Eriposte at TheLeftCoaster * has an excellent post on the Grand Unified Theory of Teh Race (GUTTeRTM) But is eriposte referring to the campaign or the racial makeup of the candidates? It seems very strange to me that the so-called post racial, transitional candidate continues to benefit from a racial bias by the rest of us, as if there are no other reasons for us to reject him except the color of his skin. It’s the stupidest thing I think I’ve ever heard from a candidate since George Bush asked us if we wanted to buy some wood at a debate.
Obama is a less than a full term senator who has absolutely NO executive experience (having never served with an executive in any capacity-at all), has about as much foreign policy experience as I have, never met a politically sensitive bill he couldn’t avoid, wins in states that we can’t win in the fall and suppresses the results of MI and FL in order to keep the perception of a delegate lead, copied his campaign rhetoric almost to the letter from Deval Patrick’s and has one of the dirtiest campaign organizations out there and *I’M* a racist because I think the media and John McCain are going to wipe the floor with him while MI and FL turn their backs on the Democratic party? Please. Who started all of the racist accusations anyway? Well, who stood to gain from them? Eriposte doesn’t say exactly, though you’d have to be pretty dim if you can’t figure it out. But the damage to the party in an effort to win by exploiting a “perception” of racism that by and large does not exist in any great magnitude in *this* party can be severe:
Let me say that, in this context, it is also worth reading Anglachel’s post “Otherness“. I don’t agree with all of it, but she raises a key point that pertains directly to the segment of the Democratic party that revels in making sweeping and false accusations of racism, especially against fellow Democrats. This segment is the foundation of the Reverse Racism Chasm within the Democratic party and reverse racism is their electoral firewall. The toxic stain they leave within the Democratic party is fundamentally dangerous to the party’s ability to win amongst the broader electorate and to defeat real racism everywhere in society, especially emanating from portions of the Republican party. People like David Sirota, who falsely cry racism, and repeatedly so, do enormous damage to the civil rights movement and negate the real hard work being done by thousands of activists in the fight against real racism in American society.
For a person who claims to be all about getting past race, he sure has managed to get pretty far as the black candidate and making the rest of US feel guilty about it.
(Oh, excuse me for bringing up what everyone is thinking. I must be spanked.)
*TheLeftCoaster- def. The place where I put my highball glass?
PS. My mom likes to quote Oscar Wilde who said, “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.”
Filed under: Barack Obama, Presidential Election 2008 | Tagged: Eriposte, GUTTeR, racism, TheLeftCoaster |
The Confluence 
Obama spends a lot of time in the gutter. Especially when he’s bowling.
Hi there.
I intentionally used the term as a play on both the racial issue and the campaign but it primarily refers to the charges of racism.
As for who stood to gain the most from the racial accusations, the history is very clear: Sen. Obama’s campaign. Sean Wilentz wrote about it some length in TNR. My coverage has made it fairly clear as well, even though I haven’t said as much about it explicitly.
The Sirota piece could be construed as an attempt by an Obama surrogate (with the blessings of the Obama campaign?) to make race as an issue again and race bait, too because the Wright controversy effectively stopped the ease in which Obama surrogates (with the blessings of the Obama campaign?) could race bait.
So what could the Clinton team (and surrogates) must do in order to counteract it? The only thing that they (Clinton team and surrogates) could really do is to be careful of what they say in public so that the other party (Obama team and surrogates) would not have any ammunition for race baiting. Because that is what it is. Race baiting.
Remember the time when the Somali tribal dress that Barack wore in 2006 and was leaked thru the Drudge Report? David Plouffe immidiately accused the Clinton team of ’shameful offensive fear-mongering’. Then there is the op-ed of Orlando Patterson in the NY times which tried to put race in the 3am ad of Sen. Clinton.To qoute the 1st paragraph of the op-ed:
“On first watching Hillary Clinton’s recent “It’s 3 a.m.” advertisement, I was left with an uneasy feeling that something was not quite right — something that went beyond my disappointment that she had decided to go negative. Repeated watching of the ad on YouTube increased my unease. I realized that I had only too often in my study of America’s racial history seen images much like these, and the sentiments to which they allude.” And that is only the 1st paragraph.
This can be construed as race baiting tactics of the Obama team and surrogates. It only needs a spark which Geraldine Ferraro unfortunately started. That is why the Clinton team and surrogates must be very careful of what they say or email to each other.
eriposte: Thanks for that clarification. I think this is best left as an exercise for the reader. They need to work through the logic on their own or it is very difficult to accept. It seems counterintuitive at first. But, yes, Obama had the most to gain from introducing race into the race. It is one of the reasons why I would prefer to write in Hillary’s name if she doesn’t win the nomination, something I think is unlikely but possible at this point. If we could only figure out a way of depicting what has been really going on….
RD: What I fear is that the right (and the media) will expose this during the GE if he’s the nominee.
In Obama’s early book he clearly isn’t post racial. He quotes Malcolm X’s remark about hating every white drop of blood in his body as something with which he (Obama) identifies. That is a little bit self-loathing. Internalized xenophobia? Or just plain racism?
I don’t know what he thinks now, because his speech on race had a lot of mixed messages, but frankly, I see him as another child of immigrant ancestry. He is able to employ the “we” when he wants to, because he is part of the American body politic in a way most African Americans have been denied because of the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. He plays both sides, but he’s really only from one side.