Another great depression. An unpopular war and the lamest-of-ducks incumbent. A tone-deaf opponent and his cartoonish running mate. These are the factors that have conspired to bring America to consider electing, as President, a black man with two Ivy League degrees, white grandparents, and nary a trace of the slaver’s whip on his eloquent psyche.
It is a scary time. A giddy time. And still…
Barack Obama never mentions poor people.
He rarely shows any colored people in his many, many, many television campaign ads.
He may have inspired the most broadly-based campaign participation in U.S. history. But in the process, he has also probably destroyed the hope for meaningful campaign finance reform for at least a generation.
He denounced the invasion of Iraq early as unwise, but he has never conceded that it was illegal and immoral, and he continues to bare his fangs at Afghanistan and Iran.
He quickly abandoned his long-held resistance to domestic oil drilling in his haste to create a popular, all-encompassing energy policy. He offers a “universal” health-care plan (“national” would sound too much like socialism) that, like Hillary Clinton’s from the early ‘90s, aims to appease big insurance companies.
There is so much he has not promised. There is so much he has promised that, in black and white, looks like standard Democrat stuff, somewhere between Ted Kennedy and (Either) Clinton.
So where’s the big change?
It’s in his kiss, as an old record once claimed. It’s in the razor-sharp cut of his shoulders and the lanky, I-got-this stride. It’s in the calm thoughtfulness of his answers and the thrill of his soaring yes-we-can.
Most white people, I imagine, have never seen anything like this before, the closest being Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner? (at the White House?). Obama looks and sounds like a different kind of cat, and that—more than any specific policy position—is what imbues him with the aura of change. Only a black public figure, like Martin Luther King, or Obama) can speak persuasively of unity in this country, because only then can such a promise approach inclusiveness and at the same time carry the promise of forgiveness.
Electing Barack Obaama will not end racism, and it will not activate a progressive political agenda. Yet if that is what it takes to overthrow the reign of the radical right and restore the country to a baseline of sanity, it is the only choice.
Delphine Davis
Sunday, November 2, 2008
Tuesday, June 3, 2008
This Moment
Hush. Be still. Taste the moment.
On television the white men keep talking. Pay them no mind. How could they know?
Smile at your children. Thank your parents. Praise the Lord.
And get ready.
Delphine Davis
On television the white men keep talking. Pay them no mind. How could they know?
Smile at your children. Thank your parents. Praise the Lord.
And get ready.
Delphine Davis
Sunday, May 25, 2008
Oh, No, She Didn't
Okay, she probably didn’t mean it that way—at least not consciously—but it doesn’t matter. Hillary Clinton raised the specter of Bobby Kennedy’s assassination while answering a question about why she’s still in the race for the Democratic presidential nomination. That’s a live wire you can’t touch and expect to survive. Especially when the man you are running against is challenging the unspoken fears of many of his supporters that the audacity of seeking to be the first African-American president could get him killed.
And it was a dumb argument in the first place. She was saying that people should not be in such a hurry to see her shut down her campaign when historically several campaigns have run into June including in 1968, when Kennedy was shot the night he won the California primary. Kennedy, however, did not even declare himself to be a candidate that year until mid-February. Traditionally California, the state with the most votes, has held its primary last, in June, and it was winner-take-all, unlike this year’s proportional allocation of delegates. So it made sense that in a close race the winner would not be decided until the cusp of summer.
In those same old days (before this election) the New York primary was in April; “Super Tuesday,” an ‘80s invention, was in March; New Hampshire was in February. This year everything on the calendar got pushed up. There were more primaries than ever and they were earlier than ever, starting in January, which is why this campaign has lasted longer than usual. It was a change clearly designed to benefit the candidate who arrived at the starting line with the greatest name recognition, the most money raised, the most experienced campaign organization. In December 2007 that person was Hillary Clinton, who said then that she fully expected the primary campaign to be over in February. Oops. In other words, her wait-a-minute plea isn’t so much to let the process play out (how much attention would she have paid then to her precious friends in West Virginia?) as it is to let her get back in front where she believes she belongs. Whatever it takes.
