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.
Thursday, August 28, 2008
Tuesday, August 26, 2008
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.
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.
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?
Monday, August 25, 2008
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:
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.
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.
Thursday, August 21, 2008
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?
Wednesday, August 20, 2008
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."
Tuesday, August 19, 2008
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.
Monday, August 18, 2008
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…
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…
Friday, August 15, 2008
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.
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.
Thursday, August 14, 2008
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.
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.
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.
Monday, August 11, 2008
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?
Saturday, August 9, 2008
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.
In the May 2008 issue of the Progressive magazine, in which he writes a monthly column, he offered a trenchant argument regarding Barack Obama. We spoke for about forty-five minutes one Wednesday morning.
***
Norman Kelley: You have taken a pretty tough position on Obama. You have termed him: (a) “vacuous opportunist”; (b) a “performer with a good ear for how to make white liberals like him”; and then described him as: (c) a “neo-liberal.” Let’s go over those in some detail. If you hadn’t met him directly, you were in Chicago the same time that Obama came on the scene, right?
Adolph Reed: Right. I’d worked closely with his opponent [Alice Palmer] on the [Illinois] state race, who was the incumbent. There a set of unfortunate dynamics that played out there, which I don’t want to bore readers with, but we wind up having some negotiations with him. She had actually introduced him around as her successor and, primarily at the urging of people like myself and others in her inner circle, she decided to take back her commitment and hold onto her state senate seat.
So we were around the Obama people, as well as his broad camp of supporters at Hyde Park, there were a couple of fairly open meetings where we tried to discuss a way of solving this issue and couldn’t. And it turns out that what Obama did was get her thrown off the ballot by challenging her signature petitions.
That’s one interesting thing about Obama; he’s only had one real opponent for elective office prior to this [campaign] and that’s when he ran against Bobby Rush for a congressional seat and lost very, very badly.
Kelley: You also called him a performer who has a good ear for how to make white liberals like him. What’s your example of that?
Reed: Well, I guess the way I would put it in a different context is that he has a talent, and I think maybe his greatest talent, for saying enough of what the constituency that he’s talking to at the moment want to hear and saying it persuasively that he can leave them believing that’s he with them, while at the same time packing enough qualifiers so that he can deny the next day that’s what he’s actually meant. We saw him do that in the AIPAC speech even though he didn’t pack the qualifiers around it. He was very clear that Jerusalem should be the capital of Israel, and he said a couple of days later, “Oh, no, that’s not exactly what I meant.”
Kelley: That sounds like a talent that people said about Bill Clinton.
Reed: Absolutely. He’s a black fulfillment of Clintonism, and I should put that in a different way: he is a fulfillment of Clintonism so thoroughly partly because he is black, at least nominally. Because you remember, Clinton, at least for some of us, had this infuriating practice and knack for connecting emotionally, or emotively, with black audiences. So he gets props for being able to connective emotively with a black audience while at the same time speaking through the black audience to a white racist audience, ultimately, telling black people they needed to take personal responsibility. He shilled for that hideous crime bill at a black church in Memphis and that kind of thing, and Obama can get a way with being even more vicious and victim blaming than Clinton because he is black.
And he’s done that consistently as well; the Philadelphia speech, the Houston speech where he’s going about “We have to stop feeding our children Popeye’s Chicken for breakfast,” the haughtiness at the NAACP. As I said in another interview last week, I might accept that this isn’t beating up on a racialized imagery of the black underclass, that’s attacking poor black people in a victim-blaming way, if he would go and tell the hedge fund operators that he talks to that that shouldn’t feed their kids the equivalent of Popeye’s Chicken in the morning or they need to be responsible fathers.
Kelley: You also used the term neo-liberal to describe him. Let’s explore that.
