Thanks to my husband for the LA Times piece, my former student Ryan Collazo for the NY Times article, and my sister-friend Sharon Pendana for Alternet.com. The media is all abuzz about Obama.
Despite Friday’s New York Times’ endorsement of Hillary Clinton, there is a powerful voice on the same Op-Ed page supporting Obama today – Caroline Kennedy’s. Yesterday, the LA Times ran a Jonathan Chait piece suggesting that, perhaps, conservatives were right all along about the Clintons – not their policies, but their political tactics. Davey D wrote a frank Alternet.com article castigating Bob Johnson, whom the Clintons actually passed the mic to on the campaign trail – despite criticism of the BET founder throughout the African American community.
Because this Democratic primary has certainly become one of character, the Clintons are losing – losing the primaries, losing Democrats, losing the love. Obama’s stunning victory in South Carolina seems to support this, and so did his Iowa victory, the fact that he won more delegates than Clinton in Nevada, and the very narrowness of his defeat in New Hampshire.
It seems the country does want change, and the Clintonian tactics I outlined in my January 14th blog post, “Race as a Political Construction,” have let people know Hillary will not provide any substantive shift in the way this country is run. As the primary rolls on, it is becoming more apparent that Barack will move the country forward. (And I’m rooting for a John Edwards vice-presidency.)
Caroline Kennedy compares Obama to the great JFK in her Times piece, “A President Like My Father.” She explicitly endorses Obama and states that: “My reasons are patriotic, political and personal, and the three are intertwined.” Kennedy acknowledges how similar the policy goals of the two front-runners are, and focuses on character issues. She then explores both Obama’s record and Obama’s character in this paragraph:
“Senator Obama is running a dignified and honest campaign. He has spoken eloquently about the role of faith in his life, and opened a window into his character in two compelling books. And when it comes to judgment, Barack Obama made the right call on the most important issue of our time by opposing the war in Iraq from the beginning.”
In the LA Times piece, Chait observes that:
“Something strange happened the other day. All these different people — friends, co-workers, relatives, people on a liberal e-mail list I read — kept saying the same thing: They’ve suddenly developed a disdain for Bill and Hillary Clinton. Maybe this is just a coincidence, but I think we’ve reached an irrevocable turning point in liberal opinion of the Clintons.
The sentiment seems to be concentrated among Barack Obama supporters. Going into the campaign, most of us liked Hillary Clinton just fine, but the fact that tens of millions of Americans are seized with irrational loathing for her suggested that she might not be a good Democratic nominee. But now that loathing seems a lot less irrational. We’re not frothing Clinton haters like … well, name pretty much any conservative. We just really wish they’d go away.”
Chait goes on to explore the past few weeks of Clintonisms, then asks these provocative questions:
“It made me wonder: Were the conservatives right about Bill Clinton all along? Maybe not right to set up a perjury trap so they could impeach him, but right about the Clintons’ essential nature?”
On January 24th, Davey D contributed “The Hypocrisy of BET’s Bob Johnson’s Obama Smears” to Alternet.com. He concludes his powerful, progressive opinion piece with this:
“My boy and fellow writer, Jelani Cobb, raised an important question in his recent article on this topic for the Washington Post, which was, what were the Clintons thinking when they got Johnson to stomp for them? She might as well gotten Rupert Murdoch or Bill O’Reilly to stomp for her. That’s like me running for office and getting a Gestapo-like guy like Rudy Giuliani to stomp on my behalf; it’s not a good look and brings into question Sen. Clinton’s clear lapse in judgment. All she had to do was look at the number of protests launched against BET in the past few years for their degrading images of women. That should’ve been a clear enough message. In other words, if Hillary thinks so little of black people that she went and dug up a cat likes Bob Johnson, then I’m gonna have to close the book on her and bounce the other way and roll with Obama.”
Too bad the Clinton camp hasn’t caught up with the rest of America:
We want to explore policy issues, not feel exploited on issues of race and gender.
We want to be inspired by our leaders, not deceived by them.
We want a clean break from political shenanigans, not a throw-back to 90s-era manipulations and machinations.
Comment(s)
Did you hear the song that closed the victory speech in South Carolina in the Obama campaign…”Here I am baby…signed, sealed, delivered I’m yours…” Fabulous. (I just wanted to say fabulous.)
Comment(s)
I can hear the melody in my head, Amanda! He is ours. 🙂