Tag: Obama

The Nation: Obama at Year One.

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From THE NATION:

Adolph Reed Jr.

Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

Adolph Reed Jr.

Professor of Political Science, University of Pennsylvania

“In January 1996 I wrote the following about Barack Obama in my Village Voice column: “In Chicago, we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems, and the predictable elevation of process over program–the point where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the wave of the future in U.S. black politics.”

In 2007 Matt Taibbi described him as “an ingeniously crafted human cipher, a man without race, ideology, geographic allegiances, or, indeed, sharp edges of any kind. You can’t run against him on the issues because you can’t even find him on the ideological spectrum.”

In 2006 Ken Silverstein noted Obama’s deep financial industry connections. Glen Ford, Paul Street and many others have stressed those and other disturbing connections, including his penchant for supporting more conservative Democratic candidates against more liberal ones.

Obama indicated no later than the summer of 2007 that he intended, if elected, to extend the war in Afghanistan into Pakistan.

The only surprise about his presidency is how many ersatz leftists cling to the fiction that he’s anything other than a superficially articulate neoliberal Democrat in the Clinton mold and that his administration would act in any other way.”

via Obama at One (Page 2).

Racialism and Obama.

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Racialism and Obama

Suddenly, the cat is out of the bag and people are looking at those who oppose Obama and asking if the dislike of the President is formed out of racial animosity.

To an observer and historian of American history, the question should really be asked: What issues in our nation are not tinged by racial prejudice?

Very few.

Welfare reform, tax breaks for the wealthy, home schooling, public transportation, spending for domestic social needs, legislative redistricting, education, jobs, sprawl, the growth of the Sun Belt, immigration reform, the depopulation and decay in the Rust Belt, Christian values, states rights, affirmative action, prisons, law enforcement, guns. Almost everything has some underlying racial preference or prejudice influencing people’s beliefs and behaviors.

Obama is half white, but in this nation, that means he is all black. He married a black woman, and they joined a majority black church and lived and worked among working class black Chicagoans. Obama never lived post-racially but joined the very race based world of South Side Chicagoland.

Despite his immersion in South Side politics, Obama has tried and nearly succeeded in making white people forget that the history of America is as much about the exclusion of darker skin as it about the inclusion of everyone else. For the last two years, the liberal “elite”, if there is such a class, has pronounced, from its well-to-do white habitat, that we are a “post-racial” nation. We are not, and never will be that country.

Who among us, if given a choice, would rather have a black complexion? Who would choose to live in a mostly black neighborhood if they could live anywhere? We are lying if we say that we want to make our life harder. Anyone with common sense would like things to be easier: economically, socially, and racially.

If some sleeping liberals now detect that hostility to Obama stems from some hidden bigotry, they might realize that hatred of the man and his policies all share a common thread, however insignificant: race and color will always inform our policies.

Race and class are sitting in the debate room on issues as small as the renaming of a part of Van Nuys as Sherman Oaks; and as large, invisible spectators in the national tragedy of why we have spent 2 trillion dollars in Iraq rather than rebuilding Detroit, Newark, and Camden, NJ.

END

Colorful people for a Better World, Barack Obama, Martin Luther King (Ben Heine)

(Note : If you wish a print of this image, follow the following link and click on “Buy This Print” : benheine.deviantart.com/art/Obama-Luther-King-81753252 thanks)
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A New Day.

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Photo by Mark Tucker.
Photo by Mark Tucker.
A beautiful new day for America.

Photo by Mark Tucker

Liberals Voice Concern Over Obama.

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Hope/Change

Illustration: jenniferXdaniel
[at] gmail [dot] com

From Politico:

“Liberals are growing increasingly nervous – and some just flat-out angry – that President-elect Barack Obama seems to be stiffing them on Cabinet jobs and policy choices.

Obama has reversed pledges to immediately repeal tax cuts for the wealthy and take on Big Oil. He’s hedged his call for a quick drawdown in Iraq. And he’s stocking his White House with anything but stalwarts of the left.

Now some are shedding a reluctance to puncture the liberal euphoria at being rid of President George W. Bush to say, in effect, that the new boss looks like the old boss.”