Reed: This connects in a certain way because what Obama has to offer is not a policy program that addresses inequality; he never talks about inequality. He talks about opportunity and responsibility…
Kelley: Which are Republican talking points…
Reed: …If you noticed when he met with evangelicals a few weeks ago, he pledged to them he would give them more HHS [Health and Human Services] and HUD [Housing and Urban Development] budget because government can’t solve the problems that afflict poor communities in inner cities. And this has been part of his rap from the very beginning, this line that structural problems are too big, that real solutions come the neighborhood, grassroots and from churches and NGOs, and that’s like a hallmark of neo-liberalism.
In his meeting with evangelicals he got behind all the faith-based stuff; he basically gave them a promise to give them more of the budget than the Bush administration had while reiterating the claim that government can’t provide social services effectively. He has never taken a position on any kind of redistribution and his fiscal and economic policies are, as [New York Times columnist] Paul Krugman has pointed out, were to the right of Clinton who had begun as the DLC’s standard bearer. His foreign policy is no less imperialist than Bush’s foreign policy. Like Kerry before him, his argument is that the war on terrorism hasn’t been fought efficiently enough. He’s on record for wanting to expand it; to redeploy troops to Iraq to Afghanistan and even into Pakistan.
What’s interesting about this is that I noticed that Tom Hayden, who been slurping down that Kool-Aide on an IV for sometime, seemed to notice last month finally that Barack Obama wants to expand the war. Well, Obama said that more than a year ago. I mentioned that in my November column in the Progressive. So one of the things that is interesting and mind-boggling, and I don’t mean interesting in a good way, is the will to believe in Obama even from people whose political identification is with the left, liberal-left and have been for sometime.
Kelley: So, you don’t see the Obama campaign as a potential opportunity, opening a door, for progressive forces to set the national agenda?
Reed: Well, I know one isn’t, technically, suppose to answer a question with a question, but I’ll start out with one. If we can’t get him to pay attention to us now when he needs our votes, why do we think he’ll pay attention to us when he’s elected, if he’s elected? I’m feeling less and less likely that he’ll be elected. This is like the logic of the 2 a.m. booty call. We’re saying in effect, “Well, I know he’s always out in public with her and he seems happy, but he’s told me that he really wants be with me.” There’s no reason to believe past a certain point that if this is what he does, this is what he really will do.
Kelley: So, what does this say about left of center, progressive organizing? The left doesn’t seem to be able to make politicians pay attention to issue it considers important, so the left is forced to go along with the lesser of two evils. There doesn’t seem to be any substantive organizing on the left. This has been the most organized that the left has been in a while. What’s been going on?
Reed: Well, I think you hit the nail on its head. The election season is too late to think about; it’s already happened. It’s a little bit like what happens with these urban renewal projects: by the time we find out about them, it’s too late to do anything about them except to try and find some way to negotiate the best possible terms of surrender, and this is the way this election stuff is.
Over the last 25, 30 years, and this is what I’ve been trying to get a more elaborate argument about, is that of all of American left of center politics—the labor movement, civil rights movement, women’s movement, public interest movement, environmental movement, you can go down the list—apart from disconnected individuals and small group list, sectarian activists, that is to say, all the left of center groups that have any institutional foundation for traction have long since fallen into a groove that assumes, or a groove that reproduces a political praxis assumes that the equivalent post-[Second World] war bargaining system is still in effect, and it hasn’t been. It hasn’t been for a long time.
For instance, I’m on the board of Public Citizen. Two of the most important things we’ve have done is lobby and litigate. Now, we can still win some victories on both those fronts; the Global Trade Watch campaign and Lori Wallach have both obviously successful in maximizing opportunities to win lobby and legislative victories on the trade front. Most of them, still no fault of our own, is more about stopping bad stuff than about winning good stuff.
The same is true in the courts, but in both of those areas, both in the legislature and in the courts, a logic of diminishing returns have set in because success in either of those domains depend being able to assume neutrality, if not some measure of good will, from the courts and the legislature. It is less and less possible to assume that.
The problem here is, to some extent, the changing of praxis, the changing of grooves is like trying to steer a battleship, and there are internal pressures that keep those institutions moving along the same path even though the returns are getting less. If you poked you head up and look down the road, you can see that this groove is going to run you into the ocean or onto an oncoming train, some place that isn’t good.
