The education of Andrew Sullivan continues. As far as I can tell, Sullivan’s conservatism took its first big blow when the GOP decided to aid the reelection of Bush/Cheney by placing gay marriage referendums on numerous state ballots. It was further eroded, severely, by the party’s reaction to revelations of officially sanctioned torture. Now he is further dismayed to see the raw fear-based racism inherent in the modern conservative movement.
For me, this is an epiphany of sorts. Not that I have changed my mind about the things I wrote in “The Conservative Soul.” Not that I have stopped believing in limited government, individual freedom, personal responsibility, pragmatic change. But I have come to believe that large swathes of today’s conservative movement truly are hateful…
…I am immensely grateful that McCain is the nominee, because he is a far bigger man than many in the “conservative” movement today. To read the Corner today was to be reminded that some are immune to the grace and hope and civility that Reagan summoned at his best; the anger and bitterness is so palpably fueled by fear and racism it really does mark a moment of revelation to me.
As we can see from the New York Times, Washington Post, and Boston Globe editorials, the Volvo-driving, latte-drinking, elite opinion makers were tremendously impressed by Barack Obama’s speech on race. Yet, as Sullivan’s readers point out, much of white America is not listening, not impressed, and not inclined to look beyond Obama’s mixed race or his connections to the urban black community. And the GOP understands this perfectly.
“It was a speech written to mau-mau the New York Times editorial board, the network production people and the media into submission. Beautifully calibrated but deeply dishonest,” said GOP media consultant Rick Wilson, who crafted the ad in 2002 tying then-Sen. Max Cleland to Osama bin Laden. “Not good enough.”
“He wants the authentic black image but he also wants to keep all his safe, suburban Obamacans in line,” said Rick Wilson. “Well, you can’t have both – they’re mutually exclusive.”
“This is a guy who associates with some real haters,” he added.
The weapon (with video) is just sitting there, waiting to be used. Here’s a preview:
Among the e-mails Anuzis received was a link to a mash-up video splicing together Wright’s most extreme comments, Michelle Obama’s statement, footage of Obama not putting his hand over his heart during the anthem at a political event and images of Malcolm X and the two black Olympians in 1968 who raised their fists in the “black power” salute set to the iconic rap song by Public Enemy “Fight the Power.”
The video, titled “Is Obama Wright,” is described as being produced by something called “NHaleMedia,” apparently just a dummy Web site set up to produce anonymous and home-made videos.
One factor in this is the attitude of John McCain, who told Sean Hannity yesterday that he knows Sen. Obama and he knows that Obama does not share the views of Louis Farrakhan. One upside of the enforced comity of the Senate might be that McCain and Obama will carry some of that comity into the presidential race. And perhaps Sullivan is correct that McCain
is “a far bigger man than many in the ‘conservative’ movement today.” But, even if McCain takes the high road, we live in a new age of YouTube and viral email, and no campaign can control their supporters.
Michael Crowley touches on the unfortunate reality:
What Obama said from the lectern in Pennsylvania today sounded like what you’d expect him to say, in less polished form, in a frank scotch-on-the-rocks conversation. I especially admired his keen analysis of how the media treats “race only as spectacle–as we did in the OJ trial–or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina–or as fodder for the nightly news.” That’s one reason it’s sure to be a hit with elite commentators, not to mention racially super-enlightened liberal Democratic primary voters.
But those weren’t the people Obama needed to reach today. His target audience was working class white voters–Reagan Democrats with a historic tendency to let racial prejudice and fear override their other social and economic interests, and whose view of Obama the Jeremiah Wright controversy threaten to permanently warp.
Crowley doesn’t mention one other group that Obama sought to reassure, and it was reflected in the make-up of the invitation-only guest list for the speech. Any association with Farrakhan, no matter how tangential, is potential poison with a large portion of the Jewish community. And with Joe Lieberman defecting to attend the Republican National Convention, there is some question about how well Obama can do among the more conservative (and even not so conservative) of that community.
