RKMBs Forums .::Important::. Politics and Current Events President Barack Obama

they must really believe Obama is a god if they think he can pull that off!

I'm very pleased. Of course there is a race issue in Obama's election. The citizens of the US - black and white - have done the one symbolic thing necessary to demonstrate that a shameful chapter in its history is long past.

Someone told me on the news that a woman standing in a line waiting to vote in Washington was asked how long she had been waiting. She answered, "Two hundred years."

And I thought McCain's concession speech was excellent and recognised the significance of the election to African-Americans.

It was also conciliatory, recognising that the country faces serious problems that will need Americans to work together. And McCain personally pledged to help in that.

I have some deep reservations about some of Obama's policies. I don't like his health reform plans, which I found out abut yesterday. I think engaging North Korea is appeasing a lunatic (I think engaging Iran is a good idea, while simultaenously pumping the strong and well-educated democratic movement in the country with lots of cash). And his attitude on free trade is the worst part of Democratic ideology.

But, the US was lucky in having two very good candidates this time around, who in nominating both candidates. And its a credit to institutions that form the fundamentals of Western democracies like ours that it all went well without tanks in the street.

So, congratulations to you all. I didn't expect an good grace from zealots on either side of the fence here (and wonder actually why Whomod isn't here gloating his head off), but I mean that to all Americans with genuine sincerity.

Whomod don't know how to be happy when he posts here so I don't expect him back anytime soon.

Hmm. Its a surprise.

That was an idiotic thing to say.

You're being a little hard on Dave. Obama's election vindicated America’s ideal of equality.

However, at the same time, the question remains whether his policies will promote a paternalism that erodes that ideal.

Either way, glad we could pave the way, Dave. Now your country can elect an Aborigine as Prime Minister and be almost as enlightened of a nation as we are.

I just can't help but think that if Daniel Steele made it into office that no one would be consistently screaming in my ear that this is a historical election that proves America is "less racist."

I certainly can't imagine that Jesse Jackson would bother crying for him.

Precisely. And your criticism, Pariah, is levelled just as much to McCain as it is to me. I'm merely echoing his words.




Undeniably.



I know you were being churlish, but one of my former colleagues who has gone into politics is, I suspect, trying to achieve just that.

Will they take the bones out of their nose and use it as a gavel to call the house to order?

I'm not sure I deserve to be called churlish, since I was neither vulgar nor particularly difficult with that comment. And my comment was actually intended more as a good-natured tweaking of something I think you would agree with me on, vis a vis your own nation.

I do, however, find it bit ironic that nations with their own history of racial or ethnic strife are acting as if the U.S. was somehow uniquely in need of absolution in this area.

Congratulations especially to you on having a black man lead your country.

I've seen Crocodile Dundee, Dave.

Hardly. I'm applauding the American democratic process and the will of the American people. I think it sets an excellent example to countries with similar or worse histories (such as Australia) and who have issues with assimilating disenfranchised ethnic minorities (such as France). Its one thing to talk abut these things (the new Australian parliament's first act was to apologise to the "stolen generation" of Australian Aborigines) and another to provide the sort of opportunities the US has done to allow someone like Obama to become the leader of your coountry.

I've said here before that I've always had enormous respect for the United States, although I've often disagreed with many of its government's actions. This election, to me, vindicates America's claim to be a land of opportunity in a way which can't be disputed or matched.

Have you been busted for tax evasion, too?

it's a badge of honor!

LOL!

You're right. It is.

You are to claims of open-mindedness to what he is to covering his own ass.

Like him, you are speaking out of your ass when you emphasize the race of the candidate.

Shelby Steele thinks so too.

• Geraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama would not be "in his position" as a frontrunner but for his race. Possibly she was acting as Hillary Clinton's surrogate. Or maybe she was simply befuddled by this new reality -- in which blackness could constitute a political advantage.
  [The Obama Bargain] AP
  
  Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, June 4, 2007.
  
  But whatever her motives, she was right: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Barack Obama is, of course, a very talented politician with a first-rate political organization at his back. But it does not detract from his merit to say that his race is also a large part of his prominence. And it is undeniable that something extremely powerful in the body politic, a force quite apart from the man himself, has pulled Obama forward. This force is about race and nothing else.
  
  The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.
  
  How to turn one's blackness to advantage?
  
  The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.
  
  This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.
  
  His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary's positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by "change" or "hope" or "the future." And he has failed to say how he would actually be a "unifier." By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.
  
  Race helps Mr. Obama in another way -- it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America's tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America's redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?
  
  Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans -- black and white -- Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America's very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.
  
  And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.
  
  But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."
  
  Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("God damn America").
  
  How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?
  
  What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?
  
  But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.
  
  No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

I think the biggest problem I have when you and your ilk coin the phrase "will of the people" in regards to Obama's elect status is that you're implying that they actually know who they're electing rather than just a charismatic politician who happens to be black.

Fair enough. My comment about "other nations" was, in fact, worded to imply that I wasn't speaking about you but about nations and their leaders. I simply used your initial comments as a springboard to segue into an observation about nations.

Probably the most intelligent conservative analysis I've read so far, in the sense that its core offensiveness is shrouded in clever deconstruction. Its a nasty echo of my posts in one of the other pre-election threads where I asked whether people were going to vote for Obama because of the symbology of it, rather than on his merits.

Does Obama grant whites "racial innocence"? I don't think so. His "A more perfect union" speech didn't dodge the bullet at all. Obama painted himself as "post-racial" in that speech, which is an interesting concept of itself, but that doesn't mean he didn't address the issue of race hatred on behalf of both blacks and whites. I didn't see any "manipulation of white guilt" in that speech. I read into it an effort to make amends on both sides, and build bridges to overcome a culture of bias.

