Emerging - New Strategy, New Tactics

Obama's Stunning
Consolidation
of the Party


[Note from CarlD: This article raises questions for independent progressives and the left as well. As Alvin Toffler puts it, if you don't have a strategy, you're part of someone else's strategy.]

By Matt Stoller
OpenLeft.com

May 07, 2008-Over 1.25 million Indianans voted yesterday for Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama in the Democratic presidential primary.

Over 1.1 million Indianans voted for Jill Long Thompson or Jim Schellinger in the Democratic primary for Governor of Indiana.

In 2004, Democratic presidential candidate John Kerry received 969,000 votes in the state of Indiana...in the general election.

That is stunning. The primary has been exceptionally good for party building. Obama has created a number of significant infrastructure pieces through his campaign, displacing traditional groups the way he promised he would by signaling the end of the old politics of division and partisanship.




1. Voter Registration: Obama has launched a 50 state registration drive.

"That's why I'm so proud that today our campaign announced a massive volunteer-led voter registration drive in all 50 states to help ensure every single eligible voter takes part in this election so we can take back Washington for the American people."

I have heard from several sources that the Obama campaign is sending out signals to donors, specifically at last weekend's Democracy Alliance convention, to stop giving to outside groups, including America Votes.

The campaign also circulated negative press reports about Women's Voices Women's Vote, implying voter suppression.

2. Obama Organizing Fellows: Here's Obama describing them:

Basically what we've done is we've been attracting so much volunteer talent, so many young people who have gotten involved in the campaign, that we wanted to give a handful of them an opportunity to have some more intensive training. So we've asked them to apply for fellowships. I think they're called Obama Fellows. They will get intensive training, and they will be put on staff and will have an experience, starting in June.

These are unpaid positions, and they will be used to do field organizing, message, and helping to "continue to build the movement".

This is pure leadership development, though it continues the class-based diminution of talent by refusing to pay, a problem outlined in Crashing the Gates.

3. Money: With 1.5 million donors, this campaign has blown away anything we've ever seen in terms of grassroots fundraising. The technology is all centralized, so Obama knows the name, address, giving patterns, and occupation of every donor out there, as well as social networking information, like who the best raisers are. He has bypassed Actblue, and will probably end up building in a Congressional slate feature to further party build while keeping control of the data.

One email from Moveon to their full list can bring in between $100k to $1M for a candidate, with $1M being the very top end of the range. With one good email to his list, in a few months, Obama will probably be able to bring in $1-3M for a Senate candidate under attack or split that among several. 10-20% of the money going to Senate candidates this cycle might come from Barack Obama's internet operation. Stunning.

4. Field: MyBarackObama.com is the cornerstone of the campaign, and it will have between 10-15 million opt-in members by election day. This group can be used for lobbying on legislation, GOTV, and donations.

It's a cross between Moveon.org and the DNC, and with the White House, it can transform progressive politics and further amplify the power of the Presidency. As coordinated campaigns pick up, and the top of the ticket brings coattails, organizing power is going to further flow to the Obama campaign.

5. Message and Politics: Obama used youtube to push back on Reverend Wright, something he will continue to do to move beyond sound bite politics. He has a good press shop and a way to push message out to the web. The campaign has also, despite thousands of interviews with a huge number of outlets, refused to have Obama interact on progressive blogs. The Fox News situation, where Obama went on Fox News and mismanaged communications, drew criticism from Moveon because taking down Fox News has been a key strategic goal of that organization; nevertheless, the group supported him because of overwhelming adulation from their membership.

This is a far different strategy than the McCain campaign, who, though he hates blogs, talks to them, or the Clinton campaign, who invites them on her calls. This is NOT a criticism, by the way, it's obviously worked as a strategy to centralize messaging power around the Obama shop while neutering a potentially off-message rowdy group. That has its downsides, which I'll get into, but it is a strategy.

I'm also told, though I can't confirm, that Obama campaign has also subtly encouraged donors to not fund groups like VoteVets and Progressive Media. These groups fall under the 'same old Washington politics' which he wants to avoid, a partisan gunslinging contest he explicitly advocates against.

You know all that old-style Washington politics preventing real change?
As hard as it might be to handle, in a lot of ways he means that those of us who believe in partisan hard edged combat are part of an outmoded system. It doesn't actually divide cleanly; old hand Tom Daschle is a key figure and likely to be Obama's chief of staff, and Artur Davis is likely to be his Attorney General. These are old school Democrats, and Obama's machine is full of the Congressional wing of the party that lost out in 1992 to Clinton and his people.

This isn't a criticism; again, Obama made his bet that the country isn't into ideological combat and wants a politics of unity and hope, and he has won at internally. In terms of the 'Iron Law of Institutions', the Obama campaign is masterful. From top to bottom, they have destroyed their opponents within the party, stolen out from under them their base, and persuaded a whole set of individuals from blog readers to people in the pews to ignore intermediaries and believe in Barack as a pure vessel of change. It's actually very similar to Clinton from 1994-2000, where power and money in the Democratic Party is being centralized around a key iconic figure. He's consolidating power within the party.

Now here's the part that's unclear. Obama has successfully remade the Democratic Party already, and shown that old partisan Washington politics is over if you are a Democrat. Can he do that with Republicans? By stripping power, money and responsibility from outside groups and opponents, Obama is increasing his control of the party apparatus. He is also, however, putting everything on his own shoulders. When the Swift Boaters come back, and they will, it's all on Obama and his movement to hit back. He's betting that he can strip power from their base just as he stripped power from the old Washington way of doing politics within the Democratic Party.

I do not doubt that he can do this during the general election. McCain is such a weak candidate, and the Republicans are in such disarray, that a solid White House victory, 5-7 Senate seats, and 40-50 seats in the House are clearly possible. House Republicans are especially mean right now; insiders tell me they are going to cause problems with the war funding tactics just because they are so depressed from losing in Louisiana and Illinois. They have no money for the House and the Senate, and a depressed base. I'm curious about Obama's governing philosophy, as that is where the Republicans are going to make their stand in 2009. Without traditional outside groups (and he doesn't want them involved, witness his lobbyist ban in his new administration), Obama is going to be relying on the emergent networks that come from his campaign to buttress his priorities, but since we don't actually know what they are, it's hard to figure out what his governing strategy will be. As Mike Lux wrote earlier, it's time to get ready for Obama as the nominee. I would amplify this and point out that it's time to get ready for a party that is being taken apart and rebuilt as the Obama movement.

It's incredibly refreshing, in a sense, for politics to be completely reimagined on top of the internet and with a strong focus on leadership development, volunteers, and outside of DC leadership disdainful of partisanship and the give and take of politics-as-usual. It's also displacing the anti-Bush arguments of the last eight years and the political dynamic it fostered on the left.

There's certainly a danger here of relying on projected numbers instead of traditional power bases, though I don't think he'll be abandoning groups like unions and black churches, nor will any progressive movement structures abandon him. But I really think that the Obama campaign is reacting to this demonization campaign from the right by saying "OK, I'll find voters in so many nooks and crannies and make you work in so many states that you won't have a chance to make this narrative work."

His response is not necessarily building a progressive electorate; that would be accomplished by plugging into the nascent progressive structures that already exist. Obama appears to want to build an electorate aligned with Obama's principles and values, and fostering greater participation in politics as a means to move the country forward and break the current polarization. Some Democrats would play on the same playing field and try to win it; Obama's building an entirely new field, one where these narratives and negative ads and the need to tailor the entire general election to 10 independent voters in the middle of Ohio won't matter anymore.
I can't say if it will totally work, but that looks to be the strategy.

We've been tantalized with these kinds of efforts before; it's actually a very traditional belief that increased turnout is good for Democrats.

All I'll add is that it's time to think through the consequences of a party where there is a new chief with massive amounts of power. I've been in the wilderness all my political life, as have most of us. The Clintonistas haven't, and they know what it's like to be part of the inside crew. We have a leader, and he's not a partisan and he can now end fractious intraparty fights with a word and/or a nod. His opinion really matters in a way that even Nancy Pelosi's just did not. He has control of the party apparatus, the grassroots, the money, and the messaging environment. He is also, and this is fundamental, someone that millions of people believe in as a moral force. When you disagree with Obama, you are saying to these people 'your favorite band sucks'.

Like many of us, I endorsed Obama, gave him money, and I intend to work to get him elected. He is attempting to completely rewrite the rules of politics, and we should try to figure out what that means for where we take our meager work. Obama is now the party leader. And he has ensured and we have given him the mandate that when he speaks, he speaks for all of us. I hope he's a vibrant progressive when he gets into office, and we should begin figuring out how to put ourselves in a position to help him take the country in a progressive direction.

