Los Angeles MayDay March 2006
Dear sirs:
In a recent post, Booman outlined his take on how Barack Obama should approach the rest of this campaign. (My Advice) It is a fairly mainstream political prescription, one that I am sure would not alarm the many mainstream political hacks and lampreys that have attached themselves to the Obama campaign, and I believe that it is dead wrong.
The addition of Palin to the Ratpub ticket has changed everything, and it is now time…almost past time, I fear…for Obama to go for broke.
Whole hog plus postage.
Go to his real base.
The so-called “”minorities” of this country.
All of them.
Racial, sexual, age-related, income-related…the works.
A coalition consisting of a sufficient number of minorities equals a majority.
It’s the democratic way.
It USED to be the Democratic Party way as well.
Read on for my argument regarding this idea.
Booman wrote:
I firmly believe that Barack Obama is going to turn out his base without a lot of additional effort. I mean that Obama will get huge urban turnout, he’ll crush in college towns, he’ll get the Jewish vote in places like southeast Florida, Northern Virginia, and the Philly suburbs, and he’ll do very well with all core Democratic groups except lower class, low-education whites.
Oh.
You mean that he will get basically the same “base” that did not succeed in electing Gore and Small K kerry. I am simply thrilled by this idea.
So are the McCain people. Bet on it.
Obama should not worry about making campaign stops in places like St. Louis and Cleveland.
Bullshit.
He ought to be in every city that has a good-sized black and Hispanic population every day of the week and twice on Sundays, and he ought to be raising holy hell in those cities. Large cities AND small. There has been a demographic shift in the U.S. regarding where minorities live over the past decade as the inner cities have become “gentrified”. (Read “whitified” to all intents and purposes. Monified.) This has forced a HUGE segment of the minority populations out into the smaller cities…places like White Plains and other small cities and towns along the Hudson in New York State, for example. It’s the same everywhere else in the country as well. Been there; played for them. Obama needs to be preaching to a choir that is not all that hot about his act. He needs a massive minority vote to win. An historically significant minority vote. And I do not think that he is going to get it if he continues along his present campaign path. He has spent enormous amounts of energy trying to diminish the public consciousness of his race in an effort to attract the white voters to whom Booman so disdainfully refers as “lower class” and it is not working. (Your own prejudices are showing there with that “lower class” shit, suburban-bred Booman. Try “working class” next time. You be bettah off.) To expand upon the apparent gaffe riff of the week, you can put lipstick on a black man but in major parts of this society it will only emphasize his otherness. There it is; live with it. Obama should learn to live with it as well. The canny addition of Palin to the Rat team has ended all hope that he might have had of capturing the working class white vote that Hillary Clinton so handily took away from him in the primaries once she realized the necessity of doing so. Number one, it is largely a racist vote…do not doubt that for a second…and number two, half of that vote is female and at least another half of it of it is Sunday go t’meetin’ Christian. Votes travel on societal lines, and the Rats have (brilliantly) put up a candidate who is the very picture of the swing voter in this country.
YOU know…the ones who identified with and/or lusted after Bill Clinton in the ’90s?
White, 30-ish/40-ish, avowedly Protestant Christian, and a woman to boot. That’s a win/win/win/win proposition in Politics 101, in case you missed that class over the last 50 years or so. Identity politics. Other women of her social class will identify with her and their men will wish their old lady was as successful as has been Palin so that they could buy a boat and go fishing instead of driving a fucking fork lift six days a week.
BRILLIANT!!!
UH OH!!!
All Obama has left is the college-educated middle and upper middle class, some part of the historically Democratic unionized white working class (Also racist to the core. Bet on it. In the privacy of the voting booth? For a large percentage of those working class white Dems? “I CAIN’T DO IT!!! I CAIN’T VOTE FER NO NIGRAH!!!” Bet on it.), the flaky “youth vote” (“What day is it? Wednesday? Oh shit. I missed vote day. Oh well…” and back to their jive little iPods and text messaging.), and something to which Booman coyly refers as a “huge urban turnout”.
