So, I should have done this week ago.
But it should now be obvious that there are a lot of Hillary surrogates who have no clue about how to talk about race under political pressure without sounding racist.
Today's Geraldine Ferraro's turn (from Kos).
If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up in the concept.
What a load of garbage!!! Obama's not leading the race for the Democratic nomination because he's black. Obama's winning because he's an extremely likable figure, who's a bright guy and a super-talented politician. Like anybody else born in the United States, Obama has to play the race cards he's been dealt. But he's played those cards extremely well. Obama has been able to be progressive on the issues without being either a ferocious partisan or heavily identified with minority politics. He has a cool androgyny that plays well with white independents, moderates, and young people while he's also become effective at appealing for black votes.
Barack Obama isn't ahead because the country is "caught up in the concept" of a "black man being president." Obama and Hillary Clinton are pretty much tied in the polls. To the contrary, Obama is ahead in the delegate count because he's made better campaign decisions than Hillary and because his campaign staff has outplanned, outhustled, and outfought Hillary's staff. I still think Hillary would make a better president, but Obama has shown that he's just as much a heavyweight as she is.
That's something that Hillary's surrogates need to catch up on.
Update--Today, Ferraro is claiming that she's being attacked because she's white. It sounds like 75 years of racial resentments are catching up with her. In some ways, she reminds me of my 73 year old mom who is reacting to Obama's success with a lot of racist garbage. It's both sad and disgusting.
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Good God what a pretentious hack you can be. Do you really have a PHD or did you just have a degree printed up? I am a liberal as you claim to be. I am a supporter of Senator Clinton as you claim to be. Yet every word you have written of late has either been critical or her, her husband, her supporters, or her campaign style. You're partially correct when you say "the country" wants a black president. But white liberal guilt among liberals like myself is the true cause of Senator Obama's success. It is clear that you have similar feelings of guilt. The difference is you have allowed yourself to be ruled by that guilt. Ms. Ferraro was absolutely correct. If Obama were white he'd be as politically dead in the water as John Edwards. They're both likeable, appealing, etc but one of them is gone, the other remains. Obama is a flavor-of-the-week whose fifteen minutes will end even if he somehow manages to stumble into the White House.
The reason the Clintons and her allies are repeatedly making unwise and frankly racist remarks about Obama is because for the first time they can't take black voters for granted. Hillary and Bill, and her allies, are in panic mode because for the first black voters aren't rallying to the Clintons--especially after all the Clinton's have "done" for blacks in this country, particularly President Clinton--the nation's first allegedly black President. Not only that, Bill Clinton views his wife’s winning the nomination of the Democratic Party, to say nothing of her winning the general election, as a vindication of sorts for his Presidency after eight years of Republican control of the White House.
White liberals have a paternalistic and frankly racist view of blacks as if they are children, or even mildy retarded, who are incapable of doing anything without government "help”—naturally directed by white liberals--even if this so-called help, particularly the Great Society programs of LBJ, have not had a positive impact on the black community (e.g., rising poverty, higher incidence of divorce and illegitimacy, joblessness and incarceration). Thomas Sowell makes a compelling case for the disastrous effects of liberal social policy on the black community. The disgrace is that black voters refuse to recognize this presumably because of the patronage the Democrats lavish on black elites to perpetuate the myth of the need for such programs.
One should not forget that Al Gore was the first person to use the Willie Horton advertisement against Michael Dukakis, and President Clinton attacked rapper Sister Souljah (sp.?) during a Rainbow-Push Coalition meeting to curry favor with Reagan Democrats disgruntled with the Democratic Party’s seemingly slavish catering to the race hustlers Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Christopher Hitchens, no conservative or fan of President Bush, wrote an excellent article on the Clintons:
How can one equal Bill Clinton for thuggery and opportunism when it comes to the so-called "race card"? And where does one even start with the breathtaking nastiness of his own conduct, and that of his supporters, in the last week? Barack Obama carries South Carolina having made no sectarian appeal to any specific kind of voter, and the best Clinton can say is that this is no better than Jesse Jackson managed to do. Really? Did Jackson come south having already got himself elected the senator from Illinois? And, come to think of it, was Jackson so much to be despised and sneered at when he was needed as Clinton's "confessor," along with Billy Graham, during the squalor of impeachment?
