blog - gObama 2008
Obama & Hillary clash
Sunday, January 13, 2008
(Hudson, New Hampshire - 10 p.m. local time)
I just spoke to Zach who called me on skype. We spoke about my travel plans - I plan to change flights and go down to film in South Carolina. He works now at Obama Headquarters in NYC and co-ordinates and strategizes the Hispanic voters in Harlem. He mentioned doing a video report for current TV. I checked their website and found a story about voting machines in Stratham, NH that did not work: www.current.com. Very interesting...
Even more interesting: during an interview with Fox News last week, Clinton said, "Dr. [Martin Luther] King's dream began to be realized when President Lyndon Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It took a president to get it done."
Wow, that is a good dose of white middle class ignorance and self-delusion. It did obviously not go down well with Afro-American politicians, including Obama.
Hillary argues repeatedly that her experience shows, she can get more done as president than Obama, which is based on her husbands credibility with black voters across the country. The war of words is on now, and the better Obama performs the dirtier it will get between them.
Another interesting article that goes back to what I discussed earlier with Chip, is the Shelby Steele quote of what makes one a Black Conservative? I should brace myself, since I am going down South. He writes in an article that I would not comment any further, since it speaks for itself:
“What, in fact, is a black conservative? Well, he is not necessarily a Republican or free-market libertarian or religious fundamentalist, pro-lifer, trickle-down economist, or neo-con. I have met blacks in all these categories who are not considered conservatives.
The liberal-conservative axis is a bit different for blacks than for Americans generally. Under his American identity a black Republican is conservative, but under his racial identity he may be quite liberal. Many black Republicans, for example, are intense supporters of preferential affirmative action and thus liberal in terms of their group identity. (Colin Powell is a case in point, as is Arthur Fletcher, a black Republican who helped President Nixon introduce America’s first racial preference in the famous “Philadelphia Plan.”)
But the “new” black conservatives—the ones who have recently become so controversial—may even be liberal by their American identity but are definitely conservative by the terms of their group identity. It is their dissent from the explanation of black group authority that brings them the “black conservative” imprimatur. Without this dissent we may have a black Republican but not a “black conservative,” as the term has come to be used.
And what is this explanation of black group authority? In a word it is victimization. Not only is victimization made to explain the hard fate of blacks in American history, but it is also asked to explain the current inequalities between blacks and whites and the difficulties blacks have in overcoming them. Certainly no explanation of black difficulties would be remotely accurate were it to ignore racial victimization. On the other hand, victimization does not in fact explain the entire fate of blacks in America, nor does it entirely explain their difficulties today.
It was also imagination, courage, the exercise of free will, and a very definite genius that enabled blacks not only to survive victimization but also to create a great literature, utterly transform Western music, help shape the American language, expand and deepen the world’s concept of democracy, influence popular culture around the globe, and so on. No people with this kind of talent, ingenuity, and self-inventiveness would allow victimization so singularly to explain their fate unless it had become a primary source of power. And this is precisely what happened after the sixties. Victimization became so rich a vein of black power—even if it was only the power to “extract” reforms (with their illusion of deliverance) from the larger society—that it was allowed not only to explain black fate but to explain it totally.”
© 2008 Shelby Steele; (P)2008 Tantor