But, in sheer numbers, the Jewish community is a minor consideration compared to the larger white community. And Crowley wisely worries:
But the question is whether working class voters in Ohio and Pennsylvania and West Virginia and elsewhere believe, particularly in a stalled economy, that racially perfecting the union really ought to be a central goal of the next president. I would like to believe so. I’m not convinced they do.
No…I do not believe they do, either. Not enough of them, anyway. I don’t think we can wish away the sad reality that Obama’s race and his pastor and his church and his name and his faith are all going to be used by everyday citizens that support McCain. McCain may, or may not, keep his own campaign clean, and he may, or may not, direct his surrogates to take the high road. But this will only have a marginal effect on the volume of the racist and fear-based attacks on Obama.
I had a sad experience yesterday that, while anecdotal, gives saliency to the point. I had just left the Constitution Center after watching Obama’s uplifting speech. I was walking through The Gallery, which is an urban shopping mall on Market Street. I decided to sit down on a bench and see if I could get a wireless signal. An elderly white woman sat down next to me and was silent for a little while. Then she said, “That’s where my tax dollars go.”
I looked up at her, not knowing what she was referring to, and asked, “excuse me?”.
She nodded at a group of young early-20’s black people (some with a baby carriage) walking by, and repeated herself.
The people she was referring to were nicely dressed and appeared to be enjoying themselves as they window shopped in the mall. I think I just mumbled something like “Mmmn” and returned my attention to my laptop. Then the elderly woman said, “Do you know that Hillary is coming here today?”
I nodded, “Yes. I just came from seeing Obama.”
She frowned at this news and then said, “I’m very excited to see Hillary. She knows how to deal with [she swept her hand around to indicate the mall crowd] this.”
I excused myself.
Race is going to be an issue in this race, and we can either worry about it or we can go to work to make sure tolerance and enlightenment prevail. Obama’s speech accomplished a lot, but he is no miracle worker. Let’s not forget that.
I think another group of voters that he needed to reach were those whites who were mildly inclined to support him and were suddenly reminded by the whole Rev. Wright controversy that Obama is, indeed, black. He had to convince them that he wasn’t Too Black or A Scary Black Guy. I think he was successful at that.
Second.
It wasn’t sudden. I’ve been reading the blogs of Clinton supporters for months and every vile thing that made it to the MSM was birthed there thanks to the Clinton campaign.
Try reading NQ or Taylor Marsh if you can stand it.
You have a stronger constitution than me if you can read either of those two blogs for more than 2 minutes. Really vile stuff.
Agreed. It was both heartening and disheartening to hear various caller comments this morning on CSPAN regarding Obama’s speech.
I’m embarrassed and dismayed to share a country with so many people who really do judge others by the color of their skin (or hair or the size of their breasts or car). So many are so superficial, so very small.
I like to hang out with big people, people with big hearts, big ideas, big compassion (no jokes re Big Love, please!) On these issues, size DOES matter.
But even with the mix of comments, I’m going to predict a five point bounce for Obama in a few days, when the results of his speech have been polled and analyzed. I think it opened the eyes of a lot of people who thought he was smart and nice, but really hadn’t considered him seriously for their choice of candidate.
I had a good friend last night tell me he was switching from Clinton to Obama after that speech. I’ve read several stories like that online. Yes, this doesn’t fix our racial divide, but if he has gotten people talking and thinking about this issue, we’ve taken a big step forward, together. And we did it thanks to the leadership of Barack Obama.
I think the reason you heard so many people bashing the speech is because Obama struck straight at the insecurity many people feel over their unconscious racism. They know it’s there, they know it shouldn’t be, and they’re guilty as hell about it. The people calling were probably the ones who were basically saying “Okay, sure, he’s said that, but I’m still not voting for him because he’s black. That’s ok, right?”
The economy will trump race this time out. Just because the market allowed some smart money to bail out yesterday doesn’t mean we won’t have a hair-raising contraction by later summer. The Reagan Dems — and they are aging and diminishing in number — will come home, mightly assisted by the $400 million that the union movement and other progressives are going to throw at the race this fall. The reagan dems will vote for Obama just like most of us Obama and Edwards fans would vote for Mrs. Clinton: with grittng teeth, but voting nonetheless.
