration’s clams against Iraq were untrue. Section 2 of that authorization states:

That the President is authorized to use all necessary and appropriate force against those nations, organizations, or persons he determines planned, authorized, committed, or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 11, 2001, or harbored such organizations or persons, in order to prevent any future acts of international terrorism against the United States by such nations, organizations or persons.

It has been well documented that Iraq did not participate in the attack on the United States and it also has been documented that the President knew so but chose to follow a course of action, attacking Iraq, which seriously compromised the nation’s effort to defeat that terrorist organization, Al Qaeda, which did attack the nation on that new day of infamy.

The President, as Commander-in-chief, should be held accountable for his mismanagement of the war in Iraq. As a MBA graduate of Harvard University, the President George W. Bush prides himself on his CEO style of management. However, by any reasonable and professional business practices, standards, and desired outcomes, the President, as the manager of the Nation’s national security apparatus and the national defense, has been an abysmal failure. That failure has dire consequences for the People of the United States.

The Unitary Executive, as articulated by some of the president’s legal counsel, is an assumption of power in which the Executive assumes powers that he does not legally have in the Constitution. Under our Constitution, Congress has a more stated role in National Security affairs than the President as Commander in Chief. As matter of fact, Congress created the National Security Act of 1947, which gave birth to the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the National Security Council, National Security Agency, the Department of Defense, and, most importantly, the Central Intelligence Agency.

The Legislative branch not only created the agencies that are under the jurisdiction of the Executive Officer but oversight and a corrective function when that Officer is errant and has unfaithfully executed the laws of this country.

In the view of the Constitution, the Unitary Executive theory is a coup by stealth by an Executive branch that claims powers not stated by the Nation’s controlling political document, the Constitution, which is a “power map,” if you will. That power map, the Constitution, lays out which branches of government have certain powers and each branch’s responsibilities. In the field of national security, the Legislature has a more pronounced set of powers than the Executive. The Unitary Executive argument is a reiteration of the divine right of kings, and prescription for tyranny masquerading as security. In this argument, the king can do no wrong and whatever he likes if he solely deems situations to be a threat to the nation’s security. This theory seeks to subvert the basic American political concept of judicial review; it seeks to circumvent the Judiciary’s role in seeing that the Nation’s laws are faithfully executed.

The United States is a democratic republic, and as such has no king whose power is unlimited. As one of the country’s founding political theorists once argued, “In America the law is the king.”

It is certainly a high crime and misdemeanor to not truthfully inform Congress the reasons for going to war, and fraudulently claim a set of “facts” to justify another action under a false pretense.

When President Bush as the Commander-in-chief of US armed forces, outfitted in a U.S. military flight suit, landed on a United States warship, the USS Abraham Lincoln, and announced that “major hostilities” had ended in Iraq, he willing committed a factual misrepresentation that was either based on defrauding the American people or engaging in a gross and incompetent mismanagement of the early phases of an unnecessary war.

The ”major hostilities” that supposedly had ended became a civil war by competing Iraqi factions due to the Commander in Chief not adequately sending enough troops to maintain order and then breaking up the state of Iraq’s national security infrastructure that could have maintained order and stability as the country tied to new political framework.

Meanwhile, al-Qaeda, under the leadership of Osama bin Ladin, has regrouped and is planning further attacks on the People of the United States and their interests.

Congress therefore should revoke the Authorization for Use of Military Force of 16 October 2002, or amend it to specifically de-authorize the use of military force in Iraq, and redeploy American forces homeward or forward to Afghanistan.

Congress should strip the President of the United States, George W. Bush, of his powers as commander-in-chief and turn such over to the Joint Chiefs, whom shall report to the joint national security committees of Congress. Vice President Dick Cheney should also be impeached for aiding and abetting President Bush’s factual misrepresentation to Congress.

The Joint Chiefs should present to Congress a plan to continue hostilities against Al Qaeda, and present to Congress an assessment of the state of the United Sates armed forces.

The full powers of the Commander in Chief, in the office of the President of the United States, will be returned on January 20, 2009.

Is Brand Obama Already Stale?

