Back in Black
Well I'm back in black
Yes, I'm back in black
--Back in Black, ACDC
__________
The Clinton's are being blamed for playing the race card, but that is not how it appears to be.
In South Carolina, the AP reported Obama "playfully breaks into a black vernacular, which seems to amuse him and his audiences greatly."
"'I need you to grab Cousin Pookie to vote,' he told a crowd in Kingstree on Thursday. 'I need you to get Ray-Ray to vote.'"At a similar rally in Dillon, Obama said Clinton was ducking the need to shore up Social Security. 'There are some things that aren't right,' he said 'and some things that just ain't right. And that ain't right!'
"He chuckled, the crowd laughed and cheered. 'In Washington,' he added with another big grin, 'that's how they do' (Obama Navigates Racial Minefield.)"
Obama is a full player in the Washington where Obama says things "ain't right." When he makes his ingratiating comment -- "In Washington, that's how they do!" -- he is indicting himself.
If Obama is not exploiting his race, why is he talking like a field hand? Did they teach Obama to speak like that at the madrasa in Indonesia, or in Hawaii? Perhaps it was on the Harvard Law Review? It is doubtful he speaks that way during his briefings.
Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who really does hail from the background Obama is mimicking, would never exploit the idiom of his youth. Obama is trying to come across as one of y'all, even though he is not.
Obama seems a candidate willing to exploit every angle, and that is politics as usual. But this is emanating from the horse's mouth, so let's not pin it elsewhere.
The liberal talking heads are all too pleased with themselves that they could identify the "call-and-response" idiom of the black spirituals. It feels cool and hip, but how many of them have ever attended a church service with a primarily black congregation? Obama is more than happy to exploit the hypnotic trance induced by such sessions.
In Sumter, S.C. he assured such a crowd, that he "pray[s] to Jesus, with [his] Bible" (When Obama Calls, They Respond.) What is so different here from Romney's protestations, George W. Bush's and the lot of them? It is short on the sort of substance America needs if it is to restablish itself on the world stage.
Now Edward Kennedy has thrown his support to Obama. "Mr. Kennedy was [also] impressed at how Mr. Obama was not defined as a black candidate. . . (Kennedy Chooses Obama.)"
Uh, is he defined as an "uppity, middle-aged white broad"? I think everyone is pretty happy painting Obama as our "first black president." But thank goodness race is not an issue.
Why this charade?
Clinton's precision is derided as "wonkish." Don't say what you really think, without first couching it in 100 verbal arabesques to obscure your true intention. If you don't, you are deemed a "loose-cannon," "not a team player," "wingnut and wacko," and political cartoonists will depict you being beamed aboard a UFO.
Today, in our media-saturated and wired society, the candidate must reflect who we think we are: erudite -- but not too much so, charming and positive, with a bit of swagger and mystique -- but not cocky, slim and attractive. Cinton pere once owned this magnetism, as did JFK and Reagan.
However, at one time we also allowed for non-runway contenders. Think Richard Nixon and 320-pounder William Howard Taft. More than ever, if one cannot pass under the image bar of attractiveness, one is an outsider. This is the New Prejudice, and it transcends and replaces race; perhaps, gender.
It is certainly more cruel to the female gender, members of whom become shrewish as they age. She is no longer able to obscure her competence beneath a socially acceptable veneer of beauty, whereas her male colleague only gains in sagacity as he lays on wrinkles.
Look at Edward Kennedy, fully a reprobate himself. But as Neely Tucker in the WaPo says, while yearning for Camelot is not the time for talking of such things.
Labels: obama exploits race, obama uses the race card, obama's empty rhetoric
posted by Lisa at 10:58 PM
6 Comments:
In my case, I looked at Obama's health care plan vs. Hillary's health care plan. Hillary's was about like you'd expect, a buncha triangulation that put more money in the pockets of Big Corporate than it spent on health care, but ... it did cover all Americans. Obama's plan? What little thin gruel of it that there was, didn't.
Hope is not a plan. Change is not a plan. Wonkishness ain't sexy, but it produces plans that might actually be implementable even with a bought Congress if said Congress sees enough money going into the pockets of their own campaign contributors. I don't really like Hillary's plan (we could have a much better plan for cheaper if we just went Single Payer), but it's better than nothing and would do the job... and Obama's thin gruel? Nope.
- Badtux the Health Care Penguin
Don't know if it's yearning for Camelot as much as garnering a Vice-President from the within the younger Kennedy generation. If Obama wins the nomination, my money is on him choosing a young Kennedy as his running mate. Will the masses swoon and believe our Camelot will be delivered by this Democratic ticket?
Cathy B
badtux,
Hope and change is not a plan, agreed.
The only legitimate question is, "How will a presumptive candidate manuever the reality of a combative and deadlocked legislature?" One can hope and pray with all one's might; being a conciliator is the salient quality sought after.
"Being a conciliator" in today's day and age means "paying off Congressmen", alas. Bill Clinton demonstrated how to do it during his Presidency, getting major pieces of his legislation passed despite a hostile Republican congress, and I have no doubt that Hillary could manage the same with a not-as-hostile Democratic congress. Obama... maybe. It depends on whether he truly understands what he's getting into. Billary didn't when they got into office in 1992, and the result was that Hillary's first health care plan went down in flames -- she just didn't understand how to pay off the right Congressmen and special interests to get it passed. Billary learned though.
Is this a corrupt system? Yes indeed. It results in horrendously inefficient programs that spend as much money lining the pockets of various special interests as it does performing its intended task. But given the fact that we have the best Congress that money can buy, and our ruling oligarchy is the folks with the money, bribing the oligarchs seems to be the only thing that works to get anything decent passed nowdays. Hillary knows this. Does Obama?
- Badtux the Practical Penguin
badtux,
Hillary was secretive with her initial health care proposals, and that may be part of the reason for its failure.
GWB has fine-tuned secrecy into a national policy. This is the major evolution in the national political scene. In some cases, this may supersede the need to grease hands. But still, that -- buying favor -- is an unfortunate byproduct of our system.
In a word, politics used to be give-and-take process, even though pork was involved. Now it is take with little give.
I think the difference was the lack of the Internet as something other than an experimental computer science research tool. HRC's first health care proposal was most definitely *not* secretive. She published a long and complex document about every aspect of the health plan that you could get just by calling the White House toll-free information line and requesting it. But that's the spin that insurance company executives who thought it'd hurt their profits put onto it when they interacted with their bought-and-paid-for stenographers in the mainstream media, which is all we had back then. So you believe Hillary was "secretive" because that's what the mainstream media told you and that's all we had back then. It took the Internet before we could really get together and share information and realize that the mainstream media is, by and large, a pack of disinformation put together by spin meisters who use the stenographic nature of what counts as "reporting" nowdays to spin lies as truth and spin truth as lies.
But like I said, Billary learned...
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