Obama's campaign is orchestrating the trumped-up racism brouhaha (see the Obama campaign memo that Taylor Marsh acquired).
Obama wants to guilt-trip every black voter into voting for him. He needs black voters in South Carolina, a state he desperately needs to win to stay viable after his New Hampshire loss. (Pundits say if Obama loses South Carolina, he's finished. So far, he's behind Clinton in the polls.) That's what is behind Michael Eric Dyson flapping his gums on every talk show and that Obama campaign memo that gives Obama-ites talking points to promote this fabricated issue.
On Wednesday, Obama warned us to expect a "Chicago smackdown" -- a reference to the shady, brutal, mobbed-up world of Chicago politics with which Obama is intimately familar. But now he and his campaign are resorting to low-brow, trumped-up racism? (For a while, it seemed that Obama would avoid Al Sharpton-esque B.S., but the New Hampshire results shook him badly. His deflation was written all over his face and in his body language. It's a sad mark of decline to see such a smart, highly educated man resort to such tactics. Further, it harms the fight against real racism.)
The Obama campaign started playing the race card immediately after Obama lost New Hampshire with Jackson Jr., then upped the dialogue with Dyson, going further with the above press release. Playing the race card before South Carolina? It fits right in with the ugly politics that is regularly seen in that state every time the presidential primaries roll around. (Taylor Marsh)
Black women were enraged over Oprah's endorsement of Obama, and deluged her with complaints. My sense, from black men and women I know, and whose comments I read on blogs, is that they are a very diverse, independent-minded group who don't like having race shoved down their throats, and are creeped out by the rapturously delusional, pseudo-feel-good "He is THE ONE!" Bible-thumpin' rhetoric of Oprah. They also know that Bill and Hillary Clinton have been with them, more than most officials, for decades.
And Obama has a history of alienating black voters: "Obama is regarded with suspicion by most African Americans. ... He alienated much of the black political Establishment in 2000, when he ran unsuccessfully in the Democratic primaries against the incumbent congressman for an Illinois district, Representative Bobby Rush - a former Black Panther and current leading member of the Congressional Black Caucus. His congressional district has more black people than any other in the country, and Obama lost to Rush by 31 points." And that's not the only time that Obama alienated fellow black politicians: See yesterday's Chicago Tribune article, "Obama knows his way around a ballot: Some say his ability to play political hardball goes back to his first campaign."
The New Republic's Sean Wilentz's new article begins, "In war, truth is the first casualty--but in politics, it appears that the first victim is history." Wilentz, a contributing editor at The New Republic and the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln, observes:
In a pair of television interviews earlier this week, Clinton made the uncontroversial historical observation that Martin Luther King and the civil rights movement put their lives on the line for racial equality, and that President Johnson enacted civil rights legislation.Her point was simple: Although great social changes require social movements that create hope and force crises, elected officials, presidents above all, are also required in order to turn those hopes into laws. It was, plainly, a rejoinder to the accusations by Obama that Clinton has sneered at "hope." Clinton was also rebutting Obama's simplistic assertion that "hope" won the American Revolution, the abolition of slavery, and the end of Jim Crow.
The historical record is crystal clear about this, and no responsible historian seriously contests it. Without Frederick Douglass and the abolitionists, black and white (not to mention restive slaves), there would have been no agitation to end slavery, even after the Civil War began. But without Douglass's ally in the White House, the sympathetic, deeply anti-slavery but highly pragmatic Abraham Lincoln, there could not have been an Emancipation Proclamation or a Thirteenth Amendment. Likewise, without King and his movement, there would have been no civil rights revolution. But without the Texas liberal and wheeler-dealer Lyndon Johnson, and his predecessor John F. Kennedy, there would have been no Civil Rights Act of 1964 or Voting Rights Act of 1965.
Hope, in other words, is necessary to bring about change--but it is never enough. Change also requires effective leadership inside government. It's not a matter of either/or (that is, either King or Johnson), but a matter of both/and.
Behind this argument over Clinton's comments lies a false, mythic view of the 1960s in which the civil rights movement supposedly pushed Johnson and the Democrats to support civil rights against their own will. In fact, the movement and the elected officials were distinct but complementary elements in the civil rights politics that changed America. ...
Read all of Wilentz's history-rich and rational article.
Taylor Marsh has painstakingly gone through the details of the kerfuffle, beginning with Sen. Clinton's statements regarding Martin Luther King, Lyndon Johnson, et al.:
This came amidst a comment by Senator Clinton about MLK, which according to Politico's Roger Simon had one Obama staffer saying, "Go ask black people what they think of that statement." Josh Marshall has what I believe is the definitive smackdown on the misunderstanding of its meaning. [Susan's Note: So does Sean Wilentz.] But the quote also has been truncated throughout the traditional media and the blogosphere, with Clinton's subsequent explanation going unmentioned. From Morning Joe, though this is a rough transcript, this is Clinton's statement clarifying her original remark: ... (Read Taylor's piece for the full skinny.)
After covering Hillary Clinton's long history of work on behalf of minority voters, Taylor notes:
Using the race card against Hillary Clinton is laughable.What it reveals is the signs of abject desperation by Mr. Obama and his campaign, which is obviously hoping to inflame African Americans in South Carolina in order to push him across the finish line to victory. Because after the New Hampshire loss, Obama is now under real pressure and simply has to win in South Carolina. The loss in New Hampshire knocked them back into a defensive crouch and they're going overtly negative on the one issue that is sure to inflame everyone: race. Obviously, they think it's an ace for them so they're going to hit that emotional card and hit it hard.
It's complete B.S. And it's a real low for Obama, who I thought was above such tactics. Apparently he's not. The shock of New Hampshire was too much for him to bear and in desperation he's falling back on the worst of all possible tactics.
And let's not even get into the ugly remarks by Jesse Jackson, Jr. about Hillary Clinton's emotional response to a female voter's question on Monday.
Jesse's wife, Jacqueline, is one of those independent-minded black women I mentioned that I know so well. Wrote Marc Ambinder for The Atlantic on January 9th:
Jacqueline Jackson, wife of Rev. Jesse Jackson, endorses HRC and tapes a South Carolina radio ad on her behalf. The Rev. himself is supporting, somewhat tepidly, Barack Obama.Update [2008-1-12 13:32:31 by susanhu]: One of the most specious charges is the "Bradley Effect" -- that white New Hampshire voters told pollsters one thing, then voted against a black in the privacy of the polling booth. TNR destroys this pathetic excuse-making in a new piece, "Poll Potheads." As did I in pointing to stats on the number of young women and independents who voted for Hillary.
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