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Photo: Rush Limbaugh of 'Operation Chaos' in Primaries

A Triumph
Over Media
Frivolity

By Norman Solomon
AlterNet, May 7, 2008

Barack Obama's triumph on Tuesday night was a victory over a wall that pretends to be a fly on the wall.

For a long time, the nation's body politic has been shoved up against that wall -- known as the news media.

Despite all its cracks and gaps, what cements the wall is mostly a series of repetition compulsion disorders. Whether the media perseveration is on Pastor Wright, the words "bitter" and "cling," or an absent flag lapel-pin, the wall's surfaces are more rigid when they're less relevant to common human needs and shared dreams.



Type rest of the post here
"We've already seen it," Obama said during his victory speech in North Carolina, "the same names and labels they always pin on everyone who doesn't agree with all their ideas, the same efforts to distract us from the issues that affect our lives, by pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy, in the hopes that the media will play along."

And how, they've played along. From the front pages of "quality" dailies to the reportage of NPR's drive-time news to the blather-driven handicapping on cable television, the ways that media structures have functioned in recent weeks tell us -- yet again -- how fleeting any media attention to substance can be.

News outlets spun out -- "pouncing on every gaffe and association and fake controversy" -- as media Obama-mania about a longshot candidate morphed into Obama-phobia toward the candidate most likely to become the Democratic presidential nominee. The man who could do little wrong became a man who could do little right. The lines of attack were spurious and protracted enough to be jaw-dropping.

But how often can we be truly shocked by such media patterns? Perennial corporate structures are reinforcing the narrow boundaries.

If this sounds like an old complaint, it is. Institutional dynamics -- fueled and steered by ownership, advertising, underwriting and undue government influence -- repeat themselves with endless permutations. Dominant media routinely focus on counterfeit issues, often ignoring or trashing progressive options in the process.

From George McGovern to Gary Hart to Michael Dukakis to Al Gore to Howard Dean to John Kerry, a long line of Democratic contenders with a chance to become president have been whipsawed by cartoonish images or bogus "issues," incubated by the right wing and fully hatched by the mass media. The slightest progressive wrinkles of even the starchiest corporate Democrats have been ironed out by media steamrollers.

In recent months, as Barack Obama went from underdog to frontrunner, the news media became stainless-steel accessories to the "kitchen sink" politics of smear and fear.

The media pretense of being a fly on the wall has often been preposterous. In the real world of politics -- where power brokers and manipulators proceed with the cynical axiom that perception is reality -- the fly on the wall is the wall. The political press corps is not observing reality as much as redefining it while obstructing outlooks and constraining public perceptions.
Yet, in North Carolina and Indiana, voters had more votes than all the pundits did. Pundits lost. Voters came out ahead. So did Obama. And so did the body politic.

We're still up against the media wall. But when dawn broke on Wednesday, that wall wasn't quite as high or mighty. And the nation might be able to see a little more clearly beyond it.

[Norman Solomon is an elected Obama delegate to the Democratic National Convention. His books include "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." A documentary film of the same name, based on the book, was released this spring via home-video outlets including Netflix. For further information, go to: www.normansolomon.com ]

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Turn It Around, and Expose the Source

Wright Issue
Dominated
News Coverage

[Note from CarlD: The critical point here is that this is likely to continue until November, if not the 'Wright Demon,' then a new one. It starts on rightwing media like Fox and Hannity, but is furthered by much of the rest of the media. Get prepared to oppose and expose the racist subtext.]

By Katharine Q. Seelye
New York Times Blog
May 6, 2006

Now it’s been quantified. If you thought the news media had been giving lopsided coverage to the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., Senator Barack Obama’s former pastor, you would be correct.

Mr. Wright even got more exposure than Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Mr. Wright dominated 42 percent of political stories last week, from April 28 to May 4, according to a survey by the Project for Excellence in Journalism, which uses empirical methods to analyze news coverage.



The retired pastor of Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago returned to the forefront of the news after making a series of public appearances during the last week in April, causing more controversy with renewed affirmation of remarks he had made in the past.

According to the survey, Mrs. Clinton, Mr. Obama’s rival, was the central figure in 41 percent of the articles. The study regularly examines 48 news sources (15 cable television programs, 13 daily newspapers, 8 radio programs, 7 network television programs and 5 Web sites).

Mr. Wright also completely overshadowed the next-most covered campaign issue, which was the gas tax — the central topic in just 7 percent of political stories.

The dominance of Mr. Wright swelled the overall coverage of Mr. Obama, who denounced the pastor last week, to 69 percent of all political stories.

This focus left Senator John McCain, the presumed Republican nominee, on the sidelines, with a significant presence in just 14 percent of stories.

(It may seem as if Bill Clinton was also a big topic, but he accounted for only 2.2 percent of the coverage.)

This is the second, though nonconsecutive, week in which Mr. Wright drew the lion’s share of media attention, receiving extraordinary play over an unusually lengthy period for something that started out as a side issue.

Obama supporters contend that the coverage has been self-perpetuating, particularly on cable television, where Mr. Wright’s words are replayed in an endless loop and then interpreted by pundits as a major setback to Mr. Obama. Indeed, his polling numbers have fallen since Mr. Wright gained notoriety in mid-March, when Mr. Obama moved to quell concern about his inflammatory statements and delivered a major speech on race, on March 18.

In the most recent New York Times/CBS News poll, a majority of voters said the furor over the relationship between the two had not affected their opinion of Mr. Obama, but a substantial number said it could influence voters in the fall.

During the week of March 17 to 23, the Wright-Obama story line accounted for 37 percent of the campaign stories, the survey said. That made Mr. Obama the central figure in 72 percent of political stories that week, close to the highest level of coverage of any figure during the campaign.

The only state to vote since the emergence of Mr. Wright was Pennsylvania, which was perceived as a stronghold for Mrs. Clinton anyway. She won by more than nine percentage points, but exit polls indicated weakness for Mr. Obama among white, working-class voters. The votes today in Indiana and North Carolina will be the first since Mr. Wright reignited coverage last week with a string of interviews that caused Mr. Obama to break with him entirely.

Stories last week focused on the political damage Mr. Wright had caused for Mr. Obama. Then, as often happens with such media obsessions, the narrative circled back to focus on the media itself and whether it had gone overboard.

Kenneth F. Bunting, associate publisher of The Seattle Post-Intelligencer, wrote last week, "Barack Obama’s forceful denunciation and disavowal of his former pastor doesn’t change the fact that it is an irrelevant distraction entirely created by cable television pundits using out-of-context and skewed sound bites." Donna Brazile, a Democratic strategist, told CNN that voters "think that Reverend Wright has been used as an ax to destroy or diminish Senator Obama and to divide people unnecessarily, in this country, at a time when we are at war and we’re trying to get our economy back on track." Over all, news of the campaign accounted for 38 percent of all news coverage last week, according to the survey. The second most-covered story was the economy, at 10 percent.

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Black Theology, Black Consciousness

Photo: Dr. James Cone

James Cone
Weighs in on
Rev. Wright

[Note from Paul Burke: Dr. James Cone is rightfully considered the dean of Black Liberation Theology. Along with his seminal works on the subject mentioned below, he also wrote Martin & Malcolm & America, the best book I've read about my two favorite Americans, and one of the best books I've ever read on any topic. Dr. Cone's thoughts on the political firestorm surrounding Sen. Barack Obama and his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, are instructive.]


Hana R. Alberts

for Forbes.com
03-24-08

Last week, Sen. Barack Obama addressed the recent imbroglio over incendiary comments from the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, former pastor of Obama's church in Chicago.

In a speech he gave in Philadelphia, Obama spoke of the emotional and historical baggage carried by the black community and the overwhelming resentment familiar to anyone who has faced injustice.

Obama denounced Wright's harshest statements--the pastor has said, "God damn America"--while urging all Americans to join in discussions about race and history in an attempt to bridge divisions in society.

Wright's sermons are rooted in the tenets of black liberation theology, the life's work of James H. Cone, a professor at Union Theological Seminary in New York, whose books both informed and inspired Wright.



According to Cone, who wrote two of the seminal texts on black liberation theology--Black Theology & Black Power in 1969 and A Black Theory of Liberation a year later--the black community is constantly experiencing conflicts that are virtually irreconcilable.

In a Q&A with Hana R. Alberts, Cone discusses why Wright said what he did, where Obama's emphasis on shared history comes from and the inevitability of anger in the black community.

