This is intriguing. I didn’t take any of the comments made as clearly racist. I took it that the media was looking for something to sensationalize and run with.
How did the fairy tale comment apply to his Iraq war stance? Did Obama’s camp initiate the suggestion that it was about a black man running for president and if so, do we know that for sure?
The fly in the ointment is that there may be no home run potential here. It may not be possible for him to say anything to reverse the damage that has been done. He can write and deliver a great speech, but at this point it might be like putting lipstick on a pig.
Can you show us this denial? I haven’t seen it and I think this statement is false.
If asked a direct question about whether his race plays some role in why people vote for him I think most people would answer that that’s obviously true.
The question of whether Clinton’s gender and the unique concept of our first woman president also gets votes for Clinton is another obvious yes.
Any more so than the novelty of the first viable female candidate getting votes? It’s embarrassing only to the extent that being human is embarrassing, which is to say, not much at all. The campaign is about the voters getting to know more about the candidates. We’ve had a lot more time to form a concept of Hillary and who she is. The more people have been exposed to Obama the more voters have come round to him, including lots of former Hillary supporters.
As you say, we’ll see.
Are you seeing or reading into something I’m not? From all outward appearances Obama is fielding the issues just fine, and further, he’s gaining superdelegates and support. What do you see?
I’m seeing Obama being very tardy in handling this. He should have known it would come up a year ago and addressed it then. I can’t say he has handled it effectively so far because it should be old news by now. What I don’t see but do fear is that this might be more successful at painting Obama black than anything Bill Clinton did. My reading of the electorate is that white voters are scared senseless by this kind of talk and will quickly reject anyone even remotely associated with it.
I think your assessment has some merrit, but I’m not convinced it has the power to bring down a candidacy. His base is not that fragile, if it were he would have lost traction to the Clinton machine long before now IMO. I bleive his speech tonight will deliver a pretty clear message.
It’s a factor, yes, but Hillary supporters tend to overstate its importance to make their candidate look like more deserving, and that’s what ticks people off. If Hillary was winning, few on her side would welcome insinuations that she is only as successful as she is because she’s a woman riding on the coattails of her husband, even though we probably all agree that this has been a factor in her success. Harping on this only makes the harpers look bad, really.
This makes little sense. This does make Obama more qualified, because offending too many people with one’s campaign strategies, as Hillary has done, inherently makes one less qualified to lead people. Part of being an effective politician is knowing how to appeal to some people without offending others, and Hillary doesn’t do this very well. She came into the race with a lot of political currency: name-brand recognizability, a strong “get r done” image, her husband’s popularity, the support of some big name people, the standing of potentially being the first female president . And steadily her currency has lost its value, as she has shown herself unable to compete against someone who is better at selling himself to the public.
I disagree. Many see Hillary’s blunders as a sign of a calculating mind that is so hungry for political points that she makes mistakes she should have seen a mile coming. Outside of the campaign, I think her voting for Iraq is pathomnemonic of this. Within the campaign, we’ve seen her make the same kind of mistakes with her “denounce and reject” ploy, and her insistence on trying to scandalize very trite issues that Obama defused so adeptly that he ended up looking like the winner (the plagiarism thing, Rezko, the so-called Iraq doublespeak thing). Her miscalculations with respect to downplaying MLK’s role in the Civil Rights Movement and letting her husband go attack dog on Obama speak negatively to her judgement. So I disagree that these none of these actions and their consequences make Obama a better president than her. Interpersonal skills are very relevant in this race, especially since their stance on the issues don’t drastically differ.
He did.
And the fact that the media has suddenly decided to glom onto this old news is Barack Obama’s fault, how?
Yeah, you mentioned this before. But you fail to mention that Hillary has done the same kind of thing. When she’s speaking to black churches, she picks up the cadences and the accents and the flavor as well, so what’s the big deal? Obama has to connect to his audience just like anyone else, but that doesn’t mean he’s trying to make himself “more black” to black people. I’m annoyed that he gets accused of this, while Hillary’s pandering is taken for granted.
The same phenomenon occured in non-blacks, though. Are we supposed to think black people were the only people impressed by his showing in Iowa? A lot of people were motivated to support Obama because of his performance there; last time I check, that’s the nature of the staggered primary system! So yes, blacks became more confident in Obama’s electability after Iowa. They were not special in that regard.
That’s easy to answer: Because Jackson is well aware that as a black man (with a racially controversial reputation) aligned with Obama, he would only hurt his guy’s chances if he even looked like he was going to say the “r-word”. Obama can not ever accuse anyone of being racist, no matter how blatant it is; if he does, then he starts looking like a “whiny black person”. No one understands this better than Jackson. It’s interesting, though, that while to the press he expressed that took no offense to Bill’s statement, Jesse essentially told Obama to never stoop to their level, no matter how low it gets. That shows that Jesse knew the intent behind Bill’s statement, despite his politically correct response to the media.
