Mr. Athens? Commander Sparta?

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

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"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

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

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?

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

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

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

"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

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

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.

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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.”