April 02, 2008
Deeply disappointing Donna
Posted by: Chris
The deposition given last month by Democratic Party chair Howard Dean shed some ugly light on longtime operative Donna Brazile, who headed up Al Gore's 2000 election and is a regular political analyst on CNN.
Dean admitted it was Brazile who objected most strenuously to a proposal put forward by gay Democrats to add GLBT delegates to affirmative action guidelines states follow when selecting those who attend the party's national convention:
Dean said some “influential individuals” within the DNC Black Caucus, such as Donna Brazile, opposed the plan because it was seen as “an affront to the civil rights movement.”
Brazile, who chairs the DNC’s Voting Rights Institute, declined to comment for this article.
Dean said the dispute grew to the point where “we had two very important groups of people in the DNC disagreeing with each other” and several DNC and caucus officials were asked to broker a deal that would make peace on the issue.
“I wanted equal representation for gay and lesbian Americans,” he said, “and I wanted to achieve it in a way that wasn’t offensive to the history of the civil rights movement.”
On the one hand, the DNC's infatuation with quotas -- even the committee itself adheres to rigid gender parity -- hardly needs encouraging with the addition of another category, whether or not GLBT folks are deserving. On the other hand, the dismissive slap-down from Brazile reeks of competing to see who's been more seriously oppressed, a pointless contest that only serves to divide groups that ought to be combining their efforts.
We've seen this before, of course. One particularly galling example was when the National Association of Black Journalists vetoed the inclusion of the National Lesbian & Gay Journalists Association in an umbrella group of minority journalists called -- ironically enough -- UNITY. Groups representing Hispanic, Native American and Asian American journalists OK'd NLGJA's participation but NABJ balked, and even pressed UNITY to change its name to UNITY: Journalists of Color.
It's bad enough that Brazile would stoop to something similarly petty, especially claiming "offense" to the idea of greater gay inclusion. But perhaps it's more understandable when we remember that Brazile herself is a closet case.* That's right.
After she was named Gore's campaign manager in October 1999, I assigned a reporter at Southern Voice to look into why the press releases omitted all mention of her role on the steering committee of the Millennium March on Washington, the massive GLBT rights event that listed "coming out" as the No. 1 item on its agenda.
When Brazile and the campaign ignored repeated inquiries, our intrepid reporter showed up at an Atlanta fund-raiser, where she was again rebuffed. Undaunted, she walked up to the microphone and asked Brazile why she had so studiously avoided acknowledging her own sexual orientation when the MMOW platform celebrated the importance of being open about such things. Brazile said she was, you got it, "offended" by the question.
A week or so later, when the Washington Post asked her the same question, Brazile was ready with a much better quip in response: "If I had a personal life, I'd have time for a sexual orientation." Clever, but still closeted.
It's not much of a stretch to see why a closet case like Brazile would find little sympathy in the importance of sending as many openly gay delegates as possible to the Democratic National Convention. But shame on Howard Dean (again!) for allowing her messed up personal situation to create a black-gay wedge within the party.
* = In anticipation of the inevitably comments I'll get, calling Brazile a "closet case" doesn't mean she's a lesbian, anymore than calling Ken Mehlman the same thing is saying he's gay. A closet case is someone who is hiding their true sexual orientation, whether or not they put on a public front of being straight or gay. So a closet case could be a gay person pretending to be straight, or a person of unknown sexual orientation who refuses to answer the question. Brazile and Melhman are the latter.
March 24, 2008
The intro to 'The Speech'
Posted by: Chris
With all the well-deserved attention paid to "The Speech" by Barack Obama on race and politics last week in Philadelphia, most of us missed the introduction he received from Harris Wofford, the former U.S. senator from Pennsylvania. I am very proud to call Harris a friend, even though he turned 80 exactly one year and one day after I turned 40.
I can only marvel at the amazing life he has led, from advising Martin Luther King, Jr., John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy on civil rights issues, to helping launch the Peace Corps. It is to Pennsylvania's credit that Harris was re-elected to the Senate in 1991 over Dick Thornburgh, the heavily favored former governor and U.S. attorney general. It's to the state's eternal shame that Wofford subsequently lost his seat in a razor-thin election to Rick Santorum, the arch-conservative, anti-gay Republican.
Harris' lifelong commitment to bridging the gap between the races made him the ideal choice to introduce Senator Obama in Philadelphia last week. His high praise reinforces the notion many have that this presidential campaign has truly unique potential:
Originals of this kind don’t come along often – maybe once every few generations. They come when they are most needed. When I heard Barack Obama speak at the Democratic Convention in 2004, I saw him as such an original. Since then I’ve read his two books and listened to his words that are reaching the soul of America. And in this campaign we’ve seen him putting those words into action.