Many of her critics, while chastising her for her insensitive comments, are giving her the benefit of the doubt. She hasn’t earned it. Barack Obama was exceedingly gracious in his we-all-make-mistakes public response. Yet where was her compassion when he spoke “inartfully” about small-town folks “clinging to their guns and religion” in times of political stress? He was actually trying to cut them a break. Asked why certain groups weren’t supporting him, he wrapped prejudice in a soft blanket and described bitterness as a natural response to a loss of faith in the government. Clinton knew that. But instead of giving him the kind of pass he just gave her, she jumped all over the remark, branded Obama an “elitist” and went on to create a whole new campaign persona as a gun-totin’ fighter for the little feller.
That hasn’t worked out so well. So now she is forced to say out loud words that suggest she is hanging around in case one of her “hard-working white American” supporters decides to shoot the other guy. Hey, you never know.
This is beyond desperate. It is frightening and insulting and appalling. It shows that she has neither the common sense, the integrity nor the simple human decency to occupy the office she seeks. And it wasn’t even 3 a.m.
Delphine Davis
And it was a dumb argument in the first place. She was saying that people should not be in such a hurry to see her shut down her campaign when historically several campaigns have run into June including in 1968, when Kennedy was shot the night he won the California primary. Kennedy, however, did not even declare himself to be a candidate that year until mid-February. Traditionally California, the state with the most votes, has held its primary last, in June, and it was winner-take-all, unlike this year’s proportional allocation of delegates. So it made sense that in a close race the winner would not be decided until the cusp of summer.
In those same old days (before this election) the New York primary was in April; “Super Tuesday,” an ‘80s invention, was in March; New Hampshire was in February. This year everything on the calendar got pushed up. There were more primaries than ever and they were earlier than ever, starting in January, which is why this campaign has lasted longer than usual. It was a change clearly designed to benefit the candidate who arrived at the starting line with the greatest name recognition, the most money raised, the most experienced campaign organization. In December 2007 that person was Hillary Clinton, who said then that she fully expected the primary campaign to be over in February. Oops. In other words, her wait-a-minute plea isn’t so much to let the process play out (how much attention would she have paid then to her precious friends in West Virginia?) as it is to let her get back in front where she believes she belongs. Whatever it takes.
Many of her critics, while chastising her for her insensitive comments, are giving her the benefit of the doubt. She hasn’t earned it. Barack Obama was exceedingly gracious in his we-all-make-mistakes public response. Yet where was her compassion when he spoke “inartfully” about small-town folks “clinging to their guns and religion” in times of political stress? He was actually trying to cut them a break. Asked why certain groups weren’t supporting him, he wrapped prejudice in a soft blanket and described bitterness as a natural response to a loss of faith in the government. Clinton knew that. But instead of giving him the kind of pass he just gave her, she jumped all over the remark, branded Obama an “elitist” and went on to create a whole new campaign persona as a gun-totin’ fighter for the little feller.
That hasn’t worked out so well. So now she is forced to say out loud words that suggest she is hanging around in case one of her “hard-working white American” supporters decides to shoot the other guy. Hey, you never know.
This is beyond desperate. It is frightening and insulting and appalling. It shows that she has neither the common sense, the integrity nor the simple human decency to occupy the office she seeks. And it wasn’t even 3 a.m.
Delphine Davis
Monday, May 19, 2008
Yes, Okay, It's Over--For Now
Well, that wasn’t so hard, was it?
Way back in February, the math was clear: Hillary Clinton would have to win every remaining primary by at least 10 percentage points in order to catch Barack Obama in pledged delegates for the Democratic nomination. But then it was decided that she would have to win both Ohio and Texas to stay in the race. She won both but ended up splitting the delegates almost evenly in Texas, where there was also a caucus. That could have done it right there.
But then with six weeks of nothing else to talk about, it was decided that if Clinton could win Pennsylvania by 10 points, this thing might be considered almost a toss-up. She won by not-quite-ten-points, and the crowd went wild. She’s closing fast! He can’t put her away! He (Harvard Law) is an out-of-touch elitist, while she (Yale Law) is a regular ol’ gal—who can afford to loan her own campaign a few million bucks. (Apparently all her working-class fans weren’t carrying their weight.)
Oh, and he still had a lead of close to 150 pledged delegates, with more superdelegates sliding his way every day. But by cracky, what a barn-burner!
