Obama blew it

From latimes.com By Michael Meyers
March 20, 2008
"Tim Rutten's column, "Obama's Lincoln moment" and The Times editorial, "Obama on race" both miss the mark.

In my considered judgment as a race and civil rights specialist, I would say that Barack Obama's "momentous" speech on race settled on merely "explaining" so-called racial differences between blacks and whites -- and in so doing amplified deep-seated racial tensions and divisions. Instead of giving us a polarizing treatise on the "black experience," Obama should have reiterated the theme that has brought so many to his campaign: That race ain't what it used to be in America.

He should have presented us a pathway out of our racial boxes and a road map for new thinking about race. He should have depicted his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., as a symbol of the dysfunctional angry men who are stuck in the past and who must yield to a new generation of color-blind, hopeful Americans and to a new global economy in which we will look on our neighbors' skin color no differently than how we look on their eye color.

In fact, I'd say that considering the nation's undivided attention to this all-important speech, which gave him an unrivaled opportunity to lift us out of racial and racist thinking, Obama blew it.

I waited in vain for our hybrid presidential candidate to speak the simple truth that there is no such thing as "race," that we all belong to the same race -- the human race. I waited for him to mesmerize us with a singular and focused appeal to hold all candidates to the same standards no matter their race or their sex or their age. But instead Obama gave us a full measure of racial rhetoric about how some of us with an "untrained ear" -- meaning whites and Asians and Latinos -- don't understand and can't relate to the so-called black experience.

Well, I am black, and I can't relate to a "black experience" that shields and explains old-style black ministers who rant and rave about supposed racial differences and about how America ought to be damned. I long ago broke away from all associations and churches that preached the gospel of hate and ethnic divisiveness -- including canceling my membership in 100 Black Men of America Inc., when they refused my motion to admit women and whites. They still don't. I was not going to stay in any group that assigned status or privileges of membership based solely on race or gender.

We and our leaders -- especially our candidates for the highest office in the land -- must repudiate all forms of racial idiocy and sexism, and be judged by whether we still belong to exclusionary or hateful groups. I don't know any church that respects, much less reflects, my personal beliefs in the absolute equality of all people, so I choose not to belong to any of them. And I would never -- as have some presidential candidates -- accept the endorsement of preachers of the gospel according to the most racist and sexist of doctrines.

But someone's race or religion is not mine or anybody else's concern. I couldn't care less that Wright is a Christian or that Louis Farrakhan professes to be a Muslim. I couldn't care less whether the hateful minister who endorsed John McCain is, deep inside, a decent man or a fundamentalist. But I do care about these pastors' divisive and crazed words; I do care that their "sermons" exploit and pander to the worst fears and passions of people based on perceptions and misperceptions about race. I hate that these preachers' sermons prejudge people's motives or behavior based on their race or ethnicity. I hate the haters, and I expected Obama to make a straightforward speech about what has become the Hate Hour -- and the most segregated hour -- in America on Sunday mornings.

I expected Obama, who up to now had been steering a perfect course away from the racial boxes of the past, to challenge racial labels and so-called black experiences. We're all mixed up, and if we haven't yet been by the process of miscegenation, trans-racial adoptions and interracial marriage, we sure ought to get used to how things will be in short order.

That would have been the forward-looking message of a visionary candidate. But Obama erred by looking backward -- as far back as slavery. What does slavery have to do with the price of milk at the grocery store? He referenced continuing segregation, especially segregated public schools, but stopped short. What is he going to do about them? How does he feel about public schools for black boys or single-sex public schools and classes? What does the gospel according to Wright say about such race-based and gender-specific schemes for getting around our civil rights laws?

We can't be united as a nation if we continue to think racially and give credence to racial experiences and differences based on ethnicity, past victim status and stereotypical categories. All of these prejudices surrounding tribe-against-tribe are old-hat and dysfunctional -- especially the rants of ministers, of whatever skin color or religion, who appeal to our base prejudices and to superstitions about our supposed racial differences. The man or woman who talks plainly about our commonality as a race of human beings, about our future as one nation indivisible, rather than about our discredited and disunited past, is, I predict, likely to finish ahead of the pack and do us a great public service.