We’ve waited a long time to meet a leader whom the country needs as badly as we needed John Kennedy in 1960 and Robert Kennedy in 1968. And today, I’m more convinced than ever that Barack Obama is that leader.
He closed his introduction with a story about King and Kennedy that merits retelling:
I’ll never forget one moment in the early weeks of President Kennedy’s thousand days. The President had to tell Dr. King that he was committed to the full civil rights agenda, but that he would have to delay proposing the far-reaching legislation that had been pledged in the 1960 Democratic Platform. He had decided that to go forward with legislation at that time would have been self-defeating -- triggering a Southern filibuster, exposing the weakness of the Democratic Party, and revealing the inability of the new President, with a razor thin majority, to control the Congress.
It was a difficult discussion. But it was Kennedy and King at their best; both calm and determined to reason together to find their way forward. Martin was disappointed. But he accepted the decision, and said he wasn’t going to attack the President for it.
On his way out of the White House, Martin turned to me and said, “I had hoped when I came here today that this would at last be a President who had the intelligence to understand this problem, the political skill to solve it, and the moral passion to see it through. I’m convinced now that he’s got the intelligence and the skill. We’ll have to see if he has the passion.”
Kennedy eventually proved that he had the passion, as did Robert Kennedy in his turn. Now, as we aim to complete the work that we began all those years ago, I’m convinced that if Martin Luther King were alive today, he’d say Barack has all three.
The introduction in its entirety is available in the jump to this post.
March 20, 2008
Wright defies convention on gays
Posted by: Chris
Barack Obama and many other parishioners of the Trinity UCC in Chicago have said that Rev. Jeremiah Wright has been unfairly caricatured by the brief excerpts of sermons playing in endless loop on cable TV and YouTube.
It does seem that whatever ugly intolerance and divisiveness he spews on those videos, Wright has been more accepting of gay parishioners than many in the black church, especially those who preach "black liberation theology":
As a leader, Wright defied convention at every turn. In an interview with the Chicago Tribune last year, he recalled a time during the 1970s when the UCC decided to ordain gay and lesbian clergy. At its annual meeting, sensitive to the historic discomfort some blacks have with homosexuality, gay leaders reached out to black pastors.
At that session, Wright heard the testimony of a gay Christian and, he said, he had a conversion experience on gay rights. He started one of the first AIDS ministries on the South Side and a singles group for Trinity gays and lesbians—a subject that still rankles some of the more conservative Trinity members, says Dwight Hopkins, a theology professor at the University of Chicago and a church member.
None of that excuses Wright's hateful rhetoric in the pulpit, but it gives a fuller version of the man than we've been getting.
March 18, 2008
Obama's Wright Stuff (III)
Posted by: Chris
Barack Obama's speech today in Philadelphia on the race-related controversy raised his pastor's remarks was, in the grand scheme of things, both brilliant and uplifting. He spoke about the racial anxieties of not just black Americans but whites and Latinos as well, and he recognized in a very rare way in politics that real grievances run in all directions.
Here's a video of the speech, in case you missed it:
In some ways the furor over the incendiary sermons by Rev. Jeremiah Wright played right to Obama's strengths -- a controversy he could address with a powerful speech, expertly delivered. Certainly anyone with an open mind who heard Obama speak so forcefully about his love for country and faith will accept that no part of Obama agrees with his pastor's outrageous statements.
For the immediate future, however, Obama did not do all that he could have to relieve legitimate doubts raised by the controversy. He has certainly used all the right words to condemn Reverend Wright's race-baiting and anti-Americanism in a way that will satisfy almost everyone. This primary season is already too consumed with Hillary's game of rejecting vs denouncing, etc., and it's downright ridiculous to see conservative pundits joining in now, since they generally abhor such silly semantics when practiced by the P.C. left.
Still, Obama would have dealt with his political problems more effectively if he responded to the utterances with specificity. He mentioned several in passing, including Wright's attempt to cast Israel as solely responsible for Middle East violence. But it would be reassuring, for example, to hear Obama directly refute Wright's exploitation of the urban myth that the U.S. government somehow infected African Americans with AIDS. That sort of ludicrous paranoia doesn't just sow distrust toward the government and white people, but is at a more fundamental level an attempt to deny the very existence of black gay and bisexual men. (President Ahmadinejad, anyone?)
But as a journalist I know that the key to settling a controversy is to give satisfactory answers to the lingering questions, the way Obama tried to with his three hours of meeting with Chicago journalists over the Mike Rezco matter. Yet on Wright, at least today, Obama may have succeeded in raising as many "nagging questions," as he called them, as he did settling others.
When it comes to specifics, Obama said:
Did I know [Reverend Wright] to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.