In this context what politics has been reduced to is the election cycle and going to elect your Democrat.
Kelley: Now this is interesting. It seems that the right understands just the opposite, they seem to understand that there’s another election that takes place between every four years; they mobilize, they organize…
So, this leads this question: How would you characterize the general state of left of center organizing as compared to the right? I mean, over the past 30 years the right has won the White House, controlled Congress, and have placed conservatives on the Supreme Court while the left has only been organizing itself on the Internet and has been unable to make any decisive policy victories that improve people’s lives
Reed: I think that’s absolutely right. In a way, and this is a simplistic account, but you can take the Goldwater defeat [of 1964] as a kind of iconic moment for the right. For them, that was kind of like the Canton uprising of 1928, they got routed and they figure out “We have to do something different,” and they had sense enough to understand that the result of the [1964] election they didn’t have the constituency that they needed, or the constituency that they needed to push the policy agenda that they have didn’t exist and they needed to create it.
And you don’t create in it in two years or four years; you create it by digging in real places that have names and addresses, and organizing people with who have real names and addresses, to implant a different way of conceptualizing what the pertinent issues are in politics, and building alliances that knit together constituencies around them.
I would recommend to everyone taking a look at Shapiro and Graetz’s book “Death By A Thousand Cuts,” which is really a nice examination of how the rightwing termed the estate tax into the “death tax” and built a durable alliance to defeat it even though no more than 2 percent of the American population has ever paid it. And as with everything else, part of the story is of acquiescence and the abetting of the liberals, for that’s what made the victory of the right possible along the way.
Part of the story that is true on our side of the ledger is a kind anti-politics strain that emerged of a section of the New Left. One vantage of the right had been that they knew what they were organizing for; they were organizing to win power. A lot people on the left were skittish about the idea of power.
Kelley: That’s an interesting point. I’ve had said that if you look at what’s going on the left is more interested in theory. Generally, the academic left is interested in theory, (I have coined the term the “theoriocracy”), but the right is interested in power. They organized to go after the economy, they went after the Supreme Court, they went after the White House and Congress, and then built these media outlets to get their message across and to challenge or denigrate, but the left doesn’t appear to be interested [dealing with the lack of effective power] or is slowly waking up to that reality.
Reed: I agree with your analysis completely, but I would also add in addition to theory is self-expression. Our politics tends to recede to being smart, and one of the things that the logic of being smart does it tells you that there is no way that you can win because the right is too powerful. But one of the other features is, bearing witness, and the politics of bearing witness and the politics of movement building don’t run on the same track. They are often in conflict.
Kelley: In what way?
Reed: It happened in the anti-war politics, and overlaps with a couple of the other pathologies, that have afflicted the left. The idea of the object of political action is to have a demonstration mistakes the tip of the iceberg for the iceberg. People like it because it gives them something to do, because they can get the sense that they are taking action in some way; in the sense of buying a red tee shirt takes action, ultimately. And it is a kind of low cost way of feeling that you’re doing something; so you got to the rally, you take your sign, you chant your slogan, you go home, you feel good about yourself.
Kelley: Your feet are tired but your soul is rested…
Reed: There you go; that would make a good tee shirt; put it on the cover and the back. But it doesn’t add up to anything, especially since we have fallen into— in the politics of demonstrations—what I have called the “permit regime.” We first of all go get a permit for the march and the authorities over the last 30 years have gotten really smart about this. They make sure you walk some place where nobody will see you, where you won’t disrupt anything, and where you gather some place where you won’t have contact with someone outside the demonstration, and they can’t see you or hear you.
The culture of demonstration has evolved to acknowledge this material reality, because I think that’s where all the young people juggling on unicycles, dressed up like from where turtles come from, from the fact that the mass demo is going on some place in a gully and will have no impact on anything. The last thing that Todd Gitlin wrote that I thought was any good was his book “The Whole World is Watching and the Unmaking of the New Left.”