2008-06-26T12:56:00.000-07:00

New. Different. Attractive.

That was how Keith Reinhard, chairman emeritus of DDB Worldwide, described Barack Obama in an April 2008 Fast Company article, “The Brand Called Obama.” But has the Obama brand become stale?

True to the American form of hip commercialization, the article reduced Sen. Barack Obama to essentially being a brand. The article went even further and reduced “Politics” as merely being “about marketing—about projecting and selling an image, stroking aspirations, moving people to identify, evangelize, and consume.” And what do people consume? A product.

According to this mindset, it’s not about policies that affect people for better or worse.

It is interesting when one reads the newspapers or listens to radio, hearing about either John McCain (“Maverick”) or Hillary Clinton (“Experienced”) referred to as brands, or how what is known about them—their projected personas—their brand being confused or devalued by a message or an event that is unfamiliar, crowding out their message. In a commercial society where almost everything is reduced a cash nexus relationship, politics is essentially one of branding, or marketing.

This is the natural result of the techniques of advertising and marketing, of candidates being handled by professional campaign managers who know how sell people, market politicians as products. Joe McGinness noted it years ago in his book about Richard Nixon, The Selling of the President 1968. The “Tricky Dick” of yesteryear, the 1950s and early 1960s, was repackaged and sold as the tanned, rested and ready Nixon of 1968, ready to lead the nation during the dark days of Vietnam, assassinations, and social disorders. Nixon, with the help of advertising and television handlers, branded himself as new and improved. One of the grand masters of this style of politicking was Clem Whitaker, a former newspaperman who founded Campaigns Inc.

Campaigns, Inc. has been cited as being one of the first professional campaign/PR firms. It took over a candidate’s entire campaign, devised his or her strategy, replacing what a party once did: being an agent between the candidate and the electorate. (Whitaker successfully branded Harry Truman’s national health care plan of the 1940s as “socialized medicine,” undermining any chance of universal healthcare for the American people for the rest of the 20th century.)

Whitaker understood how things could be marketed to a certain base, the American consumer: “The average American doesn’t want to be educated,” said Whitaker. “He doesn’t want to improve his mind; he doesn’t want to work, consciously, at being a good citizen. But most every American likes to be entertained. He likes movies; he likes mysteries; he likes fireworks and parades…So, if you have to fight put on a show!”

Branding is pervasive in American politics. Think of the Republican Party and one immediately understands its brand: Strong Defense. Family Values. Free Enterprise. Pro-Life.

Democrats, as they have been defined or “branded” by the Republicans, are: Unpatriotic. Tax and Spend. The Enemy of Normal People. Weak on Defense. In short, Liberals.

“Change That You Can Believe In”. “Yes, We Can.”

These were the essential messages of Obama’s primary campaign, along with
“a new kind of politics.” What is interesting to note about the Fast Company article is that it’s basically a horse-race article. Issues aren’t important; it is how Team Obama branded Obama the product, or how the game is played. Most of the article is about how Internet saavy Team Obama is: getting Facebook genius Chris Hughes on board, or how Obama mashups were viral and viewed as more authentic. Obama was readily available in the online world, but his brand was protected by keeping him way from those people who have a tendency to kick the tires and check underneath the hood of any suspicious four-wheeled brand: the press.

Yet Brand Obama was marketed tested by that new breed of 2.0 journalism, the citizen blogger. Blogger Mayhill Fowler, attending an Obama fundraiser in San Francisco, reported the Brand’s infamous “cling” remarks about lower-brand folks in the American hinterland.

So has Brand Obama lost its zing? It’s zip? It’s snazz? Put another way, is Barack Obama merely old wine in new wineskin? The gleam of this brand, spanking new model appears to have lost some of its luster. As the NYT noted in April, he had enjoyed a considerable lead among men in February over Hillary Clinton: “67 percent of men wanted the party to nominate him compared with 28 percent for Mrs. Clinton. Now 47 percent back him, compared with 42 percent for her.”

Undoubtedly, the wear and tear on this brand in the primary season, the trial marketing period, has been considerable, but not enough to prevent him from reaching the necessary delegate number to seal the deal for the nomination in Denver. But increasingly the fresh face of 2004 is beginning to look like “Fast Eddie Obama,” talking out of both sides of his neck, a trick not unusual for politicians.