It was a mistake to be so stingy with details, when the media will not let up until he is more forthcoming. What type of controversial statements did Obama here? On what topics? How frequently? Did he hear about other controversial statements from other parishioners? On what topics? How frequently? Did he ever raise with Wright directly his objections to any of these remarks? Did he and Michelle Obama consider leaving the congregation? You get the idea.
At the same time I recognize the political reality that Obama needs to answer these additional questions, I would also like to channel Hillary Clinton just long enough to complain that this whole line of questioning is being unfairly applied in practice.
As I've noted before, there is a real double standard in how the story has been covered. The second place candidate in the just-concluded Republican primaries was not just candidate with a pastor but a pastor himself -- former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. And yet Huckabee has refused help to release tapes or written copies of his own sermons. And what about Mitt Romney, whose Mormon faith is so poorly understood -- were we entitled to hear tapes of all the sermons from his church?
The videotapes of Wright's sermons made this an irresistible controversy, but the media should at the very least ask conservatives using Wright to tar Obama whether the sermons by Huckabee and by Romney's pastor are similarly fair game.
March 17, 2008
Barack Obama's Wright stuff (II)
Posted by: Chris
There's been no shortage of opportunities to hear Barack Obama condemning the racially incendiary sermons of his pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and explaining their relationship. A quick list:
- Blog post by Obama on Huffington Post: Uses strong condemnatory language and clarifying that Obama wasn't in the pews when any of Wright's "greatest hits" were uttered.
- Interview with Anderson Cooper: By far the best interview in the bunch; Cooper presses Obama on whether he at least heard secondhand about Wright's post-9/11 sermon blaming the attacks on the U.S. and saying rather than "God Bless America," blacks should say "God Damn America." Obama makes the interesting point that Wright, like Geraldine Ferraro, is the product of a different time, and still harbors anger and frustration from that era. Obama sees himself part of a new generation that while benefiting from the efforts of Wright's, nonetheless moving beyond seeing the world through "a racial lens." Funny -- I can't imagine Hillary Clinton drawing the same kind of contrast with Ferraro, positioning her presidential candidacy as moving beyond gender victimization.
- Interview with Major Garrett on Fox News: The first third is a sophomoric set-up by Garrett that Obama handles well. Eventually Garrett moves on to the crux, whether Obama would have quit the church if he had been aware of the sermons.
- Interview with Keith Olbermann on MSNBC: I've linked to and commented on this one earlier.
- Obama's remarks yesterday in Plainfield, Ind.: Obama makes a powerful analogy to a speech by Robert F. Kennedy the night Martin Luther King, Jr., was assassinated, and the choice we have to allow hate to divide us even further or to tread a common path that embraces commonalities.
- Interview with the Chicago Tribune: Second half of the interview focuses on Wright.
- Obama campaign posts YouTube video on Wright:
Some will no doubt never be satisfied that Obama has sufficiently denounced Wright's rhetoric, but that part is settled for me. I also accept his unequivocal statement that he was not present when the sermons were given and had not heard about them secondhand.
If you have been a regular churchgoer or have spent time around regular churchgoers -- I have both -- then you know it's common to hear someone say, "I just love Rev. Smith. He's so kind and his sermons or so powerful -- except when he starts talking about [subject x] and then he just goes off the deep end."
The lingering trouble I have is based on how fundamentally Wright's rhetoric conflicts with the core message of Obama's campaign. Maybe words really don't matter, as Hillary keeps claiming, if Wright could simultaneously preach such hate while providing someone with Obama's beliefs a happy church home.
What's more, Obama's appeal for so may is based upon his ability to heal divisions and bring people together. But will Obama really be effective in reaching the rest when he couldn't even reach his own pastor and (from the video it appears) many members of his own church?
That said, there is a very real double standard in how the story has been covered. The second place candidate in the just-concluded Republican primaries was not just candidate with a pastor but a pastor himself -- former Arkansas Gov. Mike Huckabee. And yet Huckabee has refused help to release tapes or written copies of his own sermons.
And what about Mitt Romney, whose Mormon faith is so poorly understood -- are we entitled to hear tapes of all the sermons from his church?
This Wright story still has legs and deservedly so, but at this point I am cautiously optimistic that it will prove a "Sister Souljah moment" that establishes Obama's own principles in contrast to even some of his closest associates.
March 15, 2008
Barack Obama's Wright stuff
Posted by: Chris
Color me disappointed. The message of unity and "new politics" championed by Barack Obama is one that has resonated deeply for me, after years of watching in frustration while bitter partisanship and Rovian wedge politics undermined the common ground our system depends upon.