Forbes: What don't people understand about black liberation theology?

Cone: I don't think people have done much reading about black liberation theology, and I think what they think--what they've heard--of what's been in the media is often only a sort of--how can I say it?--kind of a distortion of it.

Black liberation theory emerged out of the ministers: out of Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X in the late 1960s.

What we were trying to do is to show that one can be black and Christian at the same time. That one can love oneself as a black person. And also, in fact, that that's the only way you can learn how to love other people.

And one of the problems in a racist society is that blacks who are the victims of that white supremacy often develop self-hatred. To see that self-hatred is to see what violence we do against each other. …

The violence that blacks do to each other is a violence that is the result of not liking who you are.
Now, Martin King was certainly aware of that, but he was addressing the social and political things in the society that made blacks feel less human. … He changed the laws of the society so that blacks could be more effectively functional in that society.

Now, Malcolm X. He was a cultural revolutionary. He changed the way black people thought about themselves. He helped black people to love themselves.

So black liberation theology is an attempt to bring Martin and Malcolm together. The "black" in black theology stands for Malcolm X. The "theology" in that phrase stands for Martin Luther King. …

King taught us how to be a Christian, to love everybody. And it's important. But Malcolm taught us that you can't love everybody else until you love yourself first.

And so black theology wanted to interpret the Christian gospel in such a way that black people will know that their political and social liberation is identical to the gospel and also identical to them loving themselves. That is, we are a part of God's creation.

God created us black. And because of that, that blackness is good. So in a world in which values are defined by white domination and white supremacy--in that kind of world--then God sides with those who are the victims in it.

And so black liberation theology was an attempt to make the gospel accountable to the black community, who were struggling for a more just society in America.

What you have in Jeremiah Wright is someone trying to bring together Martin and Malcolm. He's a Christian preacher in a white church, by the way. He is speaking to the hurt in the African-American community. The suffering.

You know, when King spoke to the black community, he spoke with language very similar to Jeremiah Wright. …

When King spoke out against the war in Vietnam, he said, and this is a quote, he said America[n government] is "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today." This was in 1967 at Riverside Church. And the media came down hard on him.

King said [he] gets [his] credentials from the gospel, and not from the government. He was speaking out against the war in Vietnam. Wright was speaking of the war in Iraq and all that. He was speaking to the same kind of reality. The language gets extreme.

Are Wright or Obama examples of these theories?

I think Rev. Wright is a perfect example and expression of black liberation theology. He's part of a progressive black ministerial community. …

I'm not sure how much Barack Obama knows about the subject of black liberation theology. … I wouldn't expect him to have read as widely as Rev. Wright. I've read both of Barack Obama's books, and I heard the speech. I don't see anything in the books or in the speech that contradicts black liberation theology. If he had it explained to him, I think he would [understand it].

In his speech, Obama said, "But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races." Is the anger about which Wright and Obama speak inevitable?

I think it's inevitable. But that's why King said he had to keep marching. Because the marches were an outlet for the anger that black people felt. So the anger is deep, and I think what you saw expressed in Rev. Wright's sermon is that anger.

Black people are the one people in this society who have not been unpatriotic. We have never attacked the government with guns or anything like that. We have been so committed to this country. …

We are super-American because no matter what this nation has done to us, we still love America. We still are committed. We are the last people to do anything to bring this country down. But that doesn't mean that you're not upset about what the country has done to you. But yet, in spite of that, we are still very patriotic.

Yes, that anger is deep. Very, very deep. But at the same time, the patriotism is deep too. And that's what people--when they hear Rev. Wright, they don't know that part of the anger is saying, "This is my country too." And so it's both patriotism and also anger. They are kind of dialectical. They feed on each other.

In his speech, Obama emphasized that Wright--and, really, all people--are products of historical consequences, these universal experiences of defeat and discrimination. In other words, we are the result of a succession of people who were reacting to their historical circumstances and what was handed to them. Is this an important concept to remember?

It is a concept to keep in mind. Because we are the product of our pasts. It isn't really past, as Faulkner says, it's really present--with us. What happened before is very much present with us today.

I think most whites often find it difficult to appreciate and to identify with what has happened to African-Americans in this country.

I think understanding a people is very important. You know, to be understood is very important to people, whether you can do anything about it or not. To be understood is important. …
You get can a Ph.D. in history in this country and never learn about black people. It's not taught in our schools, so people can't be well aware that black people have a different history.
We didn't come here on the Mayflower. We came on slave ships, and that runs in our blood, and it's a part of America's history. It's not something we want to forget.

And so I just hope that we can, you know, talk about very difficult things, like about race, without, you know, demonizing each other. It's one thing to see the system as bad, but there's no reason to demonize individuals.

And so sometimes I think whites take it personally when we talk about the institution of slavery. We talk about lynching. We talk about segregation. It is not an individual white that is the object of our critique; it is the nation.

In his speech, Obama said, "The church contains in full the kindness and the cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America." Do you agree with this characterization of the black community?

One way you can see it is that there are black people who also oppose Rev. Wright. And there are blacks who support [him]. Well, those blacks will be in the same worship service. And they will learn from each other. They will check against each other. They will keep each other from going too far one way or the other.

That's the thing about the black community. We don't all think alike. We try to mutually respect each other and take each other seriously … because I can't refuse to listen to someone who disagrees with me when they've been through the same experience I've been through. I have to listen to them.

What we have in the African-American community is the bitterness and the love, is the Martin and the Malcolm. …

[W.E.B.] DuBois calls it a double consciousness. It is like--we are American, yes. And we are also black. And they don't treat us right, so it's a double feeling. It's a paradoxical feeling. And I think Barack Obama caught it well with that statement--the paradox that exists, even in the church itself, even in the homes of black people.

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Behold the Double Standard

Beware the
Terrible
Simplifiers

By Bill Moyers
Bill Moyers Journal
May 3, 2008

I once asked a reporter back from Vietnam: 'Who's
telling the truth over there?'

'Everyone,' he said. 'Everyone sees what's happening
through the lens of their own experience.'

That's how people see Jeremiah Wright.

In my conversation with him and in his dramatic public
appearances since, he revealed himself to be far more
complex than the sound bites that propelled him onto
the public stage.

More than 2,000 people have written me about him, and
their opinions vary widely. Some sting: 'Jeremiah
Wright is nothing more than a race-hustling, American-
hating radical,' one of my viewers wrote. Another
called him a 'nut case.'
Many more were sympathetic to him. Many asked for some
rational explanation for Wright's transition from
reasonable conversation to the shocking anger they saw
at the National Press Club.

A psychologist might pull back some of the layers and
see this complicated man more clearly, but I'm not a
psychologist

Many black preachers I've known-scholarly, smart, and
gentle in person-uncorked fire and brimstone in the
pulpit. Of course, I've known many white preachers like
that, too

But where I grew up in the South, before the civil
rights movement, the pulpit was a safe place for black
men to express anger for which they would have been
punished anywhere else. A safe place for the fierce
thunder of dignity denied, justice delayedI think I would have been angry if my ancestors had
been transported thousands of miles in the hellish hole
of a slave ship, then sold at auction, humiliated,
whipped, and lynchedOr if my great-great-great grandfather had been but
three-fifths of a person in a Constitution that
proclaimed: 'We, the people.'

Or if my own parents had been subjected to the racial
vitriol of Jim Crow, Strom Thurmond, Bull Conner, and
Jesse Helms

Even so, the anger of black preachers I've known and
heard and reported on was, for them, very personal and
cathartic. That's not how Jeremiah Wright came across
in those sound bites or in his defiant performances
since my interview

What white America is hearing in his most inflammatory
words is an attack on the America they cherish and that
many of their sons have died for in battle - forgetting
that black Americans have fought and bled beside them,
and that Wright himself has a record of honored service
in the Navy.

Hardly anyone took the 'chickens come home to roost'
remark to convey the message that intervention in the
political battles of other nations is sure to bring
retaliation in some form, which is not to justify the
particular savagery of 9/11 but to understand that
actions have consequences.

My friend Bernard Weisberger, the historian, says, yes,
people are understandably seething with indignation
over Wright's absurd charge that the United States
deliberately brought an HIV epidemic into being.
But it is a fact, he says, that within living memory
the U.S. public health service conducted a study that
deliberately deceived black men with syphilis into
believing that they were being treated while actually
letting them die for the sake of a scientific test.

Does this excuse Wright's anger? His exaggerations or
distortions? You'll have to decide for yourself, but at
least it helps me to understand the why of them.
In this multimedia age the pulpit isn't only available
on Sunday mornings. There's round the clock media - the
beast whose hunger is never satisfied, especially for
the fast food with emotional content.

