BlackChampagne -- no longer new; improvement also in question.
Friday, April 25, 2008
Because they're black, too.
Months ago I said that I thought Clinton could win big as president, since she'd get huge support from women who might have grown slightly tired of picking between rich white man A and rich white man B in every election during their adult lives. I was less sure Obama could win, even with his formidable speech-making skills, since so many white Americans remain fundamentally racist.
Now that Obama has an essentially insurmountable lead in delegates, (seemingly to everyone but the Clintons, who seem determined to fight on) the right wing attacks that were focused on the Clintons have shifted to him, and as a result we've had months of white panic and stupid debate questions about Obama being a stealth Muslim, things his pastor said, and tons of general nonsense in which anything any black person has ever done in America is viewed through a lens that requires Obama to repudiate it. And we're still months and months from the real start of the presidential election -- it's going to get much, much worse. I assure you, the open lies and slurs that made up the Swift Boating of John Kerry will be a fond memory by November.
For today's example, it's now incumbent upon Obama to repudiate rap music. Not just something one particular rapper said, or a rapper he's been personally associated with, but rap music in general.
Although the media has finally exposed Barack Obama’s ties to the unhinged pastor his support from rappers who propagate equally pernicious nonsense has gone almost entirely unnoticed.
...The rappers have good reason to praise Obama. He has at times been an apologist for their "music."
...Obama thus far has equivocated on rappers. He has criticized their language, but adamantly refused to denounce the whole sordid genre as the unique cultural problem that it is.
Because after all, rappers are often black people, and Obama is half-black. The fact that rap music happens to be the best selling, most influential style of music in the US, and on earth, over the last decade plus is apparently beside the point. It's scary to reactionary right ring white Republicans, so it's therefore Obama's fault. Look for this talking point to infiltrate the mainstream media in the weeks to come, when everything every black male more intimidating than Will Smith has ever said, in rhyme, will come to symbolize Obama's outlook on society.
Actually, it gets worse, since come to think of it, Obama's not just half-black, he's also half-white. Will his deceptions never end! So now Eminem, Limp Bizkit, and Vanilla Ice are his fault, too! Also, those creepy Aryan Olsen twins. I demand he prove that he's not secretly aligned with the white power movement to pass stealth laws that would force Black Americans back to African, White Americans to back to Europe, and leave this country to the Indians!
More (sarcasm) directed at this absurdity can be found here.
Elsewhere, Roy Edroso makes a point I was going to, but abandoned when I realized it would require me to spend several seconds thinking about country music.
Candidate Barack Obama made a remark at a fund raiser last week in San Francisco that's become somewhat controversial, thanks to the rebroadcasting, amplifying, and condemning it's received from his various political and racial enemies on the right and in Hilary Clinton's campaign offices. Here's the remark:
You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them....And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
When I first read that last week I thought it was fairly insightful. I knew it would be cited by Obama's political enemies as elitist and insulting and untrue and anything else they could smear on it, since 1) they're his enemies, and 2) since any honest discourse about race or class in America is strongly condemned by the powers that be, especially those on the right side of the political aisle. Much of the conservative voting bloc in the US is motivated precisely by what Obama pointed his finger at in these remarks, and the politicians and commenters who remain in power thanks to the proletariat's inchoate anger at Hollywood liberals, or gun control, or immigrants, or the ACLU, etc. If those people are pointed, or led, to the actual economic and political sources of their troubles, in a What's the Matter with Kansas fashion, they might rethink their knee-jerk reactions to cultural provocations, and that might stop them from automatically, and self-defeatingly, voting Republican. So, much as was the case with the controversy whipped up after Obama's brilliant speech on race, the aim of the whippers is to manufacture outrage and perpetuate stereotypes, precisely because those are what keep people from reading or listening to the words and possibly rethinking some of their inbred assumptions.
That was my initial reaction to Obama's words and the extremely predictable reaction to them. I'm slightly rethinking this today, since as Kevin Drum points out, Obama's comments are rather crude and arguably inaccurate generalizations of larger and more complex issues.
...what really strikes me as odd about Obama's statement is that, on its merits, it's largely untrue, isn't it? Economic distress probably is responsible for growing anti-trade sentiment (though the Midwest has never exactly been a bastion of free trade support), and maybe for a bit of the increase in anti-immigrant sentiment too... But does anyone really think that stagnant wages and globalization are responsible for rural gun culture? Or the rise of the Christian right? Or an increase in bigotry? ...Gun culture, for example, has been around forever. It's just that it was largely unnoticed until liberals started trying to take guns away in the 60s and 70s. The rise of the Christian right has lots of causes, but it's part of a long American religious tradition that has very little to do with the ups and downs of the economy. And bigotry hasn't increased in the past 25 years, so that part doesn't even make sense on its own terms.
I think he's right on most of the particulars, but is ignoring the larger issue. It doesn't matter if exact, demographically-provable economic charts show that the Midwest is victimized by globalization and immigration; it matters if the white rural voter thinks that's the case, and fostering that belief, along with the attendant conservative cultural values, is what keeps the Republican party viable in national elections, despite the fact that their actual economic policies are of benefit almost exclusively to the rich. Obama might not have been exactly correct on the details, but the overall theme of his remarks was a perfect strike against the demagoguery of his opponents. Even aside from that, it was a remark made to his supporters at a fundraiser in a very liberal city, and was exactly the sort of faux-insightful political analysis those type of people like to hear. (As this San Francisco-area inhabitant is proving with this blog post?)