North Carolina and Indiana: Can he possibly stay afloat? Will Jeremiah Wright remind everybody that Obama is still black and therefore not supposed to be winning? Maybe, but he wins North Carolina anyway by a margin of about 15 per cent that is hailed as a “trouncing” of Clinton. (In fact it is close to his average margin of victory; he has won neighboring Virginia by 29 percentage points.) And Clinton almost loses Indiana in the middle of the night.
And just like that, she’s pronounced toast. Yet all that has happened is that each candidate has won the expected states, and the one in second place has never seriously cut into the front-runner’s delegate margin.
For a while commentators asked each other whether the superdelegates would overrule primary voters and pick Clinton because they bought her argument that she would be the better candidate. Just as quickly, those same commentators would answer “probably not.” Even more seriously, they asked whether Obama could win the general election without the “hard-working white Americans” clinging to Clinton. They did not ask, at least not as seriously, wheteher she could win without the everybody-else who seemed to keep voting for Obama.
As if on cue, all that has pretty much stopped. Maybe the Big Media thought it unseemly to call the fight too soon. Maybe they just got tired of concocting dramatic narratives to string it along. Maybe they feared that if the horse race were declared over they would have to talk about substantive policy. God forbid anyone look too closely at what “working class” voters really want besides a grinning, beer-swigging, pantsuited champion.
The “conversation” changes so quickly and easily—like so many plot twists in a Law & Order” marathon—that you wouldn’t think anything of significance is at stake. And that is the truly scary part. As this race winds down and the contestants begin to line up for the next heat, it is not preposterous to stop and ask ourselves: Are we making a decision that in the end will make any difference?
Delphine Davis
Way back in February, the math was clear: Hillary Clinton would have to win every remaining primary by at least 10 percentage points in order to catch Barack Obama in pledged delegates for the Democratic nomination. But then it was decided that she would have to win both Ohio and Texas to stay in the race. She won both but ended up splitting the delegates almost evenly in Texas, where there was also a caucus. That could have done it right there.
But then with six weeks of nothing else to talk about, it was decided that if Clinton could win Pennsylvania by 10 points, this thing might be considered almost a toss-up. She won by not-quite-ten-points, and the crowd went wild. She’s closing fast! He can’t put her away! He (Harvard Law) is an out-of-touch elitist, while she (Yale Law) is a regular ol’ gal—who can afford to loan her own campaign a few million bucks. (Apparently all her working-class fans weren’t carrying their weight.)
Oh, and he still had a lead of close to 150 pledged delegates, with more superdelegates sliding his way every day. But by cracky, what a barn-burner!
North Carolina and Indiana: Can he possibly stay afloat? Will Jeremiah Wright remind everybody that Obama is still black and therefore not supposed to be winning? Maybe, but he wins North Carolina anyway by a margin of about 15 per cent that is hailed as a “trouncing” of Clinton. (In fact it is close to his average margin of victory; he has won neighboring Virginia by 29 percentage points.) And Clinton almost loses Indiana in the middle of the night.
And just like that, she’s pronounced toast. Yet all that has happened is that each candidate has won the expected states, and the one in second place has never seriously cut into the front-runner’s delegate margin.
For a while commentators asked each other whether the superdelegates would overrule primary voters and pick Clinton because they bought her argument that she would be the better candidate. Just as quickly, those same commentators would answer “probably not.” Even more seriously, they asked whether Obama could win the general election without the “hard-working white Americans” clinging to Clinton. They did not ask, at least not as seriously, wheteher she could win without the everybody-else who seemed to keep voting for Obama.
As if on cue, all that has pretty much stopped. Maybe the Big Media thought it unseemly to call the fight too soon. Maybe they just got tired of concocting dramatic narratives to string it along. Maybe they feared that if the horse race were declared over they would have to talk about substantive policy. God forbid anyone look too closely at what “working class” voters really want besides a grinning, beer-swigging, pantsuited champion.
The “conversation” changes so quickly and easily—like so many plot twists in a Law & Order” marathon—that you wouldn’t think anything of significance is at stake. And that is the truly scary part. As this race winds down and the contestants begin to line up for the next heat, it is not preposterous to stop and ask ourselves: Are we making a decision that in the end will make any difference?
Delphine Davis
Monday, April 21, 2008
Primary Follies: A No-Win Game
You just knew it was going to happen this way.