So the preacher starts with rational discussion and
after much prodding throws more and more gasoline on
the fire that will eventually consume everything it
touches. He had help - people who, for their own
reasons, set out to conflate the man in the pulpit who
wasn't running for president with the man in the pew
who was.

Behold the double standard: John McCain sought out the
endorsement of John Hagee, the war-mongering, Catholic-
bashing Texas preacher, who said the people of New
Orleans got what they deserved for their sins.

But no one suggests McCain shares Hagee's delusions or
thinks AIDS is God's punishment for homosexuality. Pat
Robertson called for the assassination of a foreign
head of state and asked God to remove Supreme Court
justices, yet he remains a force in the Republican
religious right.

After 9/11, Jerry Falwell said the attack was God's
judgment on America for having been driven out of our
schools and the public square, but when McCain goes
after the endorsement of the preacher he once condemned
as an agent of intolerance, the press gives him a pass.
Jon Stewart recently played tape from the Nixon White
House in which Billy Graham talks in the Oval Office
about how he has friends who are Jewish, but he knows
in his heart that they are undermining America.
This is crazy and wrong -- white preachers are given
leeway in politics that others aren't.

Which means it is all about race, isn't it?

Wright's offensive opinions and inflammatory
appearances are judged differently. He doesn't fire a
shot in anger, put a noose around anyone's neck, call
for insurrection, or plant a bomb in a church with
children in Sunday school.

What he does is to speak his mind in a language and
style that unsettles some people, and says some things
so outlandish and ill-advised that he finally leaves
Obama no choice but to end their friendship.
We're often exposed to the corroding acid of the
politics of personal destruction, but I've never seen
anything like this - this wrenching break between
pastor and parishioner played out right in front of our
eyes.

Both men no doubt will carry the grief to their graves.
All the rest of us should hang our heads in shame for
letting it come to this in America, where the gluttony
of the non-stop media grinder consumes us all and
prevents an honest conversation on race.
It is the price we are paying for failing to heed the
great historian Jacob Burckhardt, who said, 'beware the
terrible simplifiers.'

[Bill Moyers is managing editor of the weekly public
affairs program "Bill Moyers Journal," which airs
Friday night on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at
The Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers. The video for
this essay can be found on YouTube.]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvnMK1d9xE0

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Following the Rev. Wright Snippet Trail

WHO DUNNIT?

Is There
a Deep Throat
Transmitter of
the Wright Tapes?

By Tom Hayden

In the feeding frenzy over the Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s sermons, one basic question is conspicuously ignored.

Who dunnit?

Who first obtained the tapes from Trinity Church?
Who first spliced and edited those tapes?
Who first took them to what media outlets?
Who first in the media received the tapes?
Who first decided to play those tapes over the air?

If the media was the source, would the tapes have been edited in the same fashion?
No one in the media has taken credit for discovering, editing and showing the tapes.
If it was an outsider, who was it? This matters for more than historical reasons. It matters if it was a hit job. It matters if the tapes were edited to maximize the negative. It matters if the media used the tapes without mentioning the source.
The question will be asked until it is answered.

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Obama, Wright, 1968, 2008

Left Unity for
A Left-Center
Candidate

By Keith Joseph
Rutgers SDS Member

I know Jeremiah Wright… Well, I never met him, but I know his ideas, he is a part of the American political left. Nothing he said outraged me, or even upset me. I agreed with a lot of it, and disagreed with some of it. If we were to meet in person I imagine we would get along just fine, and we probably could do some good work together.

Obama had to distance himself from his pastor in order to remain a viable candidate -- a smart move. Gary Wills, writing in the May 2008 NY Review of Books, pointed out that Abe Lincoln, who Obama invoked when announcing his own candidacy, was associated with John Brown and the "radical" abolitionists. Like Obama, Abe had to distance himself in pubic from the "extremists." But the abolitionists remained the left wing of Lincoln's coalition, and although he publicly disavowed them (gently) he was secretly and indirectly connected to them.



About 100 hundred years later, in 1968, Robert Kennedy's candidacy for president represented a similar coalition. His brother, John Kennedy's election marked the achievement of full citizenship for Catholic (Irish and Italian) workers (that's why Kennedy's picture hangs in all those Irish bars). Bobby Kennedy continued to lead those "white" workers and he was bringing them into an alliance with the Civil Rights Movement (Kennedy was meeting and marching with two of its most prominent leaders, Dr. King and Caesar Chavez). In other words, Kennedy's campaign was a next phase in the Civil Rights struggle. But the assassination of Malcolm X in 1965 and the FBI repression of the left made it difficult for a left wing to get into that coalition and soon King and Kennedy would also be murdered.

These assassinations sent most left wing forces in the United States into a disorientating tailspin that we have yet to recover from. If it were 1968, Hillary would be Hubert Humphrey, McCain would be Nixon, and Obama would be Bobby Kennedy. Some of our friends on the left have asked us to "Recreate '68." Yes, but let's not repeat the blind rage, instead let's do it over and send Humphrey and Nixon packing. So, we must build a John Brown, Malcolm X, Jeremiah Wright bloc— a left bloc allied to but independent from Obama's campaign.

As Malcolm and the movement developed, he emphasized uniting with other left forces. He and King drew closer together, but after Malcolm's assassination left wing forces pushed liberals and center-left forces away and into the hands of the right. Obama's campaign is the potential rebirth of the Kennedy-King Coalition. And it is time for the radical left to do what Malcolm would have done—get into the coalition as an independent force, consolidate a left wing and build a liberal and left coalition to stomp the war loving right wing in this country while building our own independent left movement.

We have a couple of immediate basic tasks: Obama must be the Democratic Party candidate—By Any Means Necessary. We should plan to camp right outside of Denver during the Democratic Party's Convention and hold anti-war demonstrations and our own left convention. If right wing Democrats try to force Hilary-Herbert Humphrey-Clinton on us we march on the convention and make sure Obama gets the nomination--By Any Means Necessary. In November, we must make sure Obama defeats the war criminal John McCain. And finally, after the election, we must be prepared to convene anywhere in the country (Florida, Ohio etc.) to make sure that the Supreme Court does not decide the contest.

Some of our fellow leftists have been very critical of Obama. The problem with their criticism is that they want Obama to be a leftist. He is not a leftist, he is a representative of the progressive, democratic wing of the capitalist class and he is making an appeal to workers of all nationalities to support him. Obama is a liberal. He is a center-left candidate. He is a part of the mainstream of the Democratic Party. We are the left! It is time we got back in the game.

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Next Battleground - Indiana

Photo: Rocker John Mellencamp Warms Up Indiana for Obama

Obama
Fires Up
Hoosiers

By Brian A. Howey
Howey Politics Indiana

EVANSVILLE - In the very toe of the Hoosier State, which was rocked and rattled by an earthquake the previous week, Barack Obama was preparing to descend to the stage at Roberts Stadium. His move came in a state that in its 192-year history has elected only three African-American mayors (all in Gary), three African-American members of Congress, two black sheriffs, and two Hispanic mayors. None served much south of I-70.

Indiana House Majority Floor Leader Russ Stilwell of Boonville looked at the gathering crowd on this Tuesday night and softly said, "There’s an undercurrent out there. I’m not sure if people realize what’s going on." In about an hour, more than 8,000 Hoosiers - black, white, young, old - stood in a huge line that wrapped around the stadium, and for most, another two hours waiting for a transformational figure in American history to appear.

Around 10:45 p.m. on this balmy night, Obama took the dais in Evansville to thunderous cheers. "Evansville is going to be so important," Obama said a few moments after Hoosier rocker John Mellencamp sang "Small Town" … "All my friends are so small town. My parents live in the same small town. My job is so small town. Provides little opportunity. Educated in a small town. Taught the fear of Jesus in a small town. Used to daydream in that small town …"


The crowd itself seemed to state that another era had dawned in Indiana.

Rep. Stilwell questioned if Obama could fill the stadium. What if he couldn’t? By now, the question was moot.

What followed was Obama’s now familiar soaring rhetoric and questions from the Eastern Seaboard about the Hoosier state of mind. "We’re not here to talk about change for change’s sake, but because our families, our communities, and our country desperately need it," Obama said. "We’re here because we can’t afford to keep doing what we’ve been doing for another four years. We can’t afford to play the same Washington games with the same Washington players and expect a different result. Not this time. Not now."