AIN’T no huge urban turnout without a huge minority turnout. And Obama is in the process of losing…or has already lost… large parts of the minority vote in this country. Bet on that as well. It’s not that blacks and Hispanics are going to vote for McCain. No person of color who is not a totally corrupt hustler and/or a complete fool could possibly have missed the racist signs so prominently displayed by the Ratpublicans over the past 40+ years. Many of them are simply not motivated to vote for Obama AND WILL THUS EQUALLY SIMPLY STAY THE FUCK HOME. And why? Because they feel that he is just another “more of the same” candidate (The Dems have been only a little bit better in this regard than the Rats. Check out Nancy Pelosi for more on this idea if you have sufficient raydar…like gaydar only regarding race…to pick up the signals.), the only real difference being that this time the candidate has a pretty good tan.
Sorry, but there it is, and Obama DID THIS HIMSELF.
Quite consciously and with good political reasons as well.
He really had little choice in the matter if he was going to beat Clinton in the primaries. He barely beat her as it was, and had he run blacker…shit, it would be a Clinton/Obama ticket now, and the whole (no pun intended) complexion of the race would be different. For one thing Palin would be back in Alaska where she belongs, baking cookies and speaking in tongues, and McCain would probably have had to take yet another dull, middle aged/middle manager white man as his running mate. YUM!!! If you doubt this, imagine what would have happened if Obama had said “Yeah, I heard Rev. Wright’s statements about race in America and I have also heard…often heard… Michelle’s statements about not feeling very proud to be an American. What’s it to ya? What kind of black person would feel otherwise given the rampant racism that has existed here for 300+ years? I am here to CHANGE that state of affairs, to end it once and for all!” The racist white media would have ripped him seventeen new assholes. They almost took him down as he tapdanced away from that trap.
However…so it goes; so it has gone and here we jolly well are, aren’t we.
I believe that it is time for Obama to go all in with his remaining chips while he still has some chips. Time to stand up and PROCLAIM his blackness. I think that the United States stands balanced on a societal precipice between its racist past and an inclusive future, and that if we do not manage to tilt towards that future we are going to fall into the past once again and go the way of all things past.
Into oblivion.
I really believe this. I see it everywhere that I go here. Here AND in the rest of the world. (See my recent post regarding My Excellent South African Adventure for more on that subject.) The power of social evolution now lies with the peoples of the Third World, and we either ally ourselves with that power…a power that exists right here in America as well…or we will go down like the dinosaurs that we are rapidly beginning to resemble.
If Obama taps into this future, he will win and we will remain a nation.
If he does not?
This time I think that it will be all over. Another 8 years of Rat rule will finish us.
Booman says:
Trust your own base and go after McCain’s base.
I say:
Find your real base, appeal to it and FUCK McCain’s base.
McCain’s “base” is ignorant, racist and SO over.
Go with the future?
Why?
Because the future ALWAYS wins eventually.
That’s the way it works. Duh.
Martin Luther King Jr. knew.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Ally yourself with that arc, Barack. Go whole hog plus postage. It’s your only chance now.
It is OUR only chance.
Stop parsing. It ain’t working.
VAYA!!!
Later…
AG
P.S. What’s that?
Y’say that by following my advice Obama will undoubtedly lose enough white voters to ensure a loss?
Au contraire, Dogsbreath!
I beg to differ.
Not if he does it right. Not if he APPEALS TO THEIR OWN SELF-INTEREST.
How?
By making the social ecology argument.
Long story short?
Provide equal opportunities for all the people in this country…equal educational opportunities, equal employment opportunities…and within one generation the incredibly wasteful so-called social and justice systems that have grown up here to administer to the needs (Read “Keep ’em alive but just barely.”) of those who are most directly affected by endemic and racially enforced poverty would be as good as gone. Take that drag off of the economy; add a new, highly capable and optimistic segment to the workforce; reduce the further economic drag of the ongoing bloated military system that is needed to enforce our obviously outdated and overmatched economic imperialist policies abroad; reduce our reliance on foreign fuel by a massive, WPA/WW II-style national effort and what do you have?
A RENAISSANCE, baby.
A renaissance.
Quite literally…a rebirth of America.
Now’s the time, Barack.
YOU know that Bird tune, don’tcha? Now’s The Time? You listen to some serious jazz, right? LEARN FROM IT.
It’s just a simple blues. But what he does with it!!!
Bird knew. It’s as serious as death.
You should know too. And fer chrissake…ACT upon what you know.