A Presidency Without Laughs?

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One of the only pleasures of the past eight years has been the great fun it is to make fun of President Bush. His malapropos, his goofy expressions, and his inability to form a complete sentence: these are everything that a humorist could hope for.

Now we have this upcoming First Family that is the youngest, brightest, most well spoken bunch seen in ages. And to top it off: they’re African-American.

The dignity, the profundity, the honor, the grace, the articulateness and powerful prose: all the Obama qualities are so comedically dismal.

And because the new President has a black father, we are all painfully self-conscious in our reaction to him. We must not rob the man of his dignity before he gets into office. We must give him a chance. He is the very embodiment of the American dream.

This nation defines pigmentation as the essence of one’s personhood. And is now eager to experiment with allowing an individual to be an individual and not a cog in the color wheel. So why are there hushed voices and sanctimoniousness?

Some of the funniest observers of the political scene in Washington, like the writer Maureen Dowd, are now suddenly the strictest and most reverent protectors of President Elect Obama. One must say nothing off-color about the man.

Dowd writes in the NY Times: “I had been astonished by the overt willingness of some people who didn’t mind being quoted by name in The New York Times saying vile stuff, that a President Obama would turn the Rose Garden into a watermelon patch, that he’d have barbeques on the front lawn, that he’d make the White House the Black House.”

He’d make the White House the Black House? What is so horrible about that? Isn’t it slightly funny? How about the fact that we will have a Black First Lady in a White House? Is that vile too? Dowd never backed away from her poison pen in attacking Mr. Bush. But Obama elicits mystical worship from a media that should be intelligently skeptical.

Jimmy Carter was a peanut farmer,  Reagan an actor, George HW Bush a “patrician”, and Clinton was a serial adulterer along with his public accomplishments and leadership. But all of these men were subjected to skits, cartoons, mockery, and criticism. And nobody held back because they were afraid of offending those supporters who backed these aforementioned Presidents.

I hope that we are mature enough to allow ourselves to laugh at Obama without the inhibiting p.c. that risk turning the leader of our democracy into a personality cult worthy of the rulers of North Korea, Iran or Cuba.

The Color Has Changed, the Situation Remains the Same.

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In the aftermath of the glow over President Elect Obama’s win, the great national back pat and international acclaim for our nation, continues. WE ELECTED A DARK SKINNED MAN! Tears were pouring out, because our racist country could now point to that one example who surmounted the odds and would now take the oath of office in January 2009.

But as Shelby Steele points out in the Los Angeles Times, Obama has been masterful at putting forth an idealism that implies that a vote against him would be an act of cynicism. “His talent was to project an idealized vision of a post-racial America — and then to have that vision define political decency. Thus, a failure to support Obama politically implied a failure of decency.”

Steele argues that some white Americans would like to vote for a black person because it absolves them of the sin of racism. He writes that Obama’s racial identity, not his political views, form the strength of his new compact with the American people. “In fact, this was his only true political originality. On the level of public policy, he was quite unremarkable. His economics were the redistributive axioms of old-fashioned Keynesianism; his social thought was recycled Great Society. But all this policy boilerplate was freshened up — given an air of “change” — by the dreamy post-racial and post-ideological kitsch he dressed it in, “ Steele says.

But the larger issue, goes to the heart of how America sees itself in the world. We are convinced that our power is unlimited. That if we only put our minds and money to work, we can end terrorism, control global warming, make the Israelis and Palestinians love each other, and insure health care for everyone. True conservatives are wary of such great ambitions, but we have just come out of eight years of neo-conservatism with its doctrine of pre-emptive war and American exceptionalism.

When Obama takes office, the expectations will again be completely ridiculous. The world expects America to be different. Obama’s supporters think he will withdraw our troops from Iraq and begin to enact national health insurance.  But by February 1, 2009 I expect the honeymoon will be over.

I voted for Obama. I like Obama. In fact, he made me cry several times during his election campaign.  I’m glad he won.

But I am nauseated, tired and sick of hearing about how his melanin, and Kenyan father, somehow ushers in a new era of change.

Skin color as change is no change at all. It’s the same old racism.