In fact, there has been great change here in Indiana. In the three election cycles since 2004, Hoosier voters have tossed out a sitting governor, the Senate president pro tempore, the Senate finance chairman, four members of Congress, more than 40 percent of our mayors including incumbents in Indianapolis, Kokomo, Terre Haute, New Albany, Jeffersonville and East Chicago. Control of the Indiana House has changed hands. Gov. Mitch Daniels has forged and even apologized for change; acknowledging some of it may have come too fast for some Hoosiers.
There have been other changes. At a time when Obama makes a call for building infrastructure, many Hoosier Democrats have lined up as vociferous opponents of Gov. Mitch Daniels’ Major Moves toll road privatization (based, in part, on Chicago Mayor Daley’s similar move on the Chicago Skyway). One of the party’s gubernatorial candidates has based a campaign on rolling back many of the changes Daniels has made that are akin to the type of changes Obama says America desperately needs. Even though Obama and Daniels occupy diverse ends of the ideological spectrum, they seem to feed off the same idea of being change agents.

And now here at Roberts Stadium was Barack Obama taking the clarion call of change in deep Southern Indiana. "We can be a party that says and does whatever it takes to win the next election," Obama explained. "We can calculate and poll-test our positions and tell everyone exactly what they want to hear. Or we can be the party that doesn’t just focus on how to win, but why we should. We can tell everyone what they need to hear about the challenges we face. We can seek to regain not just an office, but the trust of the American people that their leaders in Washington will tell them the truth. That’s the choice in this election."

Obama continued, "We can build on the movement we’ve started in this campaign – a movement that’s united Democrats, Independents, and Republicans. We’re not as divided as our politics suggests. We may have different stories and different backgrounds, but we hold common hopes for the future of this country."

There are 100,000 new Hoosier voters taking all of this in. Hoosier Democrats will vote for a female or African-American for the first time on May 6.

Stilwell joined several southern Indiana legislators such as Dave Crooks and Lindel Hume, and Evansville Mayor Jonathan Weinzapfel, in endorsing Obama. But he was quick to note, "Clinton will win Southern Indiana, but I don’t think they realize what’s really going on here."

There are Democrats who won’t vote for a black man, just as there were in Pennsylvania. In past elections, we’ve speculated on how much a Jewish candidate for governor (Stephen Goldsmith in 1996) might lose in such intolerant proclivities (my answer was 1 to 3 percent). Sadly, numbers like that might exist today.

Barack Obama walked into a city that produced one of Indiana’s worst characters: Ku Klux Klan leader D.C. Stephenson who took over the state eight decades ago. On Tuesday he found a huge crowd and ears willing to listen to what he had to say. How they vote in less than two weeks could alter the course of American history.

Howey is publisher of Howey Politics Indiana at www.howeypolitics.com.

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[The New York Senator's last-ditch efforts to win the Democratic nomination could rely on the "Race Chasm" and the trampling of democracy.]






The Clinton
Firewall and
The Race Chasm

By David Sirota
In These Times

Google the phrase "Clinton firewall" and you will come up with an ever-lengthening list of scenarios that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign has said will stop Barack Obama's candidacy. The New Hampshire primary, said her campaign, would be the firewall to end Obamamania. Then Super Tuesday was supposed to be the firewall. Then Texas. Now Pennsylvania and Indiana.

For four months, the political world has been hypnotized by this string-along game, not bothering to ask what this Clinton tactic really is. The "just wait until the next states" mantra has diverted our attention from the firewall's grounding in race and democracy. But now, with only a few months until the Democratic National Convention in Denver, the firewall's true composition is coming into focus. Whether Obama can overcome this barrier will likely decide who becomes the Democrats' presidential nominee.ype your summary here



The Race Chasm

Since at least the South Carolina primary, the Clinton campaign's message has been stripped of its poll-tested nuance and become a rather crass drumbeat aimed at reminding voters that Obama is black. Whether it is former President Clinton likening Obama's campaign to Jesse Jackson's; Clinton aides telling the Associated Press that Obama is "the black candidate," or Geraldine Ferraro tapping into anti-affirmative action anger by claiming Obama's success is a product of his skin color, barely a week goes by without a white Clinton surrogate injecting race into the nominating contest.

That is one of the twin pillars of the Clinton firewall—a well-honed strategy aimed at maximizing "the Race Chasm." The Race Chasm may sound like a conventional discussion of the black-white divide, but it is one of the least-discussed geographic, demographic and political dynamics driving the contest between Clinton and Obama. I call it the Race Chasm because of what it looks like on a graph. Here's how it works.

To date, 42 states and the District of Columbia have voted in primaries or caucuses. Factor out the two senators' home states (Illinois, New York and Arkansas), the two states where Edwards was a major factor (New Hampshire and Iowa) and the one state where only Clinton was on the ballot (Michigan) and you are left with 37 elections where the head-to-head Clinton-Obama matchup has been most clear. Subtract the Latino factor (a hugely important but wholly separate influence on the election) by removing the four states whose Hispanic population is over 25 percent (California, New Mexico, Texas and Arizona), and you are left with 33 elections that best represent how the black-white split has impacted the campaign.

As the Race Chasm graph shows, when you chart Obama's margin of victory or defeat against the percentage of African-Americans living in that state, a striking U trend emerges. That precipitous dip in Obama's performance in states with a big-but-not-huge African-American population is the Race Chasm—and that chasm is no coincidence.

On the left of the graph, among the states with the smallest black population, Obama has destroyed Clinton. With the candidates differing little on issues, this trend is likely due, in part, to the fact that black-white racial politics are all but non-existent in nearly totally white states. Thus, Clinton has fewer built-in advantages. Though some of these states like Idaho or Wyoming have reputations for intolerance thanks to the occasional militia headlines, black-white interaction in these places is not a part of people's daily lives, nor their political decisions. Put another way, the dialect of racism—the hints of the Ferraro comment and codes of Bill Clinton's Jesse Jackson reference, for instance—is not politically effective because such language has not historically been a significant part of the local political discussion. That's especially true in the liberal-skewed Democratic primary.

On the right of the graph among the states with the largest black populations, Obama has also crushed Clinton. Unlike the super-white states, these states—many in the Deep South—have a long and sordid history of day-to-day, black-white racial politics, with Richard Nixon famously pioneering Republican's "southern strategy" to maximize the racist segregationist vote in general elections. "But in the Democratic primary the black vote is so huge [in these states], it can overwhelm the white vote," says Thomas Schaller, a political science professor at the University of Maryland—Baltimore. That black vote has gone primarily to Obama, helping him win these states by big margins.

It is in the chasm where Clinton has consistently defeated Obama. These are geographically diverse states from Ohio to Oklahoma to Massachusetts where racial politics is very much a part of the political culture, but where the black vote is too small to offset a white vote racially motivated by the Clinton campaign's coded messages and tactics. The chasm exists in the cluster of states whose population is above 6 percent and below 17 percent black, and Clinton has won most of them by beating Obama handily among white working-class voters.

In sum, Obama has only been able to eke out victories in three states with Race Chasm demographics, where African-American populations make up more than 6 percent but less than 17 percent of the total population. And those three states provided him extra advantages: He won Illinois, his home state; Missouri, an Illinois border state; and Connecticut, a state whose Democratic electorate just two years before supported Ned Lamont's insurgent candidacy against Joe Lieberman, and therefore had uniquely developed infrastructure and political cultures inclined to support an outsider candidacy. Meanwhile, three-quarters of all the states Clinton has won are those with Race Chasm demographics.

Pennsylvania Gov. Ed Rendell (D), a Clinton supporter, publicly acknowledged this dynamic in February. He suggested to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette editorial board that Obama's ethnicity could prevent him from winning the state, which, at 10.6 percent black, falls squarely in the Race Chasm.

"You've got conservative whites here, and I think there are some whites who are probably not ready to vote for an African-American candidate," Rendell said.

That was echoed by Obama supporter David K. Levdansky, a state representative from western Pennsylvania. "For all our wanting to believe that race is less of an issue than ever before, the reality of racism still exists," he told the New York Times. "It's not that [Pennsylvanians] don't think he's qualified, but some people fear that it might be empowering the black community by electing Obama."

Primaries are now looming in a critical group of Race Chasm states—Pennsylvania, Indiana (8.8 percent black), Kentucky (7.5 percent black) and West Virginia (only 3 percent black, but a place influenced by the Ohio, Maryland, Virginia and Pennsylvania media markets, which undoubtedly makes race politics more customary than in other mostly white states).