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I never quite understand how the Clintons' initial exploitation of racism was overlooked the first time around and has been airbrushed from the record since. After falling behind in the New Hampshire primary in 1992, and after being caught lying about the affair with Gennifer Flowers to which he later confessed under oath, Clinton left the campaign trail and flew home to Arkansas to give the maximum publicity to his decision to sign a death warrant for Ricky Ray Rector. Rector was a black inmate on death row who had shot himself in the head after committing a double murder and, instead of dying as a result, had achieved the same effect as a lobotomy would have done. He never understood the charge against him or the sentence. After being served his last meal, he left the pecan pie on the side of the tray, as he told the guards who came to take him to the execution chamber, "for later." Several police and prison-officer witnesses expressed extreme queasiness at this execution of a gravely impaired man, and the prison chaplain, Dennis Pigman, later resigned from the prison service. The whole dismal and cruel and pathetic story was told by Marshall Frady in a long essay in The New Yorker in 1993 and is also recounted in a chapter titled "Chameleon in Black and White" by your humble servant in his book No One Left To Lie To. For now, I just ask you to imagine what would have been said if a Republican governor, falling in the polls, had gone out of his way to execute a mentally incompetent African-American prisoner.
Or leaf back, if you will, to the New York Times of March 23, 1992, and the jolly headline, "Club Where Clinton Has Golfed Retains Ways of Old South." Yes indeedy, the Country Club of Little Rock had 500 members, all of them white, and the aspirant candidate had himself photographed there more than once until Jerry Brown made an issue of it. It was then announced by Clinton's people that "the staff and facilities" at the club were "integrated"—a pretty way of stating that the toilets were cleaned by black Arkansans. Yet all this was forgiven by credulous liberals who were sure that they had discovered a New Democrat who was a Southerner to boot.
Many of these same people do not like it now that they see similar two-faced tactics being employed against "one of their own." Well, tough. And many of the most prominent and eloquent black columnists—Bob Herbert, Colbert King, Eugene Robinson—are also acting shocked. It's a bit late. I have to say that Bob Herbert shocked even me by quoting Andrew Young, who said that his pal Clinton was "every bit as black as Barack" because he'd screwed more black chicks. How is Hillary Clinton, or Chelsea Clinton, supposed to feel on hearing that little endorsement? One gets the impression, though, at least from the wife, that anything is OK as long as it works, or even has a chance of working. When Toni Morrison described Clinton as "black" on the basis of his promiscuity and dysfunction and uncertainty about his parentage, she did more than cater to the white racist impression of the African-American male. She tapped into the sort of self-hatred that is evidently more common than we might choose to think. Say what you will about Sen. Obama (and I say that he's got much more charisma than guts), he is miles above this sort of squalor and has decent manners. Say what you will about the Clintons, you cannot acquit them of having played the race card several times in both directions and of having done so in the most vulgar and unscrupulous fashion. Anyone who thinks that this equals "change" is a fool, and an easily fooled fool at that.
In relation to Anonymous, I've been to an Obama event and an Edwards event close upon each other. Obama blew Edwards out of the water and exceeded the high expectations people had for him. His staff also did great work in organizing the event. I don't know how you can say Obama's moving forward because he's black. The current president has less than half of Obama's smarts and charisma but still got elected twice despite "playing politics while white." It just doesn't seem like the political world is that biased toward black people.
Simply put, the Democrats have turned around and bitten themselves on their own backsides. The party that created the politically correct phenomenon is now suffering with the lunacy which they so self-righteously forced upon the rest of us.
Geraldine Ferraro is not a racist. She spoke the truth, the simple truth....that a man with no experience, and no substance to speak of, is running for president. Why is he running for president, who knows why except, I suppose, that like every other candidate in the race, he wants to be President?
Why is he the front runner, given his lack of experience and his apparent possession of only one skill, that being the ability to weave dreams and make promises which multitudes seem more than anxious to accept as gospel? That's easy...because he is an African American and, in this era of Liberal imposed guilt complexes, the only way it seems that America can redeem itself for raping the world, and thereby prove that we really are a fair-minded people, is to pander to the Black community and dutifully slobber over a Black man who is gifted in the art of speech making, and very little else.
It is clear that African Americans are supporting Barack Obama because he is a Black man. What other reason could they have, for Obama offers them nothing that any other Democrat has not offered with the same exuberance and false hope? Were this about politics and only politics, John Edwards would still be in the race and leading the pack as Obama is now. The difference is that Edwards, in addition to being of no less substance than Obama, is White.
Ferraro tells the truth and is castigated for it. We have a candidate for president who is so insulated from scrutiny by the media that any examination of his past record, or possible future performance, is immediately greeted with charges of racism. Is this insanity or is it just a cleverly disguised campaign tactic?
Whichever it is, the Democrats have dug a hole, from which they seem unable to extricate themselves, and must now live with their creation, a nation in which the only people who may be attacked and criticized are White Republican men.
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