A month or so back I said that Obama was going to pull racists into his coalition. Today’s dailykos has proof, a poster describing how his/her mother in Kentucky said she wasn’t "ready for a colored man to be president," and changed her mind in the last couple of weeks, because of the war, because of Hillary:
"Well, you know, he’s half white," she pointed out, as though that was some special revelation. "Maybe that’s a good thing, to have someone who can see things from the point of view of black people and white people."
Identity meant more when a mountain range–or a quota, or a color ban– separated you from the next tribe. The world’s too small for all that. And identity is evolving before our eyes. Black, white, southern, Jewish, Catholic. Just watch the kids, it’s fluid…
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Obama is his mother's son. In his wide-open rhetoric about what can be instead of what was, you see a hint of his mother's credulity. When Obama gets donations from people who have never believed in politics before, they're responding to his ability—passed down from his mother—to make a powerful argument (that happens to be very liberal) without using a trace of ideology. On a good day, when he figures out how to move a crowd of thousands of people very different from himself, it has something to do with having had a parent who gazed at different cultures the way other people study gems.
It turns out that Obama's nascent career peddling hope is a family business. He inherited it. And while it is true that he has not been profoundly tested, he was raised by someone who was.
In her own way, Ann tried to compensate for the absence of black people in her son's life. At night, she came home from work with books on the civil rights movement and recordings of Mahalia Jackson. Her aspirations for racial harmony were simplistic. "She was very much of the early Dr. [Martin Luther] King era," Obama says. "She believed that people were all basically the same under their skin, that bigotry of any sort was wrong and that the goal was then to treat everybody as unique individuals." Ann gave her daughter, who was born in 1970, dolls of every hue: "A pretty black girl with braids, an Inuit, Sacagawea, a little Dutch boy with clogs," says Soetoro-Ng, laughing. "It was like the United Nations."
Obama's mother cared deeply about helping poor women, and she had two biracial children. But neither of them remembers her talking about sexism or racism. "She spoke mostly in positive terms: what we are trying to do and what we can do," says Soetoro-Ng, who is now a history teacher at a girls' high school in Honolulu. "She wasn't ideological," notes Obama. "I inherited that, I think, from her. She was suspicious of cant." He remembers her joking that she wanted to get paid as much as a man, but it didn't mean she would stop shaving her legs. In his recent Philadelphia speech on race, in which he acknowledged the grievances of blacks and whites, Obama was consciously channeling his mother. "When I was writing that speech," he told nbc News, "her memory loomed over me. Is this something that she would trust?" When it came to race, Obama told me, "I don't think she was entirely comfortable with the more aggressive or militant approaches to African-American politics."
Ann's most lasting professional legacy was to help build the microfinance program in Indonesia, which she did from 1988 to '92—before the practice of granting tiny loans to credit-poor entrepreneurs was an established success story. Her anthropological research into how real people worked helped inform the policies set by the Bank Rakyat Indonesia, says Patten, an economist who worked there. "I would say her work had a lot to do with the success of the program," he says. Today Indonesia's microfinance program is No. 1 in the world in terms of savers, with 31 million members, according to Microfinance Information eXchange Inc., a microfinance-tracking outfit.
On the other foot, I just read where Obama's 2006 IRS return shows he gave 22 thousand dollars to Wright's church.
The truth is, Obama's a loose cannon, plagued by issues of self-identity, trying even in his sleep for a solution. I think he banks to the black left when push comes to shove, and, e.g., lunch pail PA white voters felt it–not because of his bowling score.
But what's the competition? Hillary? McCain? They're both just totally egotistical power mongers. Obama's very ambiguity to himself offers more promise, though I think he's not much better.
I would never normally vote for someone as far left as Obama but it is such a pleasure to listen to him speak. In contrast to Bush or Hillary or McCain he actually says the unexpected. He makes subtle distinctions. He cares about how his sentences sound. He would never express himself so crudely as to say, as Bush famously did, "I am the decider." But it is true that he doesn't have much experience. Once inaugurated, He will make rookie mistakies. He will be a deer in the headlights the first time the red phone rings at 3 am. The good news is he learns fast. He doesn't pander. And best of all he's not Hillary and he's not McCain.
Speaking of the late vanquished Hillary,I can't believe how desperate she has become. Yesterday she said she should get the nomination because she had the support of "hardworking Americans, white Americans." As opposed to what? Lazy, non-white Americans?
Duscany, you are right, especially about how he talks as compared to the others–his normal facility as described by you did fail however at Bittergate, PA. He made a few freudian slips/ disconnects there. Praise the Lord and Pass the Ammunition once upon in America was patriotic, not merely a signifier of
bigoted, bitter losers full of god & guns. I have a friend who would say that was like Obama's perfect OJ trial witness Mark Furhman's downfall.
Charles, you may be on to something there. If Bittergate and the Rev. Wright revelations had happened, say, two weeks before Super Tuesday. Obama might not be ahead today.
Yeah the problem is who do we vote for? I guess I'll take Obama as the lesser of three evils. I did the same voting for Kerry, a real puke. Waitm maybe I will vote for Ron Paul–I gave money to him and I am not a rich person. Just to send a message the usual pundits will mostly ignore….
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