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March 18, 2008

Obama's 'Racist' Campaign In A Nutshell

Topics: Political News and commentaries

In an opinion at WSJ titled "The Obama Bargain," Shelby Steele sums up both what I believe to be the very basis behind Obama's rise to political rock star status, and what I believe to be the reason he will never be elected in a general election.

What Steele writes in regard to Obama's "grand bargain," is on target with both the reality of what we've seen in Obama's rise, and no matter how you spin it or dress it up - the reality is that he himself has used and played the race card from day one:

... 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.

And regardless of what Obama says in his speech in the next hour, his playing of the race card will continue - and fail - in spite of his cynical yet skillful playing of the American people; he's been outed for his 20 years of tolerating, embracing, associating with, and accepting racial hatred as being an integral part of the Black church in America (an assumption on his part which is dead wrong except for a minority segment of the Black community):

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.

Continue reading - The Obama Bargain

Fortunately, "most" of the American people, at least those in the center and right, just aren't that damned dumb!

Posted by Abdul at March 18, 2008 10:36 AM

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• Obama's 'Racist' Campaign In A Nutshell - Mar 18, 2008