Kelley: That’s one of the best books out there…
Reed: That’s something else that people ought to read. Unfortunately, I have to lay a lot of that at the feet of my generation and the New Left. The social fractions that make up the core base of this kind of leftism, are people whose lives are not going to be much affected no matter who wins. I mean, The Nation crowd, in so far members of the academy or elsewhere, are by and large well connected enough that they have got good stable jobs with decent access to healthcare and benefits and maybe pensions. No Democratic politics or no presidential candidate on the Democratic label has been able to go out and offer concrete proposals for making better the lives of most working people in this country.
Kerry’s so-called healthcare proposal was going cost a trillion dollars and by his own acknowledgment—and it was a complex Rube Goldberg contraption that was complex because he wanted to make sure that insurance companies were brought in—and by acknowledgement was going to leave half of the 46 million who are uninsured still uninsured. His antiwar stance of fighting it better and sending in more troops wasn’t going to do anything to ease the concerns of those Wal-Mart workers and public schools teachers, who along with their kids in the National Guard were otherwise being called up. You end but don’t mend the other…Not exactly privatize the pension system but you don’t shore it up, either.
Kelley: If either party is not going to address the needs of working people, why do you think there is no third party of some sort of independent political apparatus that can place demands on the system?
Reed: That’s a very good question. I spent more than the last fifteen years trying to build an independent labor party and it’s hard because of the kind of institutional factors we’ve had talked about before. We founded the labor party a few months before the ’96 election and we assumed that every one in the labor movement would be focused on election, and stuff usually starts a year or so before the actual election. And then you’re not doing anything except taking care of the everyday business that needs to be taken care of. And then all of these institutions [of the left] have shrunken revenues bases and are trying to do more with less, and some of it is just something, frankly, as venal as, “Well, not that I’m just doing okay,” but there’s a staff stratum that moves back and forth between unions and public interest groups, congressional staff to the DNC.
So they move back and forth and there’s a logic of not wanting to piss anyone off so they keep their options open, which really translates into a different version of “Well, I’m doing okay with things are they are, so why should I try to do anything different that might tick of the congressman at men that could prevent a bill from getting through. Some people might think that I’m an irresponsible radical.”
Kelley: If McCain doesn’t win the November election, you know the right will be mending itself. However, I get the feeling that if Obama wins, the left will sigh, let down its guard and just say what, “What is this guy to do for us?” instead of having a set of policies that they would like implemented.
Reed: Unquestionably, with Obama, as with Kerry, as with Gore, as with Clinton, in some non-trivial ways, our side would likely be better off, at least for the first four years of an Obama presidency, with Obama in office than with McCain, but that’s only one level of calculations. We also need to think of a long-term view. You go back to Clinton; Clinton was able to do things that would have been arguably difficult for a Republican do.
Kelley: Like the repeal of welfare….
Reed: The repeal of welfare, the elimination of the federal government’s 60-year old commitment to federal housing for poor people, NAFTA, those two hideous crime bills, and something else that people have only begun to pay a little attention to. It was under the Clinton administration that you saw the first significant burst of financial deregulations, the repeal of the Glass-Steagall [Act], another edifice of the New Deal, which kicked off the speculative wave of the dot.com boom that became later the dot.com bust. And the same thing that I have confirmed recently has been true of housing speculation, but even beyond those specific policy entailments that wound up wreaking a lot of havoc on so-called traditional Democratic constituencies, the longer term cost of Clinton’s victory was much more of a consolidation of his notion of neo-liberalism is what legitimate political aspiration is on the left. That’s what makes it possible for Obama, who is even to the right of Clinton, to proclaim himself as the boundary of progressive politics.
I want to reiterate what I said both in the Progressive and the Black Agenda Report. I am not arguing that people shouldn’t vote for Obama. In fact, what I’m arguing is that it is not clear that whether you vote for him or don’t vote for him is an important issue, or whether the cost and benefit of doing one of the other can be calculated clearly enough to come down on either side of that question.
