But the great problem for Obama is that today's black identity is grounded in challenging. This is the circumstance that makes him a bound man. If he tries to win the black vote by taking on a posture of challenging, he risks losing the vote of whites who like him precisely because he does not challenge. And if his natural bargaining wins white votes, he risks losing black votes to Hillary Clinton. Why? Because Hillary Clinton always identifies with black challengers like Al Sharpton. This makes her "blacker" than Barack Obama....and Barack the first feminist president:
In the intensifying battle for the votes of Democratic women, Senator Barack Obama’s campaign is trying to turn years of feminist thinking on its head and argue that the best candidate for women may, in fact, be a man. The pitch for Mr. Obama, in a new video, speeches and talking points aimed at women, presents him as deeply sensitized to the needs and aspirations of women, raised by a single mother, “a man comfortable with strong women in his life,” as his wife, Michelle Obama, puts it, and a man committed to the issues they care about.Identity politics is so tiresome.
Oh, and the NY Times' Frank Rich, while supposedly positing the new conventional wisdom, in "Whose Afraid of Barack Obama?" suggests there are no racists in the Democrat party.
Most Americans aren’t racist, most Republicans included. (Those who are won’t vote for the Democratic presidential candidate even if it’s not Mr. Obama.)Oh fine, most Americans, and by the way, most Republicans aren't racists, but what a slur. And what about those in the Democrat party who play the race card all the time, who judge everyone by their race, view everything through the prism of race (seems racist to me, what about judging people by the content of their character, hmm?) and are anti-Semites to boot? Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson, Louis Farrakhan. The press has some responsibility for this state of affairs--if they had devoted one tenth of the ink to Michael Steele or Ken Blackwell that they have to Barack Obama, maybe we'd have more black Republicans in higher office. And what about Bill Cosby's comments? How much coverage did they get?
As Shelby Steele suggests, Obama needs to be himself to win. I don't think he knows who he is, other than seeing himself as a symbol of unity in diversity, or something. (Maureen Dowd calls him the child prodigy.) I call him the big zerO over the rainbow. Is that enough to win? Could be for Democrats, given the alternative of the Duplicitous Duo for the Price of One. We'll see how the country views someone with so little adult gravitas peddling the same old failed liberalism, but with a fresh, phony "centrist" face. During his time in the Illinois state Senate, Barack Obama was the most liberal voting member. Full record here.
It's the Democrats who are stuck in the past, blind to the civil rights issue of the day. They stand in the schoolhouse door, making a prison of what should be a citadel of opportunity, locked into the teachers' union position against school choice.
If Barack Obama came out for school choice, I'd even vote for him on that issue alone. Those teachers' union heads are the evil dictators I'd like to see him meet with face to face.
But when Barack Obama had the chance to knock the Chicago Dem machine upside the head, where was the new kind of politics, where was the purposeful hope in action?
He plotted to knock rivals off the ballot in the hardball Chicago tradition, he scratched the backs of those who scratched his in his quest for campaign cash, he sided with the corrupt party hacks against reformers of his own party when he could have made a real difference, he cashed in on his Senate celebrity with a sweet little book deal a la Hillary that also raised eyebrows about how he invested the proceeds, he got a mansion at essentially half-price, the side yard conveniently bought by a man who's now under indictment and goes to trial right after Tsunami Tuesday.
And as far as being racist, which Rich brings up, I'd like to see Barack explain again why his choice of church is headed by a black separatist pastor who, in the company of Louis Farrakhan, made a pilgrimage in 1984 to visit Libya's notoriously anti-Semitic dictator Muammar Gaddafi. Oh, well, who knew he would engage in the Lockerbie bombing 4 years later? But he had bombed US servicemen in Berlin and was known to harbor terrorists in 1986. Let's see what was going on with Libya in 1984...Libya shoots British policewoman protecting their "people's bureau" in London. We had an embargo on Libya then for some reason.
So who is Barack Obama?
Judge for yourself.
UPDATE: Tribune's Frank James, The Swamp defends Obama on his ambitions for President, taking a poke at Hillary for attacking Obama on both a kindergarten and a 3rd grade essay, "Why I Want to be President". Of course an essay like this is not remarkable at an early age, when children's aspirations are untethered to reality. But Obama did fudge about his longstanding ambitions in his recent remarks, as quoted by the Clinton campaign:
Today in Iowa, Senator Barack Obama said: "I have not been planning to run for President for however number of years some of the other candidates have been planning for."James doesn't mention Obama's remarks to his brother-in-law, when he first met him as I recall, a bizarre exchange also cited by Hillary's campaign).
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