This may all be true, but “old school political haymaker” strategies do not work well against someone who has successfully marketed himself as a change agent who wants to get past the hackneyed, mean-spirited politics of Washington! So even if you’re right that the Clintons didn’t do anything egregiously offensive here, it still was a miscalculation on their part. It’s a miscalculation mainly because Hillary has zero standing on the Iraq war. To attack Obama on this shows Rove-like unscrupulousness and a lack of regard for the public’s intelligence. It’s also a miscalculation because it shows that Hillary is out of touch with her opponent’s strengths. She only made it easier to portray himself as a good guy who is above the petty squabbling of Clinton’s generation.
I agree. I don’t think blacks in general believe that the Clintons are big r racists. I just think that, like plenty of other people, they feel that the Clintons are fighting a bit dirty. And I think they are more apt to feel that way because it’s a black guy. A black guy with some great qualities that they’d like to see in the White House.
Why is this especially troubling? He did pretty well in a state that is notoriously racist. I was actually surprised that he did as well as he did there.
Nothing I’ve said contradicts this. 9th Floor kept talking about how Obama has made himself more blacker, and all I’ve said is the Clintons are just as responsible for this as Obama is.
Oops, just read what you wrote again Hippy and I realized I misunderstood what you were referencing when you wrote “old school haymaker politics”. Mea culpa. The rest of what I wrote still stands though. If the “fairy tale” was indeed about Iraq and not his candidancy (I’d also be interested in seeing a clip with the full context), then the Clinton’s deserved to get penalized for that even if there was some misconstruing going on.
I’m not talking about just picking up a cadence or code-switching… I’m talking about talking to the audience with different words and a different message. I wouldn’t characterize it as trying to be “more Black” but I would characterize it as a strategy the other candidate would be called out on using. Remember Clinton’s “I ain’t no ways tired” line? The press mocked her for days about that.
I don’t think I argued against this point. My last line of the post acknowledged that all Americans took note of Iowa.
I’ve met Jackson and followed him over the years. I don’t think he would mince words, and I think he has the ability to make a nuanced statement calling Clinton out if he had indeed crossed a line. I think he also knows that nobody’s going to change their opinion about him at this time, and it’s public knowledge that he supports Obama. I don’t see how holding his tongue if Clinton did indeed transgress that line would have an effect one way or another. Cliburn, for instance, never called Clinton out but did make it clear that he felt that Clinton crossed a line. I’m taking Jackson at his word that he didn’t feel that way.
I’m glad we agree. The only issue I have is the assumption that the Clintons are the only ones playing dirty. People haven’t seen the memo that Amaya Smith, communications director for the Obama campaign, wrote indicating that the Clintons had injected racism into the campaign. See it here for yourself. I think it’s fair to say if the Clintons released a memo with the words of Jeremiah Wright and Jesse Jackson, Jr. as evidence people would lose their minds.
As far as the “fairy tale” comment being taken out of context, Media Matters has it covered here.
You think that Mississippi’s reputation is qualitatively worse than Alabama’s, Florida’s, or Georgia’s? (I used to live in Georgia - Atlanta isn’t representative of the state.) I think you’ll find the same attitudes in the other states mentioned. More importantly, if Obama’s people are being candid, I think they noticed the trends in the exit polling as well and they’re concerned.
And in fairness to Mississippi, there’s racism everywhere… I wouldn’t call them out as being particularly worse than a lot of other places at this point in time.
Yes, I can and it’s not false. Look around yourself. Trying to ‘prove’ things to you is a waste of my time.
We’ll agree to disagree about that. Being human is VERY embarrassing, in my view.
He still could have put it behind much earlier. Mind you, I think he’s a brilliant man and is by far and away the best choice for 2008, but surely he could have foreseen this coming in the YouTube age. Perhaps if it forced the speech it was a good thing, but this Wright thing almost put the train off the tracks.
Yes, we do indeed disagree. I don’t think playing the race card makes him more qualified. That, of course, is my reading of what went down at SC with MLK.
Someone else pointed out that Ferraro dismissing his candidacy as based on only race was divisive. See, to me, accusing her of doing so is what’s divisive. She was simply making a factual observation after being asked to explain his appeal. We can agree to disagree there as well, I presume.
As for the plagiarism thing, I agree that’s trite and makes him look like a winner on the issue. As for Rezko, NAFTA, and Iraq doublespeak (and now Wright), I don’t think he’s handled those as well and I do think that will hurt him and I believe on NAFTA, it already has hurt him in losing Ohio. Just my opinion.
As for Wright (the latest), I think his speech was really good. I don’t think it will go away, however, for many reasons including the following excerpts from an article from Fineman on MSNBC:
"He and his top aides have started to give excuses and split hairs with the enthusiasm (if not quite the surgical skill) of a Bill or Hillary Clinton. And for Obama it is not a good thing to start to sound like either.