I’m just not going to do it because I’ve just gotten to a point where I’m not going to ask someone to come and do it to me. I’m not going to offer to toss somebody’s salad; they may make me do it, but I’m not going to ask for it. But that’s just a matter of personal idiosyncrasy; I can’t argue against for voting for him. What I would argue against is for trying to justify voting for him [in the belief] that in the short term that he’s likely to be less dangerous than McCain.
Kelley: That’s something to keep in mind. I’ve been telling people that if he gets into office you have to watch him.
Reed: But once you vote him.… He hasn’t even counted up all the delegates, yet; he didn’t even leave an equivalent of cab money on the table, you know what I mean? He just got what he wanted and was gone. I think one thing that comes true in that New Yorker article ["Making It; How Chicago Shaped Obama"], although they are too much in support of him for it to come through quite clearly, is that is what his entire political career has been. There’s been nothing there but ambition. There’s been no alliance that he hasn’t sold out.
You can talk to people in Hyde Park about that, too. Some of my friends, including my doctor, who’s a longtime activist, who’s also Obama’s doctor and Jesse Jackson’s doctor—I told him the last time I saw him that he’s probably the only man in the world who can claim that he has had two fingers stuck up the behind of Obama and Jesse Jackson—well, he was a supporter of Obama earlier and before Obama went to the U.S. Senate, he had soured on him.
###
In a brief phone conversation days later, while clarifying a point, I asked Reed what did he make of Jesse Jackson’s castration remark regarding Obama “talking down to black people.” Reed observed: “That Jesse’s remark was consistent with his pettiness and it also reflects how the old school ‘race first’ crowd has been trying to get a handle on the Obama campaign.”
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
"I'm Just Hot." Paris Hilton Offers Her Energy Policy
Paris Hilton coolly dismisses McCain as the "white-haired dude" in her presidential video and offers a "hybrid" of both McCain's and Obama's energy policies, which echoes what the bi-partisan Senate "Gang of Ten" has offered as a compromise, if not a direct steal.
Monday, August 4, 2008
What to do about being "Black and Blue"
Some interesting insights from Drew Westen, whom I interviewed a few weeks ago, on what Team Obama's response should be to the recent ads from Team McCain.
Westen is the author of "The Political Brain," which ought to be the handbook of every Democratic strategist. The real problem, however, is that the Republicans already understand what he's talking about.
Westen is the author of "The Political Brain," which ought to be the handbook of every Democratic strategist. The real problem, however, is that the Republicans already understand what he's talking about.
Saturday, August 2, 2008
The Black Bimbo (with a correction and apologies)
Note: In an earlier post regarding the McCain campaign's video association of Obama with two current pop female pop celebrities, I mistakenly cited Lindsay Lohan instead of Britney Spears. Usually when I cite a reference to an article or ad, I check the original source and make a link to it. For some odd reason, I didn’t and thus my obvious mistake. Although blogs are mostly opinion oriented, I strive to make whatever I post fact-based since facts as well as the truth are important.
My apologies to TPM readers, to Ms. Lohan, and the McCain campaign.
***
What is McCain really inferring by his association of Obama with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? It’s not merely being a celebrity, for his campaign could have chosen George Clooney, a liberal Hollywood hunk, or Brad Pitt.
No, these gals are just frivolous, airheads, the kind who suck up more media airtime like that frivolous two-book writing, Harvard-trained, University of Chicago lawyer professor, first-term senator from the Land of Lincoln. He’s like numerous other blondes in America pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smith, or Pam Anderson, all airheads, all frivolous, some gold-diggers.
Women like Spears and Hilton are, after all, the essence of trophy wives; nice to look at, but you don’t take them seriously.
There’s nothing serious about this guy Obama. He doesn’t inspire people; he ain’t cool like the Senator McCain, who has a war record and years in Congress.
Obama isn’t a real nigga, black man; the kind that America fears but is used to: Mr. T. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Le Bron James, Samuel Jackson, These men exude some kind of niggatude that make them a known entity, and useful. You may hate them, but they are the black devils you know rather than the Obama devil you don't know.
