Is anyone surprised I have a post on Wright and "the speech"?
I hadn't said anything about Wright before tonight for a couple of reasons --
(1) the potential electability issues from this are rather obvious, and
(2) while I ordinarily would have (at least somewhat) defended Obama's association with the man and some (certainly not all) of Wright's comments on various grounds, Obama's campaign up to this point, much of which was built around slandering Hillary based on much more innocuous comments from her sometimes distant supporters, had me doing a little dance to Instant Karma, instead.
I didn't post on that, either, because much as I enjoy Obama finally getting a wee bit of deserved own-petard-hoisting, there's still a fair shot he will be the Democratic nominee, and I don't know that the country or the world can afford a McCain presidency, and this is going to hurt him badly in the general election.
But, since so many diverse thoughts out there right now, figured I might as well throw my own in . . . first about some of Wright's comments and then about Obama's speech.
-- Yikes and not-so-yikes. Some of the stuff that really offends me, "Bill riding Monica dirty", or just strikes me as mind-bogglingly out of touch with reality "Hillary can't know what it's like to have to work twice as hard", gets a "yikes!", but by itself probably would not have hurt the campaign, because the people who are going to get offended by it are already in Hillary's camp, I suspect.
Most of what's going to hurt him are things that didn't offend me so much but will likely be catastrophic with middle america. The AIDS conspiracy stuff -- maybe because I once had an interracial couple as roomies (early 90's again) and they both believed this, and I gathered from them it was a prevalent belief in the black community, I was inoculated, and just think it's almost certainly very, very wrong and completely lacking in any supportive evidence without finding it horrifying? But most people in the US -- this will not play well. Still, way better than . . .
"black people should say "god damn America". Rationally speaking, Rev. Wright has a point. Seriously. Black Africans were carted over here in slave ships, held as slaves, and upon gaining their freedom were kept in an intentionally rigged poverty trap in much of the country, and it's only in the last 40 years that this has been recognized and racism has started to recede from something taken for granted as truth by a majority of white america, and the odds are still unfairly stacked, on the whole. Internationally, we contributed heavily to the mess in Haiti for centuries before we finally started using some of our muscle for good (thanks to oh, wow, Bill Clinton for that, but never mind such details) and as recently as the 70's or early 80's we had people defending apartheid in South Africa. At least most of them are out of politics now, except for the ones like our sitting vice president. So, me? I don't get upset about this comment.
The U.S. brought 9/11 on itself? Well, I'm more than 90% convinced that the Bush administration (not Bush himself) knew it was coming and deliberately let it happen so that instead of rapidly falling approval ratings and growing ridicule and a stifled agenda, the Halliburton crowd could do all the things they have done since, and the American voters who were idiots enough to buy the smears on Gore and the Bush=compassionate conservative crap, and/or the more well-intentioned types who bought Nader's "no real difference between Bush and Gore" stuff, do have some responsibility for letting the Bush administration rig their way into power (not to mention the American media, who I loathe every bit as much as I loathe the neocons). That's not what Wright meant, (and what he did mean, in context, was just laughably, scarily wrong-headed), but in an accidental way, he sort of glanced off a point.
That's me. Not most people. Maybe I'm being unfair to most Americans, but I think these two comments, all by themself, means that if the economy recovers somewhat before the election and nothing else new goes wrong, Obama has no chance in the general. Zero. Zilch. None. Fortunately for his electoral chances, we're probably headed for a very long, very bad time. Even more fortunately for those chances, we're already in a long, bad time for a huge percentage of people, and those in the middle class (even most of the upper middle class) who are doing okay have started to notice that the ice beneath them is getting thinner all the time. Plus, there's that "stay in Iraq for 100 years" and scarily supportive of invading Iran stuff that McCain has blathered.
And then there's the comment which will hurt Obama electorally and offended me, Wright's reference to "zionists". This doesn't sound a whole lot better coming from him than it does from Ron Paul.
The speech --
It was, for the most part (one or two glaring exceptions which may come back to haunt him) a good speech. As well as being an exceptional orator, Obama has the most lyrical speech writing team of anyone I can remember. This speech, unlike most of them, was somewhat substantive. Also unlike most of them, it relied less on phrasing sufficiently vague that people who would *never* agree in actual politics could all think he was talking to them ("let's make the world a better place" is a slogan Patty Murray and Pat Buchanan could equally embrace, until the details got in the way, and his most-praised stuff has pretty much been along those lines thus far), and pointed the way towards the sort of liberal policy-making and *real* coalition building of the less-enfranchised that I desperately wish had been on display throughout his campaign.
Unfortunately, I can't buy it until his campaign actually takes on the shape of what he spoke about in this speech. To give some examples:
"What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."
