Tag: Barack Obama

Thoughts on race and the race

There was a good piece by Nicholas D. Kristof in Sunday’s Week in Review section of The New York Times on the impact that race may be having on this campaign.

Kristof writes that Barack Obama’s race has probably cost the candidate about 6 percentage points in the polls, though not because of outright racists.

Such racists account for perhaps 10 percent of the electorate and, polling suggests, are mostly conservatives who would not vote for any Democratic presidential candidate.

Rather, most of the votes that Mr. Obama actually loses belong to well-meaning whites who believe in racial equality and have no objection to electing a black person as president — yet who discriminate unconsciously.

“When we fixate on the racist individual, we’re focused on the least interesting way that race works,” said Phillip Goff, a social psychologist at U.C.L.A. who focuses his research on “racism without racists.” “Most of the way race functions is without the need for racial animus.”

It’s not hate, necessarily, but a lingering distrust born of a long and terrible history of racism and discrimination. It is racism, but a racism based not on individual prejudice but on cultural attitudes.

I mention this because of a conversation my wife had tonight with a friend who said she distrusts Obama. Annie asked her why, which elicited one of those vague answers — “something about him,” “I just don’t know him,” etc. — that lacks substance, that comes from someplace other than a well-reasoned exploration of the candidates’ backgrounds or stances on the issues.

Our friend is not a racist, but I think that race is playing a part in her reaction to Obama. I fully believe that a white candidate with Obama’s resume, a white candidate named Smith or Johnson or Petty, would be getting quite a different reaction.

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I wish I could afford the ticket

This is a show and a half — no, more than that, much more than that:

Billy Joel and Bruce Springsteen will do a benefit concert for Senator Barack Obama’s campaign and the Democratic National Committee next month at the Hammerstein Ballroom in New York City on Oct. 16.

Mr. Obama will be appearing on stage as well for the event, which is set for the day after his debate with Senator John McCain at Hofstra University on Long Island.

The concert was being billed by Obama fund-raisers as the first joint concert for Mr. Joel and Mr. Springsteen, although they have appeared together on stage at least once before in 1987 during a benefit concert for homeless children at Madison Square Garden with Paul Simon, among others.

Tickets for the fund-raiser, which is slated to be Mr. Obama’s last in the New York area, are not cheap. Balcony seats are going for $500; a “premiere seat” costs $2,500; and a “lounge ticket” is $10,000.

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Race and the race in New Jersey

This is a disturbing report from The Star-Ledger:

Some neighborhoods in Roxbury were blanketed over the weekend with campaign literature from a white-supremacist, anti-immigration group that bluntly raised the issue of race regarding presidential candidate Barack Obama, offending some recipients and angering Democratic leaders.

A flier left on driveways in a neatly packaged plastic envelope questioned, “Do You Want A Black President?” and stated, “Black Ruled Nations most unstable and violent in the world.”

The material was distributed by a group called the League of American Patriots, which has a Butler mailing address.

The black-and-white flier featured “unflattering photos of Obama, including a doctored one portraying him with a long beard and turban.”

“Why should we seal our fate by allowing a black ruler to destroy us?” said the flier, which also detailed what it contended were facts on unemployment, poverty, HIV and crime rates among African Americans, while pointing out woes of a couple of predominantly black-populated countries.

I’ve seen this kind of thing before — in Princeton, where an area hate group distributed anti-Semetic literature in the same manner — and my hope is that this kind of nonsense is ignored.

But given the kind of ugliness that arrives in my e-mail Inbox almost daily and the comments I’ve heard from otherwise sane and humane people at parties, I can’t say I’m all that optimistic that this kind of assault on reason will fall on deaf ears.

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A vent and a rant

I received this e-mail today from my friend Bill, a committed Obama supporter:

Need to vent …..You and I have seen the Rove machine in action before, but I want to shove my head through a wall. Apparently Johnny Mac can say anything on his commercials with no relation to the truth, and just rely on this public perception of him being an honorable man. Even though I’ve seen a few good (AP, CNN) stories debunking his lies, his campaign keeps spewing them out there. From Barack raising taxes (warm up act), to ‘his’ sex education to minors (main course) to his ‘disrespectful’ (for desert, and it sounds a lot like uppity to me), I’m in the panic camp. Barack needs to change the game, just pointing out the tactics isn’t going to get him any ground, and pushing out his commercials pointing out McCain’s hypocrisy I can’t see gaining any ground as well. The media just reports this stuff as ‘he said, he said’, he needs something that will hit the news cycle like the faux pig/lipstick outrage. Have some of his military supporters cut a commercial talking about Mc’s ‘loss of honor’, have a mother & child (ala Move On) talking about how the bill protected her child from sexual predators. I’m really in full panic, he needs something big. Once the ‘meme’ is set, it’s hard to shake it off. I see now where ‘outraged’ Repubs are now using shorthand (He called her a pig), Hannity throws ranting and merging Wright and Ayers, saying how Barack was ‘involved’ with them for 20 years. I see Obama putting the fight on more than Kerry and Gore, but that still wont’ be enough, it’s very disheartening to watch.

I feel his pain. Here is my response:

I agree with Rachel Maddow. It is time to call a lie a lie and stop pussyfooting around.

The thing about all of this is that we are only one week out of the conventions and the Palin Effect remains an unknown. I suspect the campaign is just starting to figure out what needs to be done. I would probably do a few things:

1. Go hard after McCain and show that his views are outside the mainstream (abortion, tax cuts) and that he appears willing to say and do almost anything to win. Remind people that McCain announced his candidacy on Leno. Remind people that McCain essentially has been running for president since 2000, that his “put country first” has not been true of McCain since he entered the Senate.

2. Use the Gibson interview to demonstrate that Palin not only has no experience in foreign affairs but seems to have not been paying attention to foreign affairs at all during her political lifetime. Run the clip where she essentially endorses war with Russia over Georgia — and remind people that her view is actually consistent with McCain’s. Run an ad that shows smiling high school kids and ask the public if they are truly willing to put their adolescents’ lives in the hands of candidates who seem all too willing to send the troops in.

3. Remember Clinton. This election is about the economy. Hammer the economic message. Go after McCain for his healthcare tax — he wants to tax nonwage benefits at a time when most of us are underinsured — and tie it to his plan to extend the Bush tax cuts and the Obama plan to cut taxes for the vast majority of Americans. Run ads showing how unserious McCain is — “Bomb, bomb, bomb, Iran,” the off-color jokes — and ask whether he has the temperament to be president.

4. Connect with voters. Obama seems to have forgotten what got him to the nomination in the first place, having been knocked off-balance by Hillary Clinton. He needs to resume the big events and talk about what he envisions government’s role to be in people’s lives and contrast it with the last eight years. And he needs to steal Reagan’s line and ask if we are better off now than we were in 2000 and whether anyone in their right mind thinks we will be better off in 2012 if we do not break with the Bush playbook — which, based on what McCain is actually talking about doing, can only be accomplished by electing Obama.

I do think the media has been better, but it still avoids calling a lie a lie and it still follows what Paul Begala on Maddow’s radio show yesterday calls the big four: scandal, gaffes, polls and ads. If the media is going to focus on those four things, then the Obama campaign needs to craft its message and its response to McCain to fit the paradigm.

What does anyone else think?

Email me at grassroots at comcast dot net.