There are three issues that potentially show how Brand Obama even before taking the oath of office as POTUS, even before getting the actual nomination to be the candidate as the Democratic standard bearer, has become a typical politician, undermining the freshness of the brand.

1. Suck-up politics

His statement before the American/Israel Political Action Committee (AIPAC) classically underscores that professed fealty to Israel is truly the third rail of American politics. Touch it and you fry. In order to prove that he’s even more loyal to Israel than the Likud wing of the Republican Party, more protective of its security than his own country’s national interest, and because there’s a on-going subterranean smear campaign regarding his Muslim heritage (despite being a professed Christian), Obama even promised that Jerusalem would be an “undivided city.” This was going beyond stated American foreign policy. This was, however, a typical case of overcompensation, in which an outsider has to be 110 percent more than whatever an insider is. (Note how Hillary Clinton had to act more “male” or “macho” than any of her Democratic Party rivals to belie the notion that as a woman she wasn’t up to being commander-in-chief.)

A new kind of politics would have made an attempt not to play the pandering game that American politicians engage in before specific audiences. Just as most politicians have to genuflect before AIPAC, most white politicians have to “We Shall Overcome” before black voters. (And it doesn’t help Obama that his national security advisory group contains Clinton retreads such as Warren Christopher and Madeleine Albright. Has Samatha Powers been banished forever?)

2. More Money than God

Obama’s pledge to use public funding is now dead. Collecting more money than God ($272 million at the last counting) during the primary, Team Obama has decided not to seek $84 million available through public funding. Of course, this led Team McCain, which is lagging in that department, to condemn him as a “typical politician,” a classic flip-flopper. However, John McCain himself has been playing fast, loose, and furious with campaign spending laws, having had to jettison lobbyists from his campaign.

But is there a modicum of validity that while Obama talks good government he hides an iron fist in a very expensive velvet glove? Or, as a lobbyist mused about Obama before journalist Ken Silverstein, “What’s the dollar value of a starry-eyed idealist?”

3. FISA Capitulation

Nothing better sums up the gutless politics of utter capitulation than the House Democrats, for fear of being labeled weak on national security, by caving in on the most recent version of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. A law in which the current administration broke by engaging in warrantless eavesdropping on American citizens without court supervision as specified by law, and then ordering telecommunication firms to do so; once again, breaking the law. Now the Bush administration seeks to codify the executive branch skirting the law and then granting telecoms immunity for breaking the law. Worse yet is Barack Obama, a constitutional law professor, going along with this wanton form of law breaking. Obama justifies supporting such a bill that undermines constitutional freedoms by invoking the same rationale that the Bush administration has used for years, namely “grave threats.”

By any reasonable examination, Barack Obama has embraced the politics of flip-flopping. Once sympathetic to the plight of Palestinians, he has now positioned himself as Israel’s next best friend. (And if he accedes to the White House, don’t be surprised if Israel smacks Iran in the first term of his presidency—if not sooner.) Arguing for a new kind of politics, “change that you can believe,” he breaks a pledge, uses a lawyer-like justification for eschewing public financing. Once denouncing a previous bad FISA bill that sought to codify the brazen lawbreaking of the Bush administration, he now backs a bill that his senate colleague Russ Feingold has termed as “capitulation.”

Obama’s appeal, his source of strength, seems to the emotional intelligence that he conveys through his charismatic appeal. This is his greatest branding strength: he makes people believe, which means that consumers have an emotional investment in Brand Obama as he is known now, or as he appears to be to them.

However, what Obama may truly be offering is a respite from eight years of hard-right Republican governing—war, corruption, incompetence— for a surface reality of change—post-racial, post-partisan—without the necessity of social reality or actual political change occurring at all.

Despite the excitement that Obama has generated, American politics may have morphed into one long advertising campaign: now it’s truly all about the marketing until the next production cycle. As Andrew Card once said of another product (the Iraq War), ``From a marketing point of view, you don't introduce new products in August.''