Besides, it's not as if politicians don't focus their remarks to appeal to the audience listening, especially when that audience is paying to attend a fund raiser. Parsing out every word of a speech made to a highly supportive, partisan audience is absurd, since obviously any politician is going to give such people more or less what they want to hear.
One of the better political blog posts I've ever read can be seen here. I highly recommend if it you want to get a sense of the larger, underlying principles and concepts that shape the superficial, surface level of politics that is more discussed, yet much less important.
Yet if you look at the history of the last thirty or so years, it seems (says Krugman) that conventional wisdom has been stood on its head, and that politics drove economics.
...And that is our history as we know it. Starting in the 1970s, at about the time of the Lewis Powell memo, an interlocking network of right wing billionaires and theocrats began to fund the institutions whose dominance we take for granted today: The American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, The Family Research Council, the Federalist Society, the Brookings Institute (over time), and on and on...
For these billionaires, the ROI of the Conservative Movement is absolutely spectacular. At the micro level, for example, if you want to create an aristocracy, then you want to eliminate any taxes on inherited wealth, despite what Warren Buffet or Bill Gates might say about the values entailed by that project. So, the Conservative Movement goes to work, develops and successfully propagates the "death tax" talking point (meme, frame) -- which they may even believe in, as if sincerity were the point -- and voila! Whoever thought that "family values" would translate to "feudal values" and dynastic wealth? At the macro level, their ROI has been spectacular as well. Real wages have been flat for a generation; unions have been disempowered; the powers of corporations greatly increased; government has become an agent for the corporations, rather than a protector of the people; the safety net has been shredded; and so on and on and on.
The picture tells the story. The Conservative Movement succeeded beyond the wildest dreams of the billionaires who invested in it. Despite the remarkable gains that we have made in productivity, they creamed most of it off.
This part just summarizes the economic thrust that's driven the pro-rich policies (and results) of the Republican Party over the past few decades, and does it very neatly, which is why I thought it was worth a link. The rest of the post is largely about why Obama's kumbaya-style "let's end partizan rancor" is doomed to failure; the Republicans in Washington are funded by the beneficiaries of this wild income spike, and they are not going to give in on policies that would take some steps towards equalizing the slices of the economic pie distributed to all Americans. You're free to agree or disagree with the specific policy recommendations made in the post, but however you feel about that, I thought the big picture info was well worth a look.
All that being said, congrats to Barack Obama for his win in the Iowa primary, and check out his victory speech if you haven't seen it already. He and Clinton (the male, ex-president Clinton) are the two best speech-makers I've ever heard, and this is a prime example of Obama doing his uplifting, "together we can change the world" thing.
For all the man's charisma and speaking ability, I've been hesitant to support Obama since he's way too happy with the religious stuff. I'm sure he's committed to a secular nation and upholding the constitution (far more so than Bush, certainly), but while I'm not hoping to see major party atheist candidates anything soon, I'd like one who seemed a bit more grounded in reality. Happily, Obama doesn't mention God or Jesus or even Allah in this victory speech, though one can't judge too much from just one 14-minute triumph.
On a larger level though, I've thought his presidential run, while interesting, was ultimately doomed by his race and background. America is still too white, and too racist a society to elect a black man to the presidency, even in 2008, even with Republican approval ratings in the 25% range. I think it's a shame, but I think that's the case. I thought it was, at least. Obama pulling 37% in the Iowa primary, with Edwards and Clinton going around 30% each, is an amazing development, though. Especially since Iowa is a very conservative, old-fashioned state, and it's something like 90% white, by the figures I've seen posted along with the election returns. I'm sure Obama, if he does get the nomination, could win California and New York and other blue states. But the South? The Midwest? True, Gore and Kerry didn't win there either, in 2000 and 2004, and they nearly won anyway (well, Gore actually did win, before the Supreme Court stepped in and stopped the recounts and appointed Bush, but let's not get into that again) but they were just boring, uninspiring candidates. They weren't black(ish) on top of that.
That being said, it's always possible that Obama in the race will motivate a lot of people who don't usually vote to get out there (that's said every time some alternative candidate pops up though, and it usually turns out to be a non-factor), and it's equally possible that while the racist vote exists, the Republican nominee will be so awful that people who would never vote for a black man simply won't vote at all.
I've been paying little attention to the primaries since I figuring Hillary Clinton would get the Democratic nomination. Edwards has been saying some good things (in my opinion; not good in terms of getting popularly elected) about turning the power structure upside down, but he's too young-looking and pretty and diminutive to get the nomination, in this image-dominated day and age. The endless Rush Limbaugh/Ann Coulter hate towards him and his pretty hair has sunk into the media narrative, and that may be true of all the "Hitlery is a ball-busting lesbian." stuff too. I still think she'd win if she were nominated; everyone but the fanatical rightwing still loves Bill Clinton, and she'd get all that vote plus women would turn out to support her, if only from the novelty of having someone other than an aging WASP male to cast a ballot for. Obama, in a nationwide election, though? Not just in Illinois, against awful Republican options? Unknown. I just hope he's got some damn good security; charismatic black national figures have a long history of taking bullets in the US, guns have never been more available in the US, and there are powerful forces profoundly disturbed by his uplifting rhetoric.