The fact is Wright is the man who brought Obama to Christ. He is the one who married him and Michelle Robinson. He is the one who baptized their children. He is the one who helped supply a sense of community rootedness and black identity that Obama, by his own account, says he so yearned for as the credentialed but confused son of a racially mixed marriage.
So what do Obama and his surrogates say?
* David Axelrod, Obama’s media adviser and close friend, said with what I assume was a straight face (it was a conference call) that a main reason why Wright did not give the invocation in Springfield was that the temperature outside was too cold.
* Obama very carefully says that he never heard any of Wright’s incendiary preachments while he, Obama, was “in the pews” in the church.
* Obama says he never heard them “directly” from Wright in “private conversations.”
* Sen. Dick Durbin of Illinois, one of Obama’s closest political allies, said many of Wright’s most inflammatory remarks were made BEFORE Obama joined the church.
* The new pastor of the church (the Obamas still belong to it) in essence is threatening to brand as racist anyone who questions the statements and record of the Rev. Wright.
* Obama has said that he repudiates all of the nasty Wright statements that are circulating as audio and video files on the net (including the “God Damn America” and “U.S. of KKK A” ones) and that he “probably” would have walked out of the church and had words with Wright if he had heard them in the pews.
* At other times, Obama has dropped the “probably.”
By the way, the new pastor adding to the list of racists those that question Rev. Wright is another example of crying wolf on racism.
To me, it looks this way: Obama supporters imply that Hillary, Bill, and Geraldine are all racists or playing the race card. Someone on the board already pointed out in detail how Bill had an impressively diverse group of folks in his government. Yet he’s a racist or playing the race card. Geraldine spent 40 years fighting for civil rights. Yet, she can be smeared in an instant as playing the race card too. And so on. Ironically, Obama’s campaign has made this nomination process much more racially divisive than it would have been if he hadn’t run. Not saying that’s necessarily his fault (though I do think there’s been wolf-crying racism and some race-baiting going on by his campaign) but it’s just ironic given his ‘uniter’ mantra.
Meanwhile, on the other side Obama has the endorsement of Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and Rev. Wright. And the CLINTONS are the race-card playing folks?
There’s enough to go around on both sides but at the end of the day I think Obama handled it as well as could be expected, I think he had preferred not to have to address it at all or he would have given this speech a long time ago, and the fact that he’s given it now ‘under the gun’ so to speak is going to solidify his base, inspire people, and probably scare off some fencesitters as noted above by someone else insofar as there are many that don’t want to touch the issue with a 10-foot pole and can imagine we’ll be having this discussion for the next 4-8 years with him as POTUS. Is that fair? Probably not, but that’s how it may play out.
Once again, we’ll see.
Agreed.
I live in Atlanta and can vouch for that. It doesn’t represent Georgia as a whole. 75% of the white vote went for Hillary in MS; same in SC 75% of the white vote voted against Obama. Can’t be good.
As for that link to the memo, I’m glad it’s in writing because this is PRECISELY what I’ve been saying is so racist and annoying about the Obama camp’s MO: “The document provides an indication that, in private, the Obama campaign is seeking to capitalize on the view - and push the narrative - that the Clintons are using race-related issues for political leverage.” I find that pretty disgusting.
I just checked out that memo Hippy and I agree that it puts Obama’s team in an unsavory light. So you’re probably right that the dirty fighting is not isolated to the Clinton’s, and that’s sad.
You gotta wonder why it’s been so easy for the Clintons to be tarred as the dirty ones, though. I don’t think we can blame it on all an unfairly biased media or a biased electorate. I think its points to the interpersonal skills of the candidates themselves, as well as the establishment baggage they bring with them. On both counts, Obama has an advantage over Clinton, and I don’t think this is irrelevant to their merits.
After Bill’s “mugging” comment… she needs to reject and denounce him too. I’m tired of racially tinged rhetoric from Bill - who KNOWS that’s what he’s doing - and then him feigning innocence.
Word.
What has irked me about the Obama campaign is precisely this. There is nothing transformative or qualitatively different about the day-to-day operation of the Obama campaign compared to other campaigns. (I will grant that his GOTV and organization around caucuses has been pretty sophisticated, certainly the best I’ve seen.) There’s a facade of transformation, but behind the scenes, there’s plenty of old-school chicanery. Also true on the Clinton side, but the media ignores Obama’s transgressions, and amplifies Clinton’s.
Axelrod is a genius in the respect that oftentimes, unless the evidence is indisputable, his candidate appears to be above the fray and people assume the best of his campaign. Clinton, sullied by years of public examination, usually is assumed to be doing the worst. But Obama’s people have been at this for a while, and getting away with it.
Oh please. Mugging is a racist term? Holy crap.