The front-loaded primary season created so much excitement so early that there was no way it could last. For nearly two months there was a contest almost every week, generating actual news, if only of the horse-race variety. But once we hit this dry stretch leading up to tomorrow's Pennsylvania primary, we were in for an extended "silly season," the same kind of nonsense that normally plagues the general election from Labor Day to Election Day.
The candidates' positions are a;ready laid out. And unless there is an incumbent in the mix, nobody has the ability to do anything of consequence, so the only potential "news" of any kind is what the candidates say and polls based on nothing but distant discussions (like this) about the last poll and what somebody said.
And so, in the last six weeks, we have been entertained by the spectacles of Geraldine Ferraro and Jeremiah Wright; small-town bitterness and Bosnia; bowling and Crown Royal shots; endorsements, retractions, finger-pointing, whining about whining, and white folks wondering what's up with that shoulder-dusting thing.
It would be amazing if any of this actually changed anyone's mind when they vote in the primary.
What it has done is sold newspapers and exposed more viewers to erectile-dysfunction commercials and given big-time supporters more opportunities to put candidates in their debt. In other words, it was fun for a while, but this extended theater of the absurd has done little to enlighten or engage the citizenry in our campaign to select our leader. More likely, it has done the opposite.
There is something to be said for an electoral process that allows the voters in all states to have a say. Ironically, this year's primary season was designed for a quick coronation, with the favorite candidate planning to have things wrapped up by a Super Tuesday that came a month earlier than in the past. Instead, it has shown that an orderly procession of primaries and caucuses, aided by advanced communications technology, can allow for comprehensive voting within a much shorter time frame.
Extended periods of time for whistle-stopping and baby-kissing are nice but not necessary for an informed electorate. The added time needed to cultivate financial supporters can be eliminated with fully publicly funded campaigns. So much of that money goes anyway into television advertising, which besides being deceitful and manipulative by nature is clearly obsolete. Few if any campaign commercials were aired in Pennsylvania until several weeks ago, but voters in that state were hardly kept in the dark about candidates' positions and voting records. In fact, the most famous commercial of the campaign, the 3 a.m. While House phone call, was seen by millions more people on news broadcasts, on the Internet, and in comedy parodies than ever saw it aired as an actual commercial.
The truth is that we can make good choices without wasting all this time on campaign filler, the oopses and gotchas that having nothing to do, really, with running a country. The way it works now, the campaign itself becomes one more thing that works to disenfranchise us.
It could almost make you a little angry, a little frustrated--maybe even a little bitter.
The front-loaded primary season created so much excitement so early that there was no way it could last. For nearly two months there was a contest almost every week, generating actual news, if only of the horse-race variety. But once we hit this dry stretch leading up to tomorrow's Pennsylvania primary, we were in for an extended "silly season," the same kind of nonsense that normally plagues the general election from Labor Day to Election Day.
The candidates' positions are a;ready laid out. And unless there is an incumbent in the mix, nobody has the ability to do anything of consequence, so the only potential "news" of any kind is what the candidates say and polls based on nothing but distant discussions (like this) about the last poll and what somebody said.
And so, in the last six weeks, we have been entertained by the spectacles of Geraldine Ferraro and Jeremiah Wright; small-town bitterness and Bosnia; bowling and Crown Royal shots; endorsements, retractions, finger-pointing, whining about whining, and white folks wondering what's up with that shoulder-dusting thing.
It would be amazing if any of this actually changed anyone's mind when they vote in the primary.
What it has done is sold newspapers and exposed more viewers to erectile-dysfunction commercials and given big-time supporters more opportunities to put candidates in their debt. In other words, it was fun for a while, but this extended theater of the absurd has done little to enlighten or engage the citizenry in our campaign to select our leader. More likely, it has done the opposite.
There is something to be said for an electoral process that allows the voters in all states to have a say. Ironically, this year's primary season was designed for a quick coronation, with the favorite candidate planning to have things wrapped up by a Super Tuesday that came a month earlier than in the past. Instead, it has shown that an orderly procession of primaries and caucuses, aided by advanced communications technology, can allow for comprehensive voting within a much shorter time frame.