Clinton, knowing the Race Chasm can fortify her firewall, has subsequently intensified her efforts to put race front and center in the campaign, most recently attacking Jeremiah Wright, Obama's former pastor who has delivered fiery speeches indicting white racism. She is so determined to raise race issues in advance of these Race Chasm contests that she gave an in-person interview to the Pittsburgh Tribune-Review specifically to criticize Wright. For reference, the Tribune-Review is a conservative newspaper in western Pennsylvania owned by the same Richard Mellon Scaife who funded the anti-Clinton witchhunts of the '90s.

Clearly, each primary and caucus contest has its own unique politics, and race is not the only factor moving votes. Despite the oversimplified punditry that comes with presidential campaigns, demographic groups—white, black or any other—do not vote as monoliths. That said, a phenomenon as stark as the Race Chasm over 33 elections is obviously affecting the campaign—particularly considering the regional and red-blue diversity of each state cluster on the graph.

"When the black population is really small, racial polarization is small enough that Obama can win, and when the black population is large, any polarization is drowned out by the overwhelming size of the Democratic black vote," says Schaller, who recently authored the book Whistling Past Dixie analyzing demographic voting trends. "But in the middle range, polarization is sizeable enough that black voters cannot overcome it, and these are the states where she wins."

The Superdelegates

Clinton has two reasons to try to highlight race and maximize the Race Chasm, both related to the second pillar of her firewall: the superdelegates. These are the senators, congress people, governors and party officials who control roughly 40 percent of the Democratic National Convention votes needed to secure the nomination.

First and most obvious, she wants to win as many of the remaining states as possible to keep her tally of "pledged" delegates (i.e., delegates won in primaries and caucuses) as large as possible. The Politico.com correctly reported in March that "Clinton has virtually no chance of winning" the race for pledged delegates. But winning some remaining states and keeping the count close will make it easier for her to argue the race was almost a tie, and thus theoretically easier to convince superdelegates to throw their support to her, even if she loses the popular vote and the pledged delegate count.

Clinton, in fact, is already making the argument that she is only narrowly behind. "We're separated by, you know, a little more than a hundred delegates," she told Time, not bothering to note that a hundred delegates is more than the entire delegate count from major states like Missouri or Wisconsin.

Additionally, in trying to maximize the Race Chasm by focusing on race-tinged issues, Clinton is tacitly making an "electability" argument to superdelegates. (This is not a stupid strategy in courting officials who are all, in one way or another, election-focused political operatives.) Part of that "electability" argument hinges on portraying Obama as "unelectable"—and what better way to do that than stoke as many race-focused controversies as possible? It is a standard primary tactic: Launch a line of attack—in this case, the "Wright controversy"—and then claim the attack will be used by Republicans to defeat an opponent—in this case Obama—should he become the general election candidate. Of course, it doesn't hurt Clinton's cause that, close to half of the superdelegates are white, according to The Politico.

Ruthless, but probably useless

As ugly as it is, the Clinton firewall strategy is stunning in its ruthlessness. It has been half a century since the major triumphs of the civil rights and party reform movements, yet a major Democratic candidate is attempting to secure a presidential nomination by exploiting racial divides and negotiating backroom superdelegate deals.

But success is not likely.

Even if Clinton wins big in the remaining Race Chasm states, Obama has advantages in Montana, Oregon, North Carolina and South Dakota—smaller states, to be sure, but likely enough pledged delegates to keep a significant lead. Clinton, therefore, would have a difficult time convincing superdelegates to go against the will of the people in their states.

That leaves the "electability" argument with the superdelegates—and the problem for Clinton there is that polls show Obama is at least as "electable" as Clinton, if not more so.

A state-by-state SurveyUSA poll in March found both Obama and Clinton defeating Republican nominee John McCain in a hypothetical general election matchup—and Obama actually getting four more Electoral College votes than Clinton. In Colorado, a key swing state, a March Rasmussen Reports poll found Obama tying McCain, but McCain clobbering Clinton by 14 percentage points. A February Rasmussen poll reported a similar phenomenon in Pennsylvania, with McCain beating Clinton by two points, but Obama beating McCain by 10.

And then there is the Pew poll taken immediately after the major wave of media surrounding the Wright controversy. The survey showed both Obama and Clinton defeating McCain, but more significantly, Obama actually performing slightly better among white voters than Clinton—a blow to those Clinton backers hoping that superdelegates may begin to fear a white voter backlash against the Illinois senator.

If her turn to more hardball tactics is any indication, Clinton may be trying to preempt the firewall strategy's failure. In two bold moves at the end of March, her campaign launched a two-pronged initiative to intimidate Democratic leaders and to strongarm pledged delegates who are already committed to Obama through primaries and caucuses.

First, the Clinton campaign organized 20 major Democratic Party financiers to release a letter to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi upbraiding her for appearing on ABC News and saying, "If the votes of the superdelegates overturn what happened in the elections, it would be harmful to the Democratic Party." According to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics, the contributors who signed the letter have given a combined $23.6 million to Democrats since 1999. These mega-donors, clearly wielding their financial heft as an implied threat, claimed that Pelosi had taken an "untenable position" by merely suggesting superdelegates should avoid overturning the results of democratic primaries and caucuses.

At the same time, Clinton told Time that technically, even pledged delegates who are supposed to represent the will of voters are permitted to change their vote at the Democratic National Convention. "Every delegate with very few exceptions is free to make up his or her mind however they choose," she said, introducing the possibility of a new, more brass-knuckled kind of delegate campaign. "We talk a lot about so-called pledged delegates, but every delegate is expected to exercise independent judgment."

A late March NBC News poll reports that if a candidate "loses among delegates selected by voters but still wins the nomination," a plurality (41 percent) of Democratic voters believe that candidate would be "not legitimate." Many of those surveyed probably remember both the recent episodes of stolen elections, and the past eras of brokered conventions and corrupt, often racist political machines stuffing ballot boxes.

The latter, in fact, was precisely how the epithet "Democrat Party"—as opposed to "Democratic Party"—was coined. As the language-obsessed William Safire documented 24 years ago in a New York Times column, the term "Democrat Party" was created by Republican leaders in the mid-20th century to imply that their opponents—many bigoted segregationists and machine pols—were, in fact, undemocratic.

After the Florida and Ohio debacles in the 2000 and 2004 election, Republican lamentations about democracy are, of course, absurd. Additionally, many machines have long ago decayed … except for the one inside the Democratic Party itself—the Clinton machine. If that machine's firewall strategy continues to exploit the Race Chasm and threaten to trample the will of voters, Clinton will be asking the Democratic Party, one that has come to champion racial tolerance and democracy, to truly become the Democrat Party—one that ignores those ideals in favor of a single Democrat.

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Dreaming Obama in North Carolina

A Story of
Race and
Inheritance

By Tom Hayden
The Nation


RALEIGH, NORTH CAROLINA. Dr. John Hope Franklin at 94 years old remains a formidable progressive historian, having lived through two world wars, five decades of segregation, the Sixties civil rights movement and now Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Since there is no comparable or greater authority alive, I was eager to ask him to evaluate this long history. I ventured to North Carolina for meetings and dinner with Dr. Franklin in Raleigh, where he keeps office hours at Duke’s John Hope Franklin Center. It was April 16, and Barack Obama was rolling through North Carolina that week, the state where the student sit-in movement began three years before Obama’s birth. I was especially wondering where Dr. Franklin placed Obama in African-American history.

Dr. Franklin is dark-skinned, tall, and angular, with the strong handshake of a man deeply grounded. He is very present, but his presence also invokes the presence of an ancestor, the kind of father Barack Obama searches for in Dreams from My Father.[1995]. Dr. Franklin is living history himself as well as the author of such classics as From Slavery to Freedom: The History of the African-American People. This is a man who volunteered to fight in World War 2, but was rejected for military service on grounds of race, a man who became a Ph.D while having to personally integrate segregated libraries, the defender of W.E.B. Dubois during McCarthyism, a key social researcher behind Brown v. Board of Education, the first black chairman of a major history department [Brooklyn College, 1956], a man who lived the bitter decades even before the Rev. Jeremiah Wright came along.



His wife Aurelia died in 1999 after 59 years of marriage. Dr. Franklin walks with a cane these days, and the accompaniment of close friends, but is extremely alert, curious and possessed of a mirthful smile. During our dinner, admirers kept approaching our table to wish him well, introduce their families, and share stories.

Dr. Franklin had received a call from Barack Obama the day before, he said, but the two had not connected yet. “The person who took the call is a Hillary supporter”, he softly chuckled.