I agree. I liked the speech and he said a lot of things that needed saying to everyone. But, I’ve also made my peace with the possibility that the electorate will again fall for the clown show antics – angry pastors, some guy with a sign somewhere, who invented the internet, windsurfing and so forth. If people are going to vote on such absurdities fucking country deserves everything it’s got coming in the next 4 years.
Also available in orange.
As Obama himself said, this is not going to change in one election cycle or even by one flawed candidate. But what he did do was change the conversation. There is no wind behind those old conversations.
Unfortunately, the racism of the elderly is probably a racism that we cannot change enough to turn them into Obama supporters. The simple truth is that older white people — especially older white women — are frightened by young black men, and that’s not going to change in less than eight months. Obama’s grandmother’s fears are not at all uncommon. Even those who concede that they find Obama to be “a nice young man” will often let on that they fear “he’ll be president for the blacks” (my grandfather’s exact words, and that’s an old white guy who voted for Barack!).
The racism of the middle-class whites of Boomer and X’er ages is another story, though — or so I, at least, think it is for now.
As they say, nothing worth doing is easy.
Well done! Might I suggest that there is another group to which the O man was directing his comments yesterday? I am referring to all of the young people that constitute a rather large part of his following. These new paticipants have one uniue characteristic and that is energy. Unbounded energy. If he has any chance at all in winning the nomination and the election, this group of younger voters will be the difference. I realize that the media tends to wave off their impact, yet if Obamas’ contributions reports are to be believed, there are literally hundreds of thousnds if not millions of “NEW VOTERS” all poised to give him a dramatic boost in his challenge. No one should blow off this group. If anything, more efforts should be employed to increase thier participation. Otherwise, what this man is trying to accomplish will not succeed.
I don’t think it was only intended for voters. If it were, I think it would have been delivered in a different forum, a forum that would have provided more energy, a more dynamic (read “expressive”) audience.
I haven’t heard anybody talking about this but I think the speech was also intended for party leaders (read “delegates”) and for pundits.
Obama’s immediate goal is not to win voters at this time but, rather to assure his own nomination. To do so, two of the most important things he had to do were:
I expect he scored big in both of these areas. (Granted, punditry will still over-react to elements of the matter but that’s how they keep themselves employed.)
Otherwise, as Huckabee said about the speech (and he said some nice things), its only March.
in any society there are those who will continue to nurture their racial prejudices as a comforter. Imho, Obama will not win over all; but enough to make a difference.
Know Hope.
Obama has already won. The remaining uncommitted super-delegates know it. Earlier, I listened to talk radio The Point. and Andrew Young, who has endorsed Hillary, was on the panel defending Obama and Wright! Many McCain supporters said they listened to and or watched the speech and have sent donations to Obama’s campaign. Something is happening here.
Yes the GOP will use Wright to assail Obama…but at a terrible cost – affirming that the GOP are totally racist.. and that’s why “we ride the donkey.” Using the Wright videos as a tool will ensure more Af-Am voters who are inclined to stay home will go out to vote.
I’m hopeful McCain will disavow…he did so in this Hannity interview...and one other reason to disavow; his adopted daughter of Muslim parentage from Bangaldesh. For those reasons, it will be very difficult for the GOP and 527s to use race and religion in the 2008 election campaign.
You didn’t honestly think race wasn’t going to be a factor? I thought everyone understood it was going to be a factor in the fall because the Republicans would make it a factor. The same way they would make Hillary’s gender a factor (and all the old white ladies who are scared of black people and would vote for Hillary are cancelled out by old white men who wouldn’t vote for a woman). I think we’re fortunate that it’s coming up now.
Yesterday’s speech wasn’t intended to convince the old people not to be racist. It was intended to get control of the media cycle, show the general population that he was unafraid to take risks and address issues head on, show that he wouldn’t be bullied (by not throwing his pastor under the bus) and lay the groundwork for future discussions about race. It also was an opportunity to once again make clear that he isn’t a Muslim. I thought he achieved all of that.
But it doesn’t mean he was going to gain a single vote from that speech. And it wasn’t going to eradicate racism over night. The fact that his speech was brilliant, though, might lay the groundwork for more progress than anyone had a right to expect going into that speech yesterday.