Extended periods of time for whistle-stopping and baby-kissing are nice but not necessary for an informed electorate. The added time needed to cultivate financial supporters can be eliminated with fully publicly funded campaigns. So much of that money goes anyway into television advertising, which besides being deceitful and manipulative by nature is clearly obsolete. Few if any campaign commercials were aired in Pennsylvania until several weeks ago, but voters in that state were hardly kept in the dark about candidates' positions and voting records. In fact, the most famous commercial of the campaign, the 3 a.m. While House phone call, was seen by millions more people on news broadcasts, on the Internet, and in comedy parodies than ever saw it aired as an actual commercial.
The truth is that we can make good choices without wasting all this time on campaign filler, the oopses and gotchas that having nothing to do, really, with running a country. The way it works now, the campaign itself becomes one more thing that works to disenfranchise us.
It could almost make you a little angry, a little frustrated--maybe even a little bitter.
Saturday, March 22, 2008
Obama and the Wright Stuff
What took them so long? Guilt-by-association is one of the oldest plays in the book, so maybe it was a combination of shame and desperation that made Barack Obama’s opponents finally go there. It’s not even news: word of Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his righteous blackness had been around the web months ago. Probably, it was just tit-for-tat. Somebody figured that since Geraldine Ferraro cost Hillary Clinton a few days’ discomfort, why not try the Rev one more time?
The only surprise is that it worked as well as it has. Which says far more about the ignorance of white folks than it does about Obama or even about his erstwhile pastor. Do9n’t they know even at this late date that every clean-shaven black colleague working his ‘berry beside them in the conference room; every easy-going middle-aged brother shooting pick-up hoops at the health club; every i-got-it sister offering to crunch the numbers on that group project—they all have their inner Wrighteousness. They have all “damned” America and have certainly not been proud of it. Do white folks really think Malcolm was just a movie and that King sounds the same to us as he does to them? Do they think that just because some of us went to Harvard and Wall Street and the U.S. Senate that we forgot? Some of these same people would be shocked if they ever had a few quiet drinks with Clarence Thomas.
But even so, Sen. Obama, in his refreshingly reasonable style, did the best possible job of sharing this truth in his extraordinary speech last week. His ability to do so—without even getting mad—was the best evidence yet of his eloquence and of his unique status in American politics. Never mind that only a handful of public officials are “articulate” enough o pull that off. He is also the first member of the U.S. Senate who is historically capable of giving that speech.
Of course all the MSM talking-heads could sputter about was whether Obama changed the minds of enough white men in Pennsylvania to keep Clinton from gaining on him in the delegate race and prove something to somebody for the general election. That, I suppose, is the way this goes for those who still believe the whole process matters. Someday, though, people will look back at this past week not or how it affected the latest polls, but as the moment when a major U/S. politician finally spoke to us all about race as if we were all rational human beings.
The only surprise is that it worked as well as it has. Which says far more about the ignorance of white folks than it does about Obama or even about his erstwhile pastor. Do9n’t they know even at this late date that every clean-shaven black colleague working his ‘berry beside them in the conference room; every easy-going middle-aged brother shooting pick-up hoops at the health club; every i-got-it sister offering to crunch the numbers on that group project—they all have their inner Wrighteousness. They have all “damned” America and have certainly not been proud of it. Do white folks really think Malcolm was just a movie and that King sounds the same to us as he does to them? Do they think that just because some of us went to Harvard and Wall Street and the U.S. Senate that we forgot? Some of these same people would be shocked if they ever had a few quiet drinks with Clarence Thomas.
But even so, Sen. Obama, in his refreshingly reasonable style, did the best possible job of sharing this truth in his extraordinary speech last week. His ability to do so—without even getting mad—was the best evidence yet of his eloquence and of his unique status in American politics. Never mind that only a handful of public officials are “articulate” enough o pull that off. He is also the first member of the U.S. Senate who is historically capable of giving that speech.
Of course all the MSM talking-heads could sputter about was whether Obama changed the minds of enough white men in Pennsylvania to keep Clinton from gaining on him in the delegate race and prove something to somebody for the general election. That, I suppose, is the way this goes for those who still believe the whole process matters. Someday, though, people will look back at this past week not or how it affected the latest polls, but as the moment when a major U/S. politician finally spoke to us all about race as if we were all rational human beings.
Delphine Davis
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)