But it's hard to square Obama's message and rhetoric with the incredibly incendiary racism and anti-Americanism of Rev. Jeremiah Wright, his pastor of 20 years. You've no doubt seen the videos of Wright exhorting his congregation to replace "God Bless America" with "God Damn America"; or when he rails in support of Obama over Hillary Clinton because he knows black America is held down by "rich white people" and she's never been called the "N-word."
In one sense, Wright is only the latest in what appears an unending stream of supporters of each of the three remaining presidential candidates with outrageous views that must be denounced, rejected, repudiated, whatever. It's a game Obama tried to avoid last fall but now is fully a part of. But Wright's relationship to the candidate is of a different order than John McCain's John Hagee, Clinton's Geraldine Ferraro or Obama's Louis Farrakhan and Donnie McClurkin.
The Trinity UCC pastor has played a much more central and formative role in Obama's personal development, even providing the inspiration for the candidate's signature "audacity of hope." Only it's hate, not hope, that Wright is preaching in the videos making the rounds in the media, the internet and (of course) the right-wing talk shows.
I've waited to hear how Obama would respond to the specific sermons that have come to light, and late yesterday he took some important steps in a blog post on HuffPo and an interview with Keith Olbermann to put Wright's outrageousness in context.
First and foremost, Obama forcefully and unconditionally condemned Wright's rhetoric, which couldn't have been easy on a personal level:
I vehemently disagree and strongly condemn the statements that have been the subject of this controversy. I categorically denounce any statement that disparages our great country or serves to divide us from our allies. I also believe that words that degrade individuals have no place in our public dialogue, whether it's on the campaign stump or in the pulpit. In sum, I reject outright the statements by Rev. Wright that are at issue.
He also confirmed that he hadn't been at the church when those sermons were delivered and insisted they weren't characteristic of the pulpit message he absorbed for 20 years:
The sermons I heard him preach always related to our obligation to love God and one another, to work on behalf of the poor, and to seek justice at every turn. The statements that Rev. Wright made that are the cause of this controversy were not statements I personally heard him preach while I sat in the pews of Trinity or heard him utter in private conversation.
That's the crux of the matter for me. If in 30 years of preaching Rev. Wright got (very) carried away a few times that have been cherry-picked by the media or oppo research, that's one thing. But if Obama sat through versions of that hateful message on more than very rare occasions over two decades, then it risks undermining the credibility that lies at the heart of his unique appeal.
Late yesterday, Wright dropped off the Obama campaign's African American Religious Leadership Committe, certainly the right decision for all concerned. But it will take more reporting about their relationship and more openness from Obama to sort through the contours of this story. Whatever effect it might have on his candidacy, short or long term, this isn't a two-day story to be swept under the rug. And better to air it now than in October.
March 13, 2008
Geraldine Ferraro as David Duke?
Posted by: Chris
MSNBC's Keith Olbermann weighs in on the Geraldine Ferraro-flap, comparing the former V.P. nominee to Klansman turned Republican David Duke, among other things:
As with most Olbermann rants, there are some solid points buried amidst the overwrought prose, but can he spare us all the drama? Does he really take himself so seriously?
March 12, 2008
Obama on Ferraro and race
Posted by: Chris
Barack Obama's remarks today in response to Geraldine Ferraro "threaded a careful needle," as Ben Smith put it, and got it exactly right as far as I'm concerned.
First, he rejected in strong terms her claim that Obama is "lucky" that he's black because he wouldn't have been successful as a presidential candidate otherwise:
I don’t think that Geraldine Ferraro’s comments have any place in our politics or the Democratic Party. I think that anybody who understands the history of this country knows they are patently absurd. I would expect that the same way those comments don’t have a place in my campaign, they shouldn’t have a place in Sen. Clinton’s.
Ferraro's upside-down logic is as ridiculous as Gloria Steinem's similar delusion, when the feminist icon claimed Hillary Clinton's gender was a greater obstacle to her candidacy than Barack Obama's race was to his. Keep in mind that there've been only five black U.S. senators or governors since Reconstruction. By contrast, there have been 35 female U.S. senators and 29 female governors.
And even though Ferraro has complained repeatedly, including tonight on the "NBC Nightly News" that the Obama campaign has called her a racist, Obama expressly refused to go there at a press conference:
He said Ferraro's remarks had been "ridiculous" and "divisive," but he also described his own wariness about allegations. … "I don't like to throw out words like 'racist,'" Obama said. "I would defy anybody to look though the rhetoric for the last year-and-a-half or the last year and a couple months to find one instance in which I have said some criticism of me was racially based."
Of course Ferraro is not a racist, but she is playing that favorite game of identity politics -- my demographic burden is heavier than yours -- and her claim happens to be patently ridiculous when applied to a black man named Barack Obama running for president.