Okay, I love this. Makes me wanna cheer. It is also totally at odds with blaming Democrats and Republicans equally for the rancor in Washington, and excusing people who make anti-choice votes because being pro-choice would get them thrown out of office, and the whole Liebermanesque "bipartisan friendship with the people who are doing things to fuck up the world while chastising the partisans on our side who resist them" bit which has been the central theme of his campaign. (yes, "hope" and "change" have also been central themes of his change, but it's been hard to tell what he's hoping for or wanting to change us to; with "unity", he's been much clearer and scarier)
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism.
I oppose such a politics also. And Obama's campaign has been by far the most divisive and cynical of any Democratic campaign of my adult lifetime, going back to 1984. (Joe Lieberman's campaign was equally as bad as Obama's in most ways, but Lieberman was actually sincere, which made him much, much scarier).
We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card,
Ye gods. I'm all for denouncing the people who did this, but it would be nice if he acknowledged he and his top aides were amongst them. At the same time, he compares WRight's 20 year history of frequently genuinely hate-mongering comments with Ferrarro's "gaffe". He compares Wright, his pastor of 20 years who married him, baptized his kids, who he called his spiritual mentor and who came up with the line that he used to title his book, to Ferrarro, who worked as a fundraiser for Hillary and has probably met her maybe half a dozen times or so over the years. He (truthfully) complains about the media using both of them as a distraction from issues , but this reeks of hypocrisy when his campaign was directly encouraged using such gaffes, even when there was no gaffe to use, as distractions every time his campaign lost momentum or needed to pick up some extra votes. (as to him saying the same thing about himself that Ferrarro did, and him saying at one pointthat Hillary wouldn't be where she was if she hadn't been married to Bill , and the blazing hypocrisy here . . . I plan to have a whole post on his hypocrisy, with links, coming up later this week)
This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem.
Oh yeah, love the conflation of cynicism with racism and privilege here. Aside from the whole "if you're not cynical in this world what the hell is wrong with you?" angle, there's the implication that if you're cynical about his happy joy hope change peace love and understanding platform, you are like one of those people who is racist and looks down on poor people. If you haven't been following the campaign, you might think this is reaching, but I have been, and I'm pretty certain that's exactly what he's doing.
Those things aside, a very moving speech which addressed some real problems in a potentially encouraging manner. But would have been nice if he'd talked about all those things he'd done to address the problems of ignorance and sexism and racism in his church over the last 20 years, or done a better job of explaining why he stayed. To the extent he did address this, I don't think it did enough to save him in the general election, and I'm not sure he did enough to get him to the general election.
(1) the potential electability issues from this are rather obvious, and
(2) while I ordinarily would have (at least somewhat) defended Obama's association with the man and some (certainly not all) of Wright's comments on various grounds, Obama's campaign up to this point, much of which was built around slandering Hillary based on much more innocuous comments from her sometimes distant supporters, had me doing a little dance to Instant Karma, instead.
I didn't post on that, either, because much as I enjoy Obama finally getting a wee bit of deserved own-petard-hoisting, there's still a fair shot he will be the Democratic nominee, and I don't know that the country or the world can afford a McCain presidency, and this is going to hurt him badly in the general election.
But, since so many diverse thoughts out there right now, figured I might as well throw my own in . . . first about some of Wright's comments and then about Obama's speech.
-- Yikes and not-so-yikes. Some of the stuff that really offends me, "Bill riding Monica dirty", or just strikes me as mind-bogglingly out of touch with reality "Hillary can't know what it's like to have to work twice as hard", gets a "yikes!", but by itself probably would not have hurt the campaign, because the people who are going to get offended by it are already in Hillary's camp, I suspect.
Most of what's going to hurt him are things that didn't offend me so much but will likely be catastrophic with middle america. The AIDS conspiracy stuff -- maybe because I once had an interracial couple as roomies (early 90's again) and they both believed this, and I gathered from them it was a prevalent belief in the black community, I was inoculated, and just think it's almost certainly very, very wrong and completely lacking in any supportive evidence without finding it horrifying? But most people in the US -- this will not play well. Still, way better than . . .
"black people should say "god damn America". Rationally speaking, Rev. Wright has a point. Seriously. Black Africans were carted over here in slave ships, held as slaves, and upon gaining their freedom were kept in an intentionally rigged poverty trap in much of the country, and it's only in the last 40 years that this has been recognized and racism has started to recede from something taken for granted as truth by a majority of white america, and the odds are still unfairly stacked, on the whole. Internationally, we contributed heavily to the mess in Haiti for centuries before we finally started using some of our muscle for good (thanks to oh, wow, Bill Clinton for that, but never mind such details) and as recently as the 70's or early 80's we had people defending apartheid in South Africa. At least most of them are out of politics now, except for the ones like our sitting vice president. So, me? I don't get upset about this comment.