Bet on it.
It’s now or never.
Bet on it.
Bet on it.
AG
I’m convinced…. Big Oil and Big Pharma ain’t gonna let Obama win. McCain is their man, Palin their boon and they got lots of excuses for shenanigans:
for starters: prick open the E-voting machines, in all of 18 seconds.
the Bradley effect – even if Obama had a 40 point lead to November 4, it’ll be said that when white Americans entered the privacy of the voting booth, they just could not pull the lever for that black guy to go live in the White House. Get the pun? No surprise there.
As scary as McCain-Palin is, this ticket suits the big boys – continue the NeoCon/Christian right-wingnut agenda into the end times while they rake in war profits.
Big Oil is helping out, against ALL fundamentals. Oil traded under $99/bbl just minutes ago; the agenda is to lower gasoline to under $3.50 gallon by election day…paints a picture of happy times until November 5th.
With eyes wide shut, by default, we get a government against our best interests. Flouridated water and bubblevision from CNN and FOx, works very well – swell our brains and put us to sleep so we won’t know what hits us. And, who cares about the minorities?
BTW, Bill Clinton and others are sitting on their butts – It’s a self-fulfilling prophecy that Obama will loose on November 4…opening the way to 2012.
Thankfully, I can live elsewhere and avoid the great American Depression II. Fannie and Freddie are the canaries..yet it’s still happy lalaland. The next up to be rescued is Lehman, followed by the FDIC in toe with 700 banks, and a default on USTreasury bonds as WWIII comes into focus. Unsustainable.
The McCain-Palin Administration knows squat, can’t add 1+1=. THe Neocons will tell them the answer is 5. Can McCain-Palin get their minds around $100 trillion of debt? Ooops, $100 trillion is the low end. A debt so massive, it’ll be paid by defaulting.
Not my thoughts. If you were watching Bloomberg yesterday you’d have heard “it’s possible there’ll be a default of the USTreasury bonds. Paulson’s bank account is wiped clean by Fannie and Freddie.
A massive shock wave cometh. The US are bereft of friends and allies. You can’t sell friends trillions of fraudulent bonds and expect they’ll remain your friends.
I root for Obama, have put in time for him. But on the other side of my heart, I know a McCain win will be a blessing for Obama. It’ll spare him the shitpile.
A massive shock wave of fWMDs cometh. And that’s bankable
America’s achilles heel is Debt. Trillions of debt. Bush used 9/11 to change the American dream.
A lot to digest in there, AG. I have the same fears that you do. And I have observed here locally a lot of the things that you point out with regard to the steady drain of support for Obama from the “working class”.
And with the tone that the media portrayal is now driving I fear that from now to November we might see the death of another promising Democratic campaign from a thousand paper cuts.
I think the Obama campaign is in deep shit. I don’t know what the answer is. I’m no political campaign guru but I would think that with blueprint that has been followed by the GOP again and again for the last several election cycles that the Democrats should have been very well prepared for what has transpired. Yet, once again, they seem to have been caught off guard. I sit near the middle of the country in a largely GOP area. But even here, there was a lot of potential for Obama support in the early days. But I can tell you now, that opportunity is long gone. The window is closed. The McCain campaign has once again gone to the tried and true methods. And it is working. My fear is that similar things are happening in many, many areas of the country where the ground was fertile for a Democratic message.
Obama might well pull this out. But we are now dealing with an election so close that marginalization of voters and theft might be just enough to pull this out once again for the GOP.
That’s not Houston.
That’s the Los Angeles immigrant protest. That picture was on the front page of the LA Times.
Here’s a picture of the same scene but from closer. (And this is not the LA Times picture – but I’m in a hurry. Someone clearly mislabeled the other one and Arthur fell for it. I live in LA, so I know that building.)
I shoulda recognized the LA Cop building from Dragnet.
AG
MINOR error.
Same people, different venue.
But thanks for the heads up, Lisa.
AG
I use lower class deliberately. Working class voters are wage earners. Some wage earners are middle class. Some are upper middle class.
Obama doesn’t have a problem with them. Obama’s problem comes from poor white people. The fact that the term ‘lower class’ has connotations of ‘low class’ makes you see disdain. But I want to send that message when it comes to people whose race-hatred blurs their own self-interest.