The Clintons were progressive enough to shower many honors on Dr. Franklin, including a presidential Medal of Freedom in 1995, the year that young Barack Obama published his Dreams. Dr. Franklin spent many hours in the White House during the Clinton years, and even today remains the ranking academic charged with molding how history will be embodied in the new African-American Smithsonian museum on the Mall.

Dr. Franklin will announce his support of Barack Obama, as early as Wednesday, despite several personal entreaties from both Clintons to at least remain neutral.

“Don’t know Obama, never met him”, he told me. What was it about Obama that drew Dr. Franklin away from the Clintons?, I asked. “I thought he was exceptionally bright and qualified, with more potential for growth in office” what he’d seen the Clintons achieve in the years he had watched them.

Then, after staring at the table intently, Dr. Franklin said that Obama’s recent speech on racism was “the Sermon on the Mount, the Declaration of Independence, and the Emancipation Proclamation, all combined into one.” Sensing that this was quite a pronouncement, he then he bit off a small portion of meat, saying that he was on a low-salt diet these days. It was as if his evaluation of Obama’s historic place was an everyday statement of fact. We went on to discuss the size of bass in North Carolina creeks.

I missed a front-row opportunity to see Obama’s Raleigh rally that week, though arriving in time to listen from the parking lot. I was late because I was exploring another chapter of the pre-Obama era. Back in 1961, I was in North Carolina at a gathering of early SDS and SNCC activists discussion the strategy of realigning the Democratic Party as a result of direct action and voter registration. The catalyst for that brainstorming was the 1960 Greensboro, North Carolina, sit-in which spread the wildfire of nonviolent direct action across the South. Here I was in 2008, missing Obama in the present because I was visiting the Greensboro lunch counter site where the activism of my generation first began.

Flashbacks briefly began affecting me as I arrived in Greensboro with two friends from Duke, both graduate students and community organizers. Greensboro is an old textile and insurance town with a couple of historically-black colleges including Bennett and North Carolina A&T, where the four original sit-in leaders had been enrolled. A railroad track bisects the town of 250,000, which is just under 30 percent black. The look of many buildings and streets has changed little. When we briefly became lost, an old caution about who to ask for directions came over me. When I glimpsed white pedestrians walking along the street where the sit-ins occurred, the former sense of high-alert briefly returned.

The old Woolworth’s is still there, on the corner of a street renamed February 1st, its shell being reconstructed, slowly, as an international civil rights museum. The lunch counter, swivel chairs and serving area haven’t changed since 1960. I sat down where David Richmond, Ezell Blair [now Jibreel Khazan], Franklin McClain and Joseph McNeil – and others – asked politely for cups of coffee so long ago. I inhabited the past, the point from which the tremors went forth, then shared coffee and conversation with local people trying to complete the work of memory. They call themselves The Beloved Community Center of Greensboro [www.belovedcommunitycenter.org]

One of them, Louis Brandon, was a participant in those first sit-ins as a junior studying biology at A&T. Rev. Nelson Johnson and Joyce Johnson direct the development efforts. Henry Fry, a Greensboro native first elected to the state legislature in 1968, later the state’s appointed chief justice, and now back at A&T, seemed to be a living example of progress. But all said their struggle has been a hard one. Fifteen years ago the Woolworth property was slated to become a parking garage. Two black leaders were able to purchase the structure. Then a 1999 $3 million bond referendum failed by a close margin on racial lines [85 percent of the town’s blacks voted yes, while 75 percent of the white majority were opposed]. Another referendum was attempted and failed. Someone placed a headless skunk on the entrance.

The prospects improved starting in 2001. The unfolding story of 1960 began including the handful of white students who joined the sit-in from a private women’s college, Bennett. [two of them, exchange students from Mt. Holyoke, were among those arrested]. The state legislature, now reflecting African-American constituencies, eventually provided $2.5 million, and downtown developers and large corporations such as tobacco firms pledging several million more, whether for reparation or profits. As a 2004 New York Times story on such civil rights museums noted, “the lure of tourism money has helped overcome the shame.” The tourism potential of such sites “has shown that the history of the 50’s and 60’s is a valuable commodity.” [1] <#_ftn1> Meanwhile project costs have risen from an initial $7 million to $18 million, largely due to renovation of the 1929 building.

Had things really changed as much as Barack Obama was suggesting? Surely there were deep shifts since the time of John Hope Franklin? How did they feel about the Woolworth lunch counter being both a legacy and a commodity?

The responses were ambiguous. Louis Brandon quickly asserted that “the town has not changed, and if you want any change you have to protest.” Memories remain bitter over the Klan killings of five activists during a textile workers’ march in 1979. Fry, the former legislator and judge, had learned “there’s more than one way to skin a cat, you need the radicals, some conservatives and people in the middle to get it done”, though he agreed that “everything here is a struggle” because “the people making laws are careful to give so many advantages to the people at the top.”

The power of the textile and insurance interests remains “tenacious”, said Rev. Johnson, though “what is changing is the community encroachment on power.” For a time in the Seventies, he said Greensboro became “the center of the southern black power movement”, with a thriving culture of radicals, nationalists, black Marxists, and publications like the African World. Community empowerment has grown through difficult strikes by cafeteria workers, rent strikers and textile workers. In the absence of a strong union movement, he noted, the community was the union, meeting at the church every Monday [two of the original four sit-in students were “anchored”, he thought, by attending the same church. Now “pieces of all these movements are on a cusp of change.”

The conversation over what memory to preserve is at times heated. “The power dynamic is unchanged, but the disguise constantly changes in order to prevent change. This gets told”, he said, pointing to the Woolworth site where we sat, “so that the rest of history of strike and struggle doesn’t get told.” History, he said, ought to be a “servant, an agent, of transformation”, not a servant of the tourism industry. “That’s exactly what Dr. King would not want.”

Does Obama represent the cusp of change for these deeply-rooted and savvy community leaders in Greensboro? So far Obama has not visited the Woolworth’s site, as he did the historic Selma, Alabama, bridge a few months ago. But the senator held a town meeting months ago at the Greensboro coliseum, filling 2100 seats and spilling outdoors. “The more he talked”, said Fry, grinning, “the better I felt. It was like Shirley Chisholm running for president back in those days, she lifted my spirits. And when I got elected to office in 1968, there was a radical black running for governor who lost, but he got a lot of new voters out. Everything builds on everything else.”

TOM HAYDEN is the author of Writings for a Democratic Society, the Tom Hayden Reader [2008] and Ending the War in Iraq [2007].

[1] Quotes and funding information from New York Times, Aug. 10, 2004, “Civil Rights Battlegrounds Enter World of Tourism.”

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There You Go Again - Red-Baiting, Race-Baiting

Photo: Billboard
Used vs King
Across the South

Baiting
Obama



By Steve Weissman
Truthout Perspective

April 21, 2008 -Bill Ayers is one of the more interesting people I've known, and I would love to discuss how, in the heat of the Vietnam War, he went from running a Summerhill school in Anna Arbor to bombing government buildings as a leader of the Weather Underground. I could even explain why I thought then - and still think - that Bill was wrong to do so.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright is a provocative theologian, whose heated rhetoric bears a striking similarity to some of the later speeches of another black preacher, the Rev. Martin Luther King. We could all learn from studying King's words, and those of the Reverend Wright, and decide for ourselves where we agree and disagree.



White workers in the rust belt, whether bitter or offended, could similarly teach us a great deal, especially when political scoundrels such as Dick Cheney sing the praises of "Guns, Guts and Glory" as they send a disproportionate number of those hard-pressed workers, their sons and their daughters to fight and die for the freedom of Big Oil in Iraq.

But using "bittergate," Wright and Ayers to drag down Barack Obama has nothing to do with fair-minded debate and discussion. Nor is all this a needed vetting of Obama, as Hillary persists in saying. The current noise is nothing less than the predictable rebirth of an American political tradition. Call it redbaiting, witch-hunting or McCarthyism, the old slime is back and the reasons go far beyond the demands of Gotcha journalism and electoral combat.

As anyone addicted to surfing the web knows, right wing Internet web sites, Fox News, and right wing talk radio have for some time been smearing Obama as a secret Marxist, Leninist elitist, secret Muslim and hater of Israel. Many of the attacks have specifically raised the specter of Bill Ayers and the Reverend Wright. The poison reached The New York Times on April 14, when the neo-conservative columnist William Kristol led a stinging attack on Obama with six paragraphs on Karl Marx and his description of religion as "the opium of the people." The ever-smiling Kristol headlined his attack "The Mask Slips."

