National Review Online: The Manchurian Candidate III

National Review Online

The Manchurian Candidate III

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EXT. HONOLULU — PUNAHOU SCHOOL — DAY (1971)
Paradise on earth.  But our hero, young fifth-grader RAYMOND SHAW, is not happy.  Half-Kansan and half-Kenyan, he’s spent much of his childhood in Muslim Indonesia, where he’s learned to recite the Koran in Arabic.  Although Hawaii is multi-racial (Japanese, Chinese, Hawaii, Filipino, Samoan, and white, both native-born and military), the black/white structural paradigm so beloved of the New York Times does not obtain there, since there are precious few African Americans in the islands.  

Heroically, Raymond does what he can to impose an artificial, Bull Connor narrative on his life, but with white people — politely called haoles in pidgin English and effin-haoles in common parlance — making up less than a third of the population, it’s tough to pretend he lives in the Deep South.  Alone and nearly friendless, he consoles himself by shooting hoops and writing bad poetry and, later experimenting with drugs and alcohol.

Destiny takes a hand when his typical white grandfather, a disaffected midwesterner who has drifted from Kansas to radical Mercer Island, Washington, to lefty Honolulu, introduces Raymond to FRANK, a “progressive” who advocates the destruction of capitalism and its replacement by socialism.  Frank had once been a columnist for the Chicago Star, a “labor-community organizer” newspaper in the city that had given birth to the Communist Party USA 1919.  

Raymond thrills to Paul Robeson recordings and the older man’s denunciation of the “racist white power structure,” while raptly listening to tales of a magical and wondrous placed called “Chicago.”  Chicago is not only the city of Al Capone, Moses Annenberg, and Dion O’Bannion, it’s also the center of Black Capitalism, the successor to Harlem as the mecca for blacks.  It’s home, too, to the “Nation of Islam,” whose close-cropped adherents wear simple dark suits and narrow ties — a costume Raymond himself will later adopt.

One night, Frank looks at Raymond and says: You are the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known in my life, and hails the boy as “the Expected One.” Raymond vows that, someday, he too will go to Chicago and become a community organizer… and perhaps even more.  Frank gives the boy a copy of Dune. 

TPM Election Central: Obama Volunteer On Scene Disputes Fox News’ Suggestions That Black Panthers Are Initimidating Voters

TPM Election Central (11/4/08)

Obama Volunteer Disputes Suggestions that Black Panthers are Initimidating Voters

Fox News and other conservatives on the Web are pushing hard on the story that two black panthers may be intimidating voters at a polling place in north Philadelphia.

But an Obama campaign volunteer who’s been on the scene since 6:30 AM this morning tells me in a phone interview that there’s been absolutely no intimidation of voters at all today. And a Pennsylvania spokesperson for Obama said the two men aren’t in any way affiliated with the campaign.

Fox News’ story is right here. It says one of two black panthers on the scene was “allegedly blocking the door,” says another was “holding a nightstick.” and adds that “the concern was that they were intimidating people who were trying to go inside to vote.”

But Jacqueline Dischell, the Obama volunteer, tells me by phone that that’s false.

Dischell confirms that there were in fact two black panthers guarding the polling place, a nursing home on Fairmont Avenue in north Philadelphia, earlier this morning.

But she says one was an officially designated poll watcher (it was not immediately clear which municipal office had designated him in that role), and the second was his friend. The second panther, who left two or three hours ago, was the one with the nightstick, she says.

Dischell says that earlier this morning a few men who identified themselves as being from the McCain campaign came and started taking pictures of the two panthers on their cell phones. She suggested that they seemed to be baiting the panthers, and that the designated watcher may have given one of them the finger in response to the picture taking.

The police came roughly an hour and a half later. She says she talked to the cops and told them there had been no incident. The police drove away without getting out of the car, she adds.

Salon: Black presidents we have known

Salon

Black presidents we have known

What does it look like to have an African-American in the White House? Pop culture has offered versions awful and great, from Sammy Davis Jr. to Chris Rock.

If Barack Obama wins Tuesday, he might begin his victory speech by thanking Dennis Haysbert.

At least Dennis Haysbert seems to think so. Months ago, he declared that his portrayal of a black president on Fox’s “24” series had paved the way for the real-life senator from Illinois. “If anything, my portrayal of David Palmer, I think, may have helped open the eyes of the American people. And I mean the American people from across the board — from the poorest to the richest, every color and creed, every religious base — to prove the possibility there could be an African-American president, a female president, any type of president that puts the people first.”