Obama? He’s slim and sleek, which makes him suspicious in the eyes of some of the electorate who may not vote for him because he ain’t fat. He’s has nice smile, too.
In a word, a bimbo. No, two words, an Obama bimbo.
My apologies to TPM readers, to Ms. Lohan, and the McCain campaign.
***
What is McCain really inferring by his association of Obama with Paris Hilton and Britney Spears? It’s not merely being a celebrity, for his campaign could have chosen George Clooney, a liberal Hollywood hunk, or Brad Pitt.
No, these gals are just frivolous, airheads, the kind who suck up more media airtime like that frivolous two-book writing, Harvard-trained, University of Chicago lawyer professor, first-term senator from the Land of Lincoln. He’s like numerous other blondes in America pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smith, or Pam Anderson, all airheads, all frivolous, some gold-diggers.
Women like Spears and Hilton are, after all, the essence of trophy wives; nice to look at, but you don’t take them seriously.
There’s nothing serious about this guy Obama. He doesn’t inspire people; he ain’t cool like the Senator McCain, who has a war record and years in Congress.
Obama isn’t a real nigga, black man; the kind that America fears but is used to: Mr. T. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Le Bron James, Samuel Jackson, These men exude some kind of niggatude that make them a known entity, and useful. You may hate them, but they are the black devils you know rather than the Obama devil you don't know.
Obama? He’s slim and sleek, which makes him suspicious in the eyes of some of the electorate who may not vote for him because he ain’t fat. He’s has nice smile, too.
In a word, a bimbo. No, two words, an Obama bimbo.
Friday, August 1, 2008
The Black Bimbo
What is McCain really inferring by his association of Obama with Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan? It’s not merely being a celebrity, for his campaign could have chosen George Clooney, a liberal Hollywood hunk, or Brad Pitt.
No, these gals are just frivolous, airheads, the kind who suck up more media airtime like that frivolous two-book writing, Harvard-trained, University of Chicago lawyer professor, first-term senator from the Land of Lincoln. He’s like numerous other blondes in America pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smithe or Pam Anderson, all airheads, all frivolous, some gold-diggers.
Women like Lohan and Hilton are, after all, the essence of trophy wives; nice to look at, but you don’t take them seriously.
There’s nothing serious about this guy Obama. He doesn’t inspire people; he ain’t cool like the Senator McCain, who has a war record and years in Congress.
Obama isn’t a real nigga, black man; the kind that America fears but is used to: Mr. T. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Le Bron James, Samuel Jackson, These men exude some kind of niggatude that make them a known entity, and useful. You may hate them, but they are the black devils you know rather than the Obama devil you don't know.
Obama? He’s slim and sleek, which makes him suspicious in the eyes of some of the electorate who may not vote for him because he ain’t fat. He’s has nice smile, too.
In a word, a bimbo. No, two words, an Obama bimbo.
No, these gals are just frivolous, airheads, the kind who suck up more media airtime like that frivolous two-book writing, Harvard-trained, University of Chicago lawyer professor, first-term senator from the Land of Lincoln. He’s like numerous other blondes in America pop culture: Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield, Anna Nicole Smithe or Pam Anderson, all airheads, all frivolous, some gold-diggers.
Women like Lohan and Hilton are, after all, the essence of trophy wives; nice to look at, but you don’t take them seriously.
There’s nothing serious about this guy Obama. He doesn’t inspire people; he ain’t cool like the Senator McCain, who has a war record and years in Congress.
Obama isn’t a real nigga, black man; the kind that America fears but is used to: Mr. T. Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Le Bron James, Samuel Jackson, These men exude some kind of niggatude that make them a known entity, and useful. You may hate them, but they are the black devils you know rather than the Obama devil you don't know.
Obama? He’s slim and sleek, which makes him suspicious in the eyes of some of the electorate who may not vote for him because he ain’t fat. He’s has nice smile, too.
In a word, a bimbo. No, two words, an Obama bimbo.
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