It could still go either way. The comments I’ve seen from all over are mixed at best, they fall into three categories:
Responses along 1 are from Obama supporters, 2 from Hillary supporters, and 3 from McCain supporters.
So where are the undecideds going to fall?
I’m wondering, why now? Those Wright sermons didn’t just appear on the church’s web site last week, did they? Someone sat on this and launched it at what they considered to be an auspicious time. Help me, I ignored this story at the beginning. Who first “broke the story”? And why didn’t they launch it before Edwards dropped out?
Slumming over at TalkLeft this a.m., I was surprised to see that Clinton supporters were openly saying that it was good strategy for Hillary to have delayed coming out for revotes in Florida and Michigan because it would have cut into the noise about Rev. Wright. That is, translated, it was better for Clinton to essentially play out the clock on giving those states a chance to revote so that this racial eruption could play out and hurt Obama.
There was an economic reason for slavery: cheap labor. And the rich benefited greatly from that. Slavery also devalued the freeman. And the rich benefited greatly from that too. All the Jim Crow laws functioned similarly to devalue labor. All labor. These “racist legalities” were accompanied by racialist myths to both scare the poor freeman and to ensure that they understood that they belonged to a separate and better class than blacks. The catch phrase for the poor white was, “At least I’m not a n***.”
That is essentially the Clinton strategy. Clinton’s supporters have gleefully embraced the divisions created by their rulers in the false hope that they can get their iconic figure in place. The amount of self-deception among them now approaches that among the Republicans. This is depressing. I’m tired of seeing the racism in Democrats’ comments.
I think the real point here is that Obama has fundamentally changed the way politics is done in this country. Race is woven firmly into the mix, but is not the core of it. I think anger, open anger, is what both the Wright attack, and then Obama’s speech, let out of the box. For years, decades, Dem candidates have been pussyfooting around, either doing their Hallmark card narcotics or trying to direct anger at specific instances of outrage.
Obama’s campaign has, for the first time, opened the dialog on the necessity, rightness, and legitimacy of anger itself. We’ve lived for years in a fantasyland where the population is palpably pissed off but retreats into a grotesque Stepford fog of anesthetic “positivism” and “pragmatism”. Obama has invited us see that the anger of blacks and whites and native Americans, the poor and the middle class, has legitimate causes — and is at bottom a shared affliction. The other part of the message is that we don’t have to just be mad, we can –yes we can — do something about it if we finally reject the scams of race and ethnicity and class and all the other superficial chains that have kept the failed ruling classses in power.
Maybe I’m just projecting my own inclinations on Obama, but it seems to me that he is on the way toward embracing a kind of velvet revolution — somehow I keep remembering the course of Vaclav Havel in Hungary. Whether that is truly Obama’s meaning, and if so, whether he is able to stay that course, is by no means settled. At the start of the primaries, Obama was not among my top 3 choices. I didn’t like the emptiness of “hope” the way he threw it around. Now I think he’s finally endowed that abstraction with flesh and bone by the very boldness of his gamble. He needed this crisis and he measured up to its challenge.
We should hesitate to make fast conclusions on the effect of these past couple weeks. What happened will percolate slowly through the population and within each individual’s consciousness like a landmark novel or deep wave of altered social awareness. I think the primaries are over as of now in the same sense that the shot is over once the arrow has left the bow. We don’t know where it will hit, but its course is fixed. Either Americans will grab this chance to finally remedy the chronic guilt and pain of race, class, and history or they will choose to revert to the old tribal nostrums. Whatever happens in this election, I will be relatively content knowing that the case for real hope and real change has been offered up with a vividness and integrity that would have seemed unthinkable only a few weeks ago.
Hillary seems to have a domineering streak that turns off around 50% of the voters immediately. Obama may offend some voters because he’s a blend of races but who isn’t some sort of a blend? Most reasonable people understand that we have common ancestors. Throw the aging McCain into the picture and one would have to admit he forgets a few facts with growing consistency – he might forget which button is which.
i find this post ironic, boo. but i agree with the argument: obama can’t do it alone. he’ll need your help, as well as your willingness to speak up.