He may be on to something. As one of “24’s” most dedicated and ambivalent fans, I have always marveled that a single program could accommodate both Dick Cheneyesque interrogation techniques and the liberal wet dream that is David Palmer. Unassailable in his goodness, ironclad in his resolve, Palmer is only incidentally a black man, and he is, not so coincidentally, everything you could want or need in a commander in chief. In the checks-and-balances universe of “24,” a figure of such virtue cannot live indefinitely, and in the opening episode of Season 5, David Palmer was duly sent to his reward. His legacy lived on, fitfully, in younger brother Wayne (D.B. Woodside), who overcame his wicked-pol origins (and his goatee) to become the Bobby to David’s JFK. “24” is hyper-adrenalized pulp, but pulp can be as good a teacher as art — better, maybe — and it’s hard to deny that six years of the Palmer brothers have inured a whole segment of Fox America to the sight of black faces in the Oval Office. But, in fact, the Palmers are just the latest milepost in a long road of acculturation that has taken several curious detours along the way.

To the audiences of the early 20th century, perhaps the most defining image of black power was provided by “The Birth of a Nation” (1915), which shows the Reconstruction Legislature of South Carolina overrun by barefoot black legislators — an open reproach to everything white civilization holds dear. Given the prevailing political climate, it’s no wonder that the idea of a black president, before it could be broached anywhere else, had to be considered through the prism of fantasy.

In 1926, a Brazilian children’s author named Monteiro Lobato had to look far into the future — the year 2228, to be exact — to imagine an African-American president. In Lobato’s obscure, half-prescient novel, “O Presidente Negro (The Black President),” a politician named Jim Roy, leader of the Black Association party, actually succeeds in claiming America’s highest office, only to be undone by a coalition between the incumbent white president and a white feminist named Evelyn Astor. Roy is murdered in short order, leaving his race to be sterilized into extinction by “the Aryan super-civilization.” See where ambition gets you?

Fantasy of a different order is on view in “Rufus Jones for President” (1933), a bizarre Vitaphone musical short in which a black mother (the great jazz-blues singer Ethel Waters) dreams that her little boy (an immediately recognizable Sammy Davis Jr.) has been elected president. A modern viewer barely has time to register the aspiration before recoiling at the racial slurs that were common to that day: black voters lured to the polls with free pork chops; Rufus celebrating his victory with a half-eaten piece of chicken; a presidential platform that calls for unlatching chicken coops and planting watermelon vines close to the fence.

From bulging eyes to happy feet, scarcely a single racist trope is omitted from this 23-minute film. But perhaps the most disturbing sight is Davis, whose grown-up clothing and prematurely aged face give him the appearance less of a child than of a midget. It’s as though the filmmakers understood that the only way to make a black president pass with Depression-era audiences was to shrink him into freakish insignificance.

Newsweek: Howard Fineman: Campaign Avoided Racial Warfare

Newsweek: Howard Fineman

Campaign Avoided Racial Warfare

You knew it was going to happen. I’m only surprised it took so long. 

In Pennsylvania, Sen. John McCain’s must-win blue state, local Republicans now are up with a TV ad linking Sen. Barack Obama to his former pastor, the corrosively race-based Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

The ad plays Wright’s familiar “no, no, no” and “KKK” clips from incendiary sermons, and asks how Obama could ever have countenanced the guy. In fact, Obama no longer does. The split was final. 

The McCain campaign distanced itself from the ad, insisting that they didn’t approve of–but could not prevent–the spot being aired.

But here is the good news, and I don’t mean for either campaign but for the entire country: so far as I know, the ad was the first of its kind to be sponsored by a state party or other above-ground entity.

Obama’s longtime relationship with Wright–and especially the Illinois senator’s shaded and reluctant characterizations of it–may be valid topics of debate. But McCain and the GOP largely have stayed away from the subject. 

And that is a good thing. There are plenty of other topics to discuss.

I am willing–we all should be willing–to give McCain the benefit of the doubt on his motives. True, he voted against the Martin Luther King holiday a quarter century ago, and, in this year’s South Carolina primary, he allied himself with some of the same operatives who savaged him on racial grounds (over his adoptive daughter from Bangladesh) when he ran against George W. Bush in 2000.

But I know McCain and know that he does not have a racist molecule in his body, and that he is no fan, at heart, of the kind of politics that pokes at racial or religious sore spots in someone else’s life.

Nashville Post Politics: Hard Right

Nashville Post Politics

Hard Right

Hard Right

By KleinheiderPosted on November 3, 2008 at 6:56 am

TNGOP Chair Robin Smith makes the case for hard right populist conservatism in Tennessee:

State GOP Chairwoman Robin Smith, though, rejects any notion of a moderate Tennessee electorate or an Obama-built Democratic insurgency growing anywhere near the state’s rural interior.

“Without question, the Obamacrats are strong in the urban areas and the areas where people are dependent on a welfare state,” Smith said. “(But) Democrats in their literature, piece by piece, point by point, if you took their names off, will look Republican.”

She added: “I think it’s absolutely hypocrisy and a lie that they have any coattails of Barack Obama in this