This editorial you have posted posits that reconciliation is seductive and false. I agree that its seductive, fundamentally disagree that its false.

I personally was bothered that people were voting for Obama because:

1. "it is time" - a sense of making history (contrasted with "washing away white guilt")

2. he isn't George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the other members of the Secret Society of Supervillains

rather than voting on his economic policies, some of which I regard as protectionist and too heavy lip-service to special-interest groups (eg teachers) core to the Democratic movement.

one of the big jokes about the 2004 election was that kerry already had an automatic 49% of the country, and a $300 million dollar grossing film to start his campaign. but kerry was such a bland, templated political robot, he couldn't garner an additional few percentage points on his own to beat the hyped up visage of dr. evil.

i think "he's not bush/bush jr" was a decent chunk of the vote going for obama. in the structured defense, that is how many votes are cast, all the time, for anyone. but i do think "bush" is probably one of the bigger factors in the election; both for why mccain lost and why obama won.

there are certainly those who voted for obama because he's black. but there's likely just as many (or at least a rivaling faction) of those who voted against because he's not white. perspective tells the story of one as racist and the other as noble, but there's certainly a level of ignorance to them both. it just isn't cool to say so. except to balloon knot, you can tell him.

i am hopeful to believe those types of votes are the minority, for either side, but i'm not naive enough to stand by that.

This thread should be stickied.

I'm sure you've stickied it plenty of times.

Been thinking of me?

I love this country and fully support Obama and hope he does a great job. The dems won't have the GOP to blame anymore so they better not fuck up. I hope that Obama governs center left and not left left. If he does that we should be ok. I know that he won't do most of the things he promised because he can't. One thing that bothers me..... really bothers me about him and his supporters is this...... He was saying Tuesday night about hope and unity and healing saying how we should all come together and stop being divided and Hollywood and Cow Oprah were all saying that now we can all come together and heal the country and we should all be united blah blah.

Well my question for all of Obamanauts is this if McCain won would you all want to be coming aboard our side so we could heal and be united? No probably not
And where was the benefit of the doubt that you will all ask for for Obama sometime in the next year for the past 8 years with Bush? It was up your asses. That just made me laugh out loud. Really you all are for unity and healing as long as you are in control and it is on your terms.



I hope MEM and Jason have some dialogue with me about this.

It's always easier to be on the winning side & talk about healing & unity. While I wouldn't have become a republican if McCain had won I would have given him a chance. Then again I didn't see him as the devil even when he was running ahead in the polls after his convention.

I won't lie -- I think a LOT of people are overreacting to this election, and speculating entirely too much. As it stands, at work, we've been sold out of every single .223 caliber (or 5.56x45mm) rifle, all 9x19mm parabellum, .45ACP and .357mag ammo since the day after the election. Everyone's convinced Obama's gonna take away their gun rights.

Maybe he will. But I doubt it.
And even if he does, how's about we wait until he's actually in office before freakin' out?

For the record I am very proud that a black man is President of the USA. I think it's great that as a country we were able to do that. I also am sick of fighting so I am willing to give him a shot. He has already backed away from much of his socialistic ideas. He knows that if he taxed businesses the way he said he was going to do it would send us into a depression. He also won't do much with health care or any other program for at least 2 years. I could see Reid and Pelosi not getting along with him. I pray for him and our country and hope he does a good job. That is more than most dems could ever say in 2000 or 2004. Even now in victory most dems are too assholic to say one nice thing about Bush even though he is being super gracious to Obama and doesn't want him to go through what he did from the Clinton White House.

Sometimes guns are used in suicides.








This is actually PJP's bro.

OK I know we're not going to agree on this but Bush was not super gracious moving in. There were a ton of anymous sourced stories about the Clinton people trashing the White House when they left. It reminds me alot of the anymous sources trashing Palin right now.

They removed all the Ws off the White House keyboards! The media reported that not Bush's staff.

Oh, well, there you go. A couple of anonymous stories about Clinton aides. THAT justified eight years of partisan bickering and obstructionism.

And yet he never spoke out against the politician calling McCain a supporter of segregation. In fact, he supported him during the third debate. He made great strides to not voice any of the victimology that his primary supporters regurgitate everyday, yet he makes no efforts to preach accountability in the spirit of Malcolm X to those very masses he relies on.



I think that's your biggest downfall: You don't read into the comments of anyone you approve of. You may or may not have missed it being in a foreign country, but there are other elements to Obama that aren't visually apparent. Overseas reporters tend to ignore even more than MSNBC since people around the world have very little frame of reference for American-Politico. As crazy as it sounds, while other countries tend to report more about American politics than their own, journalists have a greater advantage for selectivity. Two of the greatest controversial mentions surrounding Obama, Bill Ayers and ACORN, held no meaning to acquaintances in Britain and France.



Seems to me like you just contradicted yourself. You first say that voting for the sake of reconciliation is alright but then go on to say that voting to "make history" is wrong. I realize you're trying to distinguish the two, but they're not mutually exclusive. Especially not in this sociological climate.

Any American you ask who calls this election "historical" will say so because they feel this to be a form of progress, which basically means--Whether directly or indirectly--That it's an act of reconciliation.

I was just saying Bush wasn't super gracious moving in, that's all. No matter what there'll be hyper-partisans like yourself who are going to be unfairly critical of anyone from the other party.

So, y'know. Usually I don't bother actually... sayin' anything to you people. But I have to just point out. Given my family history, do you REALLY think suicide is a topic I'd take lightly? I mean, fine. Don't believe me if you don't want to. But think about it, now.

Didn't you just say something about us not getting to you?

What you allege doesn't bother me G-man. One only has to look at your posts before & after Obama winning to see how you work. To be fair I wouldn't expect any McCain supporter to be very fair right now but you'll be like this as long as a democrat is in office.