The only explanation of Ferraro's comments that I've heard that rings truer for me came from Chris Matthews, who argued on MSNBC's "Hardball" that she really meant that the central thread of Obama's appeal is that he can, as a black politician, transcend racial politics in a way that a white politician could not.
Also on that program, Pat Buchanan (of all people) noted that a lot of white voters feel a greater excitement voting for Obama because they feel like they're doing some constructive to put the nation's bitter racial history behind us.
Those are both valid observations about how Obama's race has played an important role in his overall appeal to "a new politics" of unity rather than division. They're also very different than what Ferraro said, even before she started playing racial victim herself as she dug her hole deeper and deeper.
'Gerard' Ferraro v. 'Barackla' Obama
Posted by: Chris
Aside from the obvious race-baiting in Geraldine Ferraro's pronouncements about the reason for the success of Barack Obama, she's also just plain wrong. Originally, Ferraro said that the reason for Obama's success is that he's black. She's quick to add, as in this Fox News clip, that she has long said that the reason for her nomination as vice president in 1984 was that she is a woman.
"In 1984, if my name were Gerard Ferraro instead of Geraldine Ferraro," she said, "I would never have been the nominee for vice president."
Maybe so, considering she got the nomination based on one vote (Walter Mondale's), but what does that have to do with Obama? If all it took was being black, then Jesse Jackson would have been the Democratic Party nominee in 1984, not Mondale (and again in 1988 rather than Michael Dukakis).
Then there's this absolute gem from Politico's Ben Smith: Who said this in April 1988: "If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn't be in the race." That's right; Geraldine Ferraro. So being black was the primary reason Jackson was able to run and yet somehow for Obama it explains not only why he's running but beating a candidate with enormous built-in establishment advantages? The identity politics explanation for everything.
The real reason that Obama has succeeded is that his candidacy is about much more than his race or, as the Clintons like to claim, a speech he gave in 2002. It's about a "new politics" that eschews the fear-mongering and sleaze of the past by appealing to the best in people rather than their worst. It's also about a candidate whose positions on the issues jive with voters and who has run a far more effective campaign than the ultimate pros, the Clintons.
The second reason Ferraro is wrong is about Hillary Clinton, not Barack Obama. Because Hillary Clinton's gender has far more to do with her candidacy than Obama's race has to do with his. I don't say that because I think Hillary's success is because women and male feminists are enamored of the idea of a woman president -- which would be the sexist equivalent of Ferraro's jaw-dropper. I say it for the simple reason that being the wife of the president eclipses by a mile all other reasons for her political starpower, subsequent Senate career and White House run.
Ferraro's has things bassackwards, just as Gloria Steinem did before her.
(May 2005 photo of Geraldine Ferraro and Hillary Clinton by Chris Hondros/Getty Images)
February 28, 2008
The politics of rejection
Posted by: Chris
In the Cleveland debate earlier this week, Tim Russert pressed Barack Obama on whether he would reject the endorsement he recently received from Louis Farrakhan, who is of course famous for his anti-Semitic fulminations.
Obama tried simply denouncing the Nation of Islam founder for his anti-Semitism, but that didn't satisfy either Russert or Hillary Clinton. For her part, Clinton related how she actively "rejected" support from a New York political party controlled by anti-Semites and demanded Obama do the same. Obama ultimately caved to the impossible politics of the moment:
I have to say I don't see a difference between denouncing and rejecting. There's no formal offer of help from Minister Farrakhan that would involve me rejecting it. But if the word "reject" Senator Clinton feels is stronger than the word "denounce," then I'm happy to concede the point, and I would reject and denounce.
"Good. Good. Excellent," nodded Clinton.
Of course there is a difference between denouncing a view espoused by a supporter and rejecting all support from that source. Remember this is the same Barack Obama who refused to reject the support of Donnie McClurkin, a black gospel singer who claims to have been "cured" of his homosexuality? Back then, Obama saw the practical impossibility of combing the views of his supporters for those he finds objectionable:
One of the things that always comes up in presidential campaigns is, if you’ve got multiple supporters all over the place, should the candidate then be held responsible for the every single view of every one of his supporters? And obviously that’s not possible. And if I start playing that game, then it will be very difficult for me to do what I think I can do best, which is bring the country together.
That struck me as exactly right. Once a candidate starts "playing that game," then there's a slippery slope about which views among which supporters are so beyond the pale that denouncing the views isn't enough, and the supporter has to be "rejected."
But now Barack Obama is "playing that game," goaded or not, and the slippery slope between Farrakhan and McClurkin begs for some sort of explanation.
The same questions could be asked of Hillary Clinton, of course, who pushed Obama into not just "denouncing" but "rejecting" Farrakhan. Why, then, did Clinton accept the endorsements of African-American ministers like Bishop Eddie Long and Rev. Ralph Mayberry, who like McClurkin preach that homosexuality can be "cured"? And yet unlike Obama, Hillary has never "denounced" their anti-gay rhetoric or "rejected" their support.