Within hours, Fox News put the issue to Sen. Joe Lieberman: Is Obama "a Marxist as Bill Kristol says might be the case?"

"I must say that's a good question," said Lieberman. Quickly gathering his frayed liberal cloak about him, Lieberman added that he would "hesitate to say" Obama is a Marxist. "But he's got some positions that are far to the left of me and I think mainstream America."

None of this was a secret to the Clinton campaign, which kept saying Obama had not been vetted and would prove an easy target for those nasty old Republicans. Hillary directed this argument to the super delegates, but I suspect she was also trying to encourage mainstream journalists to go after Obama with the same smears the right wing had been using. Then came ABC's prime time debate and - no surprise - Hillary teamed up with Charles Gibson and George Stephanopoulos, Bill Clinton's former press secretary, to red-bait Obama as if he were a reluctant witness called before HUAC, the House Un-American Activities Committee.

Those of us of a certain age have seen this movie before, and I could not help hoping Obama would reply to his self-appointed inquisitors as Woody Allen did in the 1976 film, "The Front." "Fellas, I don't recognize the right of this committee to ask me these kinds of questions. And furthermore, you can go fuck yourselves." But no. Far cooler, Obama did his best to pivot and turn back to the real concerns of those Joe Lieberman calls "mainstream Americans," which is exactly the way to go. In time, Obama might also rise above the fray with his huge smile and that great quip from Ronald Reagan, "There you go again."

Obama will certainly get plenty of practice. redbaiting is how America's right wingers and their conservatized liberal allies have long fought to kill progressive social and economic change. Accuse the change-makers of being godless Commie pinkos. Berate them for associating with godless Commie pinkos. Damn them for not doing enough to root out all the godless Commie pinkos and their sympathizers, whether from the State Department, Hollywood, the unions, the media, charitable foundations, under their beds or wherever else the beasts of the night might lurk.

Don't laugh, it works. In the late 1940s, President Harry Truman proposed universal health care. Right wingers branded it "Communistic" and smothered it at birth. We still don't have decent health care for everyone, and even John Edwards feared to suggest anything as "Socialistic" as a single-payer system. Better to find "a pragmatic compromise" existing insurance companies and HMOs might accept, as Hillary did so successfully in the 1990s.
Desegregate the races? Heaven forbid! Billboards and leaflets all over the South showed photographs of Martin Luther King attending "a Communist training school," and many white liberals shied away.

Organize workers into unions? Not on your life! Employers and their paid-for politicians branded the organizers as "Reds" and used flag-waving American Legionnaires to beat early unionists to a pulp or ride them out of town on a rail.

In a similar, if less violent, vein, Hillary now sounds like a card-carrying member of what she used to call "the vast right wing conspiracy." McCain has wasted no time trying to link Obama to Hamas. And, should Obama become president, he will run into wall-to-wall redbaiting as he tries to bring about such terribly Marxistical reforms as universal health care, well-paying jobs, more progressive taxation, serious regulation of Wall Street speculators and an end to our military occupation of Iraq.

As for my old friend Bill Ayers, I haven't seen him in nearly 20 years, but I doubt he has his neighbor Obama's ear. When asked about Ayers in the ABC debate, Obama identified him as an English professor. William Ayers is a widely respected and very outspoken education maven, and if Obama has spent any serious time with him, the senator would surely have known Bill's life-long passion has been to find more effective ways to teach our children

[A veteran of the Berkeley Free Speech Movement and the New Left monthly Ramparts, Steve Weissman lived for many years in London, working as a magazine writer and television producer. He now lives and works in France. ]

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Getting Super-Delegates to Dump Obama?

Photo: Bill and Hillary in the 1960s

Why Hillary
Makes My
Wife Scream





By Tom Hayden

My wife Barbara has begun yelling at the television set every time she hears Hillary Clinton. This is abnormal behavior since Barbara is a meditative practitioner of everything peaceful and organic, and is inspired by Barack’s transformational appeal.

For Barbara, Hillary has become the screech on the blackboard. From First Lady to Lady Macbeth.

It’s getting to me as well. Last year, I was somewhat reconciled to the prospect of supporting and pressuring Hillary as the nominee amidst the rising tide of my friends who already hated her, irrationally I thought. I was one of those people Barack accuses of being willing to settle. I even had framed a flattering autographed message from Hillary. But as the campaign has gone on and on, her signed portrait still leans against the wall in my study. I don’t know where she belongs anymore.




At least Hillary was a known quantity in my life. I knew of the danger of her becoming more and more hawkish as she tried to break the ultimate glass ceiling. I also knew that she could be forced to change course if public opinion was fiercely opposed to the war. And I knew she was familiar with radical social causes from her own life experience in the Sixties. So my progressive task seemed clear: help build an anti-war force powerful enough to make it politically necessary to end the war. Been there, done that. And in the process, finally put a woman in the White House. A soothing bonus. But as the Obama campaign gained momentum, Hillary began morphing into the persona that has my pacifist wife screaming at the television set.

Going negative doesn’t begin to describe what has happened. Hillary is going over the edge. Even worse are the flacks she sends before the cameras on her behalf, like that Kiki person who smirks and shakes her head at the camera every time she fields a question. Or the real carnivores, like Howard Wolfson, Lanny Davis and James Carville whose sneering smugness prevents countless women like my wife from considering Hillary at all.

To use the current terminology, Hillary people are bitter people, even more bitter than the white working class voters Barack has talked about. Because they circle the wagons so tightly, they don’t recognize how identical, self-reinforcing and out-of-touch they are.

To take just one example, the imagined association between Barack Obama and Bill Ayers will suffice. Hillary is blind to her own roots in the Sixties. In one college speech she spoke of ecstatic transcendence; in another, she said, "our social indictment has broadened. Where once we exposed the quality of life in the world of the South and the ghettos, now we condemn the quality of work in factories and corporations. Where once we assaulted the exploitation of man, now we decry the destruction of nature as well. How much long can we let corporations run us?" She was in Chicago for three nights during the 1968 street confrontations. She chaired the 1970 Yale law school meeting where students voted to join a national student strike again an "unconscionable expansion of a war that should never have been waged." She was involved in the New Haven defense of Bobby Seale during his murder trial in 1970, as the lead scheduler of student monitors. She surely agreed with Yale president Kingman Brewster that a black revolutionary couldn’t get a fair trial in America. She wrote that abused children were citizens with the same rights as their parents. [75] Most significantly in terms of her recent attacks on Barack, after Yale law school, Hillary went to work for the left-wing Bay Area law firm of Truehaft, Walker and Burnstein, which specialized in Black Panthers and West Coast labor leaders prosecuted for being communists. Two of the firm’s partners, according to Treuhaft, were communists and the two others "tolerated communists". Then she went on to Washington to help impeach Richard Nixon, whose career was built on smearing and destroying the careers of people through vague insinuations about their backgrounds and associates. [all citations from Carl Bernstein’s sympathetic biography, A Woman in Charge, 2007, pp. 67,69,70,75, 83]

All these were honorable words and associations in my mind, but doesn’t she see how the Hillary of today would accuse the Hillary of the Sixties of associating with black revolutionaries who fought gun battles with police officers, and defending pro-communist lawyers who backed communists? Doesn’t the Rev. Jeremiah Wright whom Hillary attacks today represent the very essence of the black radicals Hillary was associating with in those days? And isn’t the Hillary of today becoming the same kind of guilt-by-association insinuator as the Richard Nixon she worked to impeach?

It is as if Hillary Clinton is engaged in a toxic transmission onto Barack Obama of every outrageous insult and accusation ever inflicted on her by the American Right over the decades. She is running against what she might have become. Too much politics dries the soul of the idealist.

It is abundantly clear that the Clintons, working with FOX News and manipulating old Clinton staffers like George Stephanopoulos, are trying, at least unconsciously, to so damage Barack Obama that he will be perceived as "unelectable" to Democratic super-delegates. It is also clear that the campaign of defamation against Obama has resulted in higher negative ratings for Hillary Clinton. She therefore is threatening the Democratic Party’s chances for the White House whether or not she is the nominee.

Since no one in the party leadership seems able or willing to intervene against this self-destructive downward spiral, perhaps progressives need to consider responding in the only way politicians sometimes understand. If they can’t hear us screaming at the television sets, we can send a message that the Clintons are acting as if they prefer John McCain to Barack Obama. And follow it up with another message: if Clinton doesn’t immediately cease her path of destruction, millions of young voters and black voters may not send checks, may not knock on doors, and may not even vote for her if she becomes the nominee. That’s not a threat, that’s the reality she is creating.

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