Michael Meyers is executive director of the New York Civil Rights Coalition and a former assistant national director of the NAACP. These views are his own. "

Playing by Obama's Rules

First, I rarely agree with anything Patrick Buchanan says. His politics are often the polar opposite of everything I believe in and support. This time, I think he is right.
From RealClearPolitics.com: "By Patrick Buchanan

To observe Democrats this week, savaging one of their heroines, is to understand why the party is unready to rule.

Consider: At the 1984 Democratic convention in San Francisco, an unknown member of Congress was vaulted into history by being chosen the first woman ever to run on a national party ticket.

Geraldine Ferraro became a household name. And though the Mondale-Ferraro ticket went down to a 49-state defeat, "Gerry" became an icon to Democratic women.

This week, however, after being subjected for 48 hours to accusations of divisiveness by Barack Obama, and racism by his agents and auxiliaries in the media, Ferraro resigned from Clinton's campaign. What had she said to send the Obamaites into paroxysms of rage?

She stated an obvious truth: Had Barack not been a black male, he probably would not be the front-runner for the nomination.

Here are the words that sent her to the scaffold.

"If Obama was a white man he would not be in this position. And if he was a woman (of any color) he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is. And the country is caught up with the concept."

Note that Ferraro did not say race was the only reason Barack was succeeding. She simply said that being an African-American has been as indispensable to his success as her being a woman was to her success in 1984. Had my name been "Gerald" rather than Geraldine, I would not have been on the '84 ticket, Ferraro conceded.

In calling her comments racist, Barack's retinue is asserting that his race has nothing to do with his success, even implying that it is racist to suggest it. This is preposterous.

What Geraldine Ferraro said is palpably true, and everyone knows it.

Was the fact that Barack is black irrelevant to the party's decision to give a state senator the keynote address at the 2004 convention? Did Barack's being African-American have nothing to do with his running up 91 percent of the black vote in Mississippi on Tuesday?

Did Barack's being black have nothing to do with the decision of civil rights legend John Lewis to dump Hillary and endorse him, though Lewis talks of how his constituents do not want to lose this first great opportunity to have an African-American president?

Can political analysts explain why Barack will sweep Philly in the Pennsylvania primary, though Hillary has the backing of the African-American mayor and Gov. Ed Rendell, without referring to Barack's ethnic appeal to black voters?

What else explains why the mainstream media are going so ga-ga over Obama they are being satirized on "Saturday Night Live"?

Barack Obama has a chance of being the first black president. And holding out that special hope has been crucial to his candidacy. To deny this is self-delusion -- or deceit.

Nor is this unusual. John F. Kennedy would not have gotten 78 percent of the Catholic vote had he not been Catholic. Hillary would not have rolled up those margins among white women in New Hampshire had she not been a sister in trouble. Mitt Romney would not have swept Utah and flamed out in Dixie were he not a Mormon. Mike Huckabee would not have marched triumphantly through the Bible Belt were he not a Baptist preacher and evangelical Christian. All politics is tribal.

The first campaign this writer ever covered was the New York mayoral race of 1961. Republicans stitched together the legendary ticket of Lefkowitz, Fino and Gilhooley, to touch three ethnic bases. Folks laughed. No one would have professed moral outrage had anyone suggested they were appealing to, or even pandering to, the Jewish, Italian and Irish voters of New York. People were more honest then.

Obama's agents suggest that Ferraro deliberately injected race into the campaign. But this, too, is ridiculous. Her quote came in an interview with the Daily Breeze of Torrance, Calif., not "Meet the Press."

The attack on Ferraro comes out of a conscious strategy of the Obama campaign -- to seek immunity from attack by smearing any and all attackers as having racist motives. When Bill Clinton dismissed Obama's claim to have been consistently antiwar as a "fairy tale," and twinned Obama's victory in South Carolina with Jesse Jackson's, his statements were described as tinged with racism.

Early this week, Harvard Professor Orlando Patterson's sensitive nostrils sniffed out racism in Hillary's Red Phone ad, as there were no blacks in it. Patterson said it reminded him of D.W. Griffith's pro-KKK "Birth of a Nation," a 1915 film.

What Barack's allies seem to be demanding is immunity, a special exemption from political attack, because he is African-American. And those who go after him are to be brought up on charges of racism, as has Bill Clinton, Ed Rendell and now Geraldine Ferraro.

Hillary, hoping to appease Barack's constituency, is ceding the point. Will the Republican Party and the right do the same? Play by Obama rules, and you lose to Obama. "