Just last week, Hillary gave an interview to CBN News, the "news department" of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network, even though Robertson has a long history of being virulently anti-gay, even blaming gay Americans for hurricanes in central Florida and the 9/11 attack. Does anyone doubt how the Clinton camp would have reacted if Obama had sat down for a chat with Farrakhan's Final Call newspaper?
Then today, when Clinton learned that prominent Dallas Hispanic supporter Adelfa Callejo had said some very intemperate things about why Hispanics won't support black politicians like Obama, Clinton's initial response sounded very much like Obama talking about McClurkin:
You know this is a free country. People get to express their opinions. … You can’t take any of that as anything other than an individual opinion.
Later, after confirming Callejo's remarks, the Clinton campaign issued a statement saying, "After confirming that they were accurately portrayed, Senator Clinton, of course, denounces and rejects them." Notice that, like Obama on Farrakhan before Hillary pushed him, Clinton has denounced and rejected the views she finds repugnant, not the endorsement or support from Callejo.
John McCain has his own denouncing and rejecting to do, according to Eric Kleefeld at Talking Points Memo. The presumptive GOP nominee appeared on stage yesterday with Christian Zionist Pastor John Hagee, who Kleefeld said "considers the Catholic Church to be the Anti-Christ, and has said that Jews brought their own persecution upon themselves."
And last year, McCain famously gave the commencement address at Jerry Falwell's Liberty University, the same Falwell who joined Robertson in blaming 9/11 on gays. Liberty also treats students in gay relationships the way Bob Jones University treats interracial couples, expelling all involved. And unlike Obama (with McClurkin and Farrakhan) or Clinton (with Callejo), McCain hasn't done anything to distance himself from Hagee, Falwell or Liberty.
My point here is that this particular "political game" will ultimately sting anyone running a nationwide campaign, and Obama was right the first time that politics really ought to be about addition, not subtraction. It's ultimately pointless to pressure presidential candidates into "rejecting the support" of even their most extremist supporters. So long as the candidate denounces the offensive views, in clear and uncertain terms, then ultimately it's up to the supporter to decide whether to stick with the candidate.
Personally, I am tickled pink that unreconstructed types like Donnie McClurkin or Eddie Long are supporting presidential candidates like Obama and Clinton who are committed to a wide array of gay civil rights protections. I hope they do all they can to get them elected!
So long as the candidate doesn't waver from denouncing their bigotry, that ought to be enough.
Selling gay rights in Beaumont, Texas
Posted by: Chris
Politico's Ben Smith just posted about an energetic Barack Obama rally in Beaumont, Texas, that was largely attended by boisterous African Americans:
An interesting moment came when he was asked a question about LGBT rights and delivered an answer that seemed to suit the questioner, listing the various attributes — race, gender, etc. — that shouldn't trigger discrimination, to successive cheers. When he came to saying that gays and lesbians deserve equality, though, the crowd fell silent.
So he took a different tack:
"Now I’m a Christian, and I praise Jesus every Sunday," he said, to a sudden wave of noisy applause and cheers.
"I hear people saying things that I don’t think are very Christian with respect to people who are gay and lesbian," he said, and the crowd seemed to come along with him this time.
I won't just remark that Hillary Clinton would never attempt something so forceful before a largely black audience because the comparison's not entirely fair since she's white. But how about a largely white, working class audience, or if the issue had come up in her recent interview with the "news department" of Pat Robertson's Christian Broadcasting Network?
(Photo of Barack Obama in Beaumont via Southeast Texas Record)
February 26, 2008
It's over, Hillary (V): the stink of denial
Posted by: Kevin
The Clintons are denying that they had anything to do with putting out a photo of "Barack Hussein Obama" dressed in elder Somali robes. And they angrily deny it in that same way they've always done when it's glaringly obvious that they had everything to do with it.
Perhaps Bill will even regale us with another accusatory finger wagging, and remind us of the good old days when there was no depth to which a President would stoop in his self-preserving deceit. Meet his wife and heiress.
There is a reason that the Clintons put out that photo. They were presuming there is just enough racism, just enough ignorance and just enough residual paranoia in the country that such a picture would make a difference and help turn around Hillary's self-induced death spiral. They knew that no picture of Hillary in a head scarf or of Bill in a dashiki would have any such impact, since "Barack Hussein Obama" is, to put it in their own words, is someone we should fear as President. Fill in the blank as to why. She's already admitted she needs less-educated, working class white voters back if she has a prayer of winning Texas and Ohio. Go ahead, my liberal friends. Fill in the blank. I dare you.