Good post. Billmon has some good thoughts on the future political landscape and minorities:
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/9/7/205533/4172/462/590433
The benefit of Obama following your advice is even if he loses he could win the younger generation which will pay dividends in the future.
I do not think that we will HAVE much of a future with McCain at the helm.
I really don’t.
AG
Obama doesn’t have much of a chance changing the long-term dynamic. He may slow but he will not fundamentally change the rightward tilt of the government and other pillars of power. So Obama may be more like a temporary salve than he is a salvation.
Nor will he make our national “dialogue” more fair to liberals–at least if he follows the current Democratic parties’ political practices. They have been committing gross political malpractice for years now.
Obama has shown to be a bit brighter than other Democrats in dealing with the GOP and its media sycophants and by picking Biden I saw some promise that he was willing to finally take a little bit of fight to the Republicans. But we’ll see if he puts the muzzle on Biden right at the very first hissy fit the GOP has. And he hasn’t been any better at whipping the Democrats into any sort of organized attack.
But I do see a positive for the Democrats whether Obama wins or loses. Even if Obama loses the Democrats will have been the first party to nominate a black man and that is something they will be able to use to their benefit for a generation.
Assuming we’re around for another generation . . .
Either we get Obama or we get McSame. We still have to all deal with the economic meltdown approaching.
The McSame plan just has a more rigidly defined police state when the riots break out.
And that’s a GOOD thing?
Of course not.
I am rooting for the least defined side, myself.
Wiggle room is precious in this increasingly digitally observed security state.
Bet on it.
AG
Meh, suppose you have a point there.
I wanna get this in quick so my comment doesn’t wind up 542nd in the reading queue. Listen AG and BooMan and the rest of y’all at this time there is only one set of facts that are REAL. FUTURE MODERATE and PROGRESSIVE hopes ride on Barack’s narrow shoulders. In essence everyone who regards themselves NOT TO BE IN THE CONSERVATIVE RIGHT or SYMPATHETIC TO IT has a BIG STAKE in the fight over the 2008 Presidential election. WHY?? Two word SUPREME COURT!!! If McCain wins, he will stack the court. 5 + 2 = STACKED!! So until nature unstacks the court, the world for American Progressives will be one of endless compromises on BAD, BADDER, and WORSE.
No matter if the Dems take over the Presidency and Congress in 2012, the Repubs will use their Supreme Court like a New York City Cop uses his billy club! Kiss Rove V Wade goodbye. Unions forget about future membership and shop turf. You’ll have a steady diet of “Right to Work” decisions to chew on. Environmentalist groups will be deluged with hundreds of cases designed to roll back the clock. Southern states will take this opportunity to get courts to ratify more segregation in their respective school districts.
This what this election is all about and people better
WTFU! I don’t give a shit what your little sweet spot is! Unless you’re a hard line right wing libertarian Conservative you better PUT EVERYTHING YOU GOT, and I mean SHOESOLES, ELBOWS, and ASSHOLES behind the OBAMA Campaign. Right now the question is one of survival and at this point it matters little what the COLOR of the GUY carrying the FLAG is. Y’all need to get with the PROGRAM.
Now as to Obama getting back with his Black folks, I’ll grant you that there are some 8 million Black voters unregistered, and brother that’s a problem that goes all the way back to Reconstruction. Pookie is not going to get excited because a Colored man is running for President. Even though Pookie ain’t doing shit, he’ll always tell you that he’s too busy to go and get registered. You see from Pookie’s point of view, he has NO STAKE in this election. Even though Pookie knows where the location of the state prison and may even have some homies inside, Pookie will still from time to time go out and do stupid stuff, because you see Pookie just doesn’t give a damn. Folks been working on dudes like Pookie for decades with some progress but its a tough slog to get inside Pookie’s head. So we get who we van and when we can.
So I agree with AG a barn burning gigantic voter registration drive will help but it is not the final solution. What works is everybody rolling up their sleeves and pitching in to the max. Folks this is WAR and if we loose this battle, America will be in the toilet for the next 3 generations. Point is NOBODY ELSE is going to CARRY WATER to put out this “arcane McCain” FIRE, ‘cept YOU and I and anybody else we can get our hands on…..