The U.S. brought 9/11 on itself? Well, I'm more than 90% convinced that the Bush administration (not Bush himself) knew it was coming and deliberately let it happen so that instead of rapidly falling approval ratings and growing ridicule and a stifled agenda, the Halliburton crowd could do all the things they have done since, and the American voters who were idiots enough to buy the smears on Gore and the Bush=compassionate conservative crap, and/or the more well-intentioned types who bought Nader's "no real difference between Bush and Gore" stuff, do have some responsibility for letting the Bush administration rig their way into power (not to mention the American media, who I loathe every bit as much as I loathe the neocons). That's not what Wright meant, (and what he did mean, in context, was just laughably, scarily wrong-headed), but in an accidental way, he sort of glanced off a point.
That's me. Not most people. Maybe I'm being unfair to most Americans, but I think these two comments, all by themself, means that if the economy recovers somewhat before the election and nothing else new goes wrong, Obama has no chance in the general. Zero. Zilch. None. Fortunately for his electoral chances, we're probably headed for a very long, very bad time. Even more fortunately for those chances, we're already in a long, bad time for a huge percentage of people, and those in the middle class (even most of the upper middle class) who are doing okay have started to notice that the ice beneath them is getting thinner all the time. Plus, there's that "stay in Iraq for 100 years" and scarily supportive of invading Iran stuff that McCain has blathered.
And then there's the comment which will hurt Obama electorally and offended me, Wright's reference to "zionists". This doesn't sound a whole lot better coming from him than it does from Ron Paul.
The speech --
It was, for the most part (one or two glaring exceptions which may come back to haunt him) a good speech. As well as being an exceptional orator, Obama has the most lyrical speech writing team of anyone I can remember. This speech, unlike most of them, was somewhat substantive. Also unlike most of them, it relied less on phrasing sufficiently vague that people who would *never* agree in actual politics could all think he was talking to them ("let's make the world a better place" is a slogan Patty Murray and Pat Buchanan could equally embrace, until the details got in the way, and his most-praised stuff has pretty much been along those lines thus far), and pointed the way towards the sort of liberal policy-making and *real* coalition building of the less-enfranchised that I desperately wish had been on display throughout his campaign.
Unfortunately, I can't buy it until his campaign actually takes on the shape of what he spoke about in this speech. To give some examples:
"What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part - through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time."
Okay, I love this. Makes me wanna cheer. It is also totally at odds with blaming Democrats and Republicans equally for the rancor in Washington, and excusing people who make anti-choice votes because being pro-choice would get them thrown out of office, and the whole Liebermanesque "bipartisan friendship with the people who are doing things to fuck up the world while chastising the partisans on our side who resist them" bit which has been the central theme of his campaign. (yes, "hope" and "change" have also been central themes of his change, but it's been hard to tell what he's hoping for or wanting to change us to; with "unity", he's been much clearer and scarier)
For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism.
I oppose such a politics also. And Obama's campaign has been by far the most divisive and cynical of any Democratic campaign of my adult lifetime, going back to 1984. (Joe Lieberman's campaign was equally as bad as Obama's in most ways, but Lieberman was actually sincere, which made him much, much scarier).
We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she's playing the race card,
Ye gods. I'm all for denouncing the people who did this, but it would be nice if he acknowledged he and his top aides were amongst them. At the same time, he compares WRight's 20 year history of frequently genuinely hate-mongering comments with Ferrarro's "gaffe". He compares Wright, his pastor of 20 years who married him, baptized his kids, who he called his spiritual mentor and who came up with the line that he used to title his book, to Ferrarro, who worked as a fundraiser for Hillary and has probably met her maybe half a dozen times or so over the years. He (truthfully) complains about the media using both of them as a distraction from issues , but this reeks of hypocrisy when his campaign was directly encouraged using such gaffes, even when there was no gaffe to use, as distractions every time his campaign lost momentum or needed to pick up some extra votes. (as to him saying the same thing about himself that Ferrarro did, and him saying at one pointthat Hillary wouldn't be where she was if she hadn't been married to Bill , and the blazing hypocrisy here . . . I plan to have a whole post on his hypocrisy, with links, coming up later this week)
This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem.
Oh yeah, love the conflation of cynicism with racism and privilege here. Aside from the whole "if you're not cynical in this world what the hell is wrong with you?" angle, there's the implication that if you're cynical about his happy joy hope change peace love and understanding platform, you are like one of those people who is racist and looks down on poor people. If you haven't been following the campaign, you might think this is reaching, but I have been, and I'm pretty certain that's exactly what he's doing.
Those things aside, a very moving speech which addressed some real problems in a potentially encouraging manner. But would have been nice if he'd talked about all those things he'd done to address the problems of ignorance and sexism and racism in his church over the last 20 years, or done a better job of explaining why he stayed. To the extent he did address this, I don't think it did enough to save him in the general election, and I'm not sure he did enough to get him to the general election.