That's the Clintons, people. Always was, and always will be.
The same Clintons that campaigned on their signing of the Defense of Marriage Act in 1996, running radio ads bragging about it despite being way ahead in the national polls against Bob Dole. (And don't give me that crap about Hillary not being in office in the 1990s. As the Scientologists like to say: fair game. She's taken credit for every accomplishment of her husband's White House already, so that old retort is finished.)
So if there is any gay Clinton ass-kisser left out there, I have a little advice for you before you open your mouth again about Hillary Clinton: You can rant and rave all you want about the Republicans for the rest of your activist career. But the stain of what the Clintons are doing in this campaign -- jettisoning all forms of decency or loyalty to principle in the raw pursuit of power -- will remain and it will tinge everything they do going forward. And you, too. So think hard about your next move. The lifeboats are filling up fast and there won't be enough for everyone.
Some of you still seem to imagine that the political equivalent of a Jerry Bruckheimer disaster movie might let Hillary wrench the nomination from Obama. If so, every one of you remaining supporters of this campaign will have to answer to when she -- inevitably -- does to the gay community everything she did to Obama. And she will. Indeed, she has put the whole nation on notice in the most chilling moment of cynicism this campaign has seen yet. I take the final sentence of this statement not as an observation, but as a warning:
But I don't fear that horror show at all, personally. My friend Frank Rich speaks for me in his most recent New York Times op-ed from Sunday:
Despite Mrs. Clinton’s valedictory tone at Thursday’s debate, there remains the fear in some quarters that whether through sleights of hand involving superdelegates or bogus delegates from Michigan or Florida, the Clintons might yet game or even steal the nomination. I’m starting to wonder. An operation that has waged political war as incompetently as the Bush administration waged war in Iraq is unlikely to suddenly become smart enough to pull off that duplicitous a “victory.” Besides, after spending $1,200 on Dunkin’ Donuts in January alone, this campaign simply may not have the cash on hand to mount a surge.
February 19, 2008
Live by identity politics, die by identity politics
Posted by: Kevin
A cautionary tale for Obama on what did the Clintons in on their faulty assumptions going into the 2008 election campaign:
Hillary Clinton's black supporters -- especially the most prominent ones -- hadn't expected their candidate to be in a dogfight right now. They thought Barack Obama was an election cycle or two away from being serious presidential timber. They thought Bill Clinton's presidency and the close relationships the Clintons had forged with African Americans would translate into goo-gobs of votes in '08. They were wrong.
Remember all the commentator chatter last summer: Is Barack Obama black enough?
Well, he's black enough now.
When you spend your hard-earned political capital, and months of brain-time planning a tortured machine-approach to winning an election, especially based on a premise as ludicrous as your southern white husband somehow having been the "first black President", this is what happens to you.
Here's hoping Obama really understands that, amidst the avalanche of support from African Americans, and the emotional expectations that seem to be coming with it.
May identity politics find itself slaughtered on the altar of the 2008 Democratic National Convention. God, please, make it happen.
February 15, 2008
'Not accurate' doesn't mean 'not true'
Posted by: Andoni
The headline in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution this afternoon read: "Rep. Lewis: Report of delegate switch to Obama 'not accurate'"
So what's going on here? Based simply on politics and not inside information, I'd point out that "not accurate" does not mean something is "not true." It means only that something in the story is not correct or the story is not 100% correct. For instance, if someone said that I robbed a bank with a gun and got away with $10,000 driving off in a black Pontiac, this story could be labeled "not accurate" if I had robbed a bank with a gun getting away with $8,000 driving off in a black Pontiac.
Politicians use this all the time to wiggle. I'm not pleased to see one of my heroes John Lewis resort to this type of wiggle talk, but here's what I think happened:
- It's possible that Congressman Lewis was in the process of switching to Senator Obama from Senator Clinton and word got out before he had a chance to tell the Clintons. Opps, not good. This would be embarrassing and result in the back peddling we see today. However, it would be odd (if possible) for something like this to happen to a politician with Lewis' experience. Things leak and the New York Times is a good paper with lots of sources, and they could have gone to Lewis with the evidence of his imminent switch already in hand.
- It's possible Lewis did make this decision to switch, but hadn't let the Obama people know. Once the Obama people heard about it
and the possible stampede of many other black congressmen, they got
worried. They certainly want superdelegates, but the publicity
surrounding black Congressmen, if not the entire Congressional
Black Caucus, coming on board en masse would raise the race thing again,
just as it had been put to bed. So it's possible the Obama people put
the brakes on this at this time.
They don't want white voters retreating back to Clinton. Internally, it would be beneficial for the Obama people know that they were picking up these superdelegate votes, but I'm sure they would want to control the timing and the numbers. If they had their druthers, they would rather that several white superdelegates, preferably women, switch now.
Save the Congressional Black Caucus for later in the game, as long as they know that these people are now on their side while they are in holding pattern to announce.
I don't know what actually happened, but the fact that Lewis' press release today did not call the Times article "false" or "totally inaccurate" to me means one of the above possibilities is likely.
Anyone else have a thought on this?
January 24, 2008
Race gets thrown into messy DNC mix
Posted by: Chris
More and more dirt is emerging from the suit by Donald Hitchcock challenging his ouster doing LGBT outreach for the Democratic National Committee, and with it more light is being shed on the way Howard Dean's unlikely obsession with evangelical voters has come at the expense of gay interests within the party.
The particulars of the latest revelation are in a report posted today by the Washington Blade and involve more nasty skirmishes among party insiders over how issues of race vs. sexual orientation were handled, both in the selection of party convention delegates and in a controversial Alabama state legislative race.
In the thick of things in both battles was Dean's chief of staff, Leah Daughtry (pictured), a Pentecostal pastor who grew up speaking in tongues -- and now employs her own forked tongues while wedging black Democrats against gay Democrats at every available opportunity. Daughtry's machinations apparently reached such a point that an unnamed Stonewall Democrat said angrily in an email to Hitchcock's successor, Brian Bond:
Imagine what Dean could do if people like Leah were confronted for their bigotry and fired. … I think Samuel L. Jackson said it best when he said "I'm sick of these mother fuckin' snakes on this mother fuckin' plane." It may be time to drive the snakes from the DNC.
It's no wonder, then, that Howard Dean went on "The 700 Club" and erroneously asserted that the Democratic Party platform opposes gay marriage. Daughtry no doubt planted the pipe dream in Dean's head that he could be the evangelical pied piper for the party and pretending official opposition to gay marriage was just a convenient, if inaccurate, way of finding common ground.
More DNC revelations are sure to follow…
January 16, 2008
What racial truce?
Posted by: Chris
Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama had apparently called a truce by the time of their Las Vegas debate last night in their sometimes bitter debate on race. Someone apparently forgot to tell Bill. Or maybe he forgot to tell himself.
Either way, in a speech the same day in Sparks, the former president turned attack dog managed to play the race card and the gender card and lie, all at the same time:
"Hillary has an enormous amount of African American support and Barack Obama has a lot of white people for him," he said in Sparks.
"There's still some African Americans who support Barack, even though they like Hillary, because they think he is the first African American to have a chance to be president," Clinton said. "And there's a lot of women who are voting for Hillary, even though they like Sen. Obama, because they think it would be better if a woman broke the glass ceiling."
So blacks and women like Hillary, and most of both groups support her; while no one likes Obama, but a minority of blacks support him because of his race.
And it's not even true. The latest Gallop poll shows Obama backed by 57 percent of African Americans nationwide, an advantage of 25 percentage points over Hillary.
Keep up the shuck and jive, Bill.
January 14, 2008
Sully didn't know Lyndon Johnson…
Posted by: Chris
… but he still believes Hillary is no Lyndon Johnson, and much as I did yesterday he draws the gay rights comparison for proof:
Are [the Clintons] really today's version of LBJ? In fact, unlike most others in this race, we have some direct evidence of how the Clintons, given the power of the White House, responded to the civil rights movement of their own time.
In the 1990s, we saw a burst of grass-roots activism, protest and rhetoric in defense of gay and lesbian equality. Out of the ashes of the AIDS epidemic, the gay rights movement rose like a phoenix. And the Clintons, seeing a fund-raising opportunity, reached out to some in the movement to finance their own campaign. Those donors trusted them. I wrote the TNR endorsement. But as soon as the gays had performed their role - financing the Clintons in power and supporting their campaign - the Clintons turned on us.
They dropped their promise to end the military's ban instantaneously and then presided over a doubling of the discharges of gay service members under the hideous "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" policy. They then used the other emerging civil rights issue - marriage equality - to triangulate against gay couples. They ran ads on Christian radio stations bragging about the Defense of Marriage Act that president Clinton eagerly signed.
And the only gay people they embraced were those willing to continue to trade money for access - and loyalty to the Clintons. Who helped them devise this anti-gay strategy? Dick Morris. Who recommended hiring him in the first place? Hillary Clinton.
Johnson risked his entire coalition on the issue of civil rights - a heroic act that still reverberates today. The Clintons wouldn't risk a smidgen of a percentage point in a Mark Penn poll for the duration of a news cycle. That's the difference.
January 05, 2008
Romney and Biden agree…
Posted by: Chris
…Barack Obama is well-spoken for a black man.
No word yet on whether Mitt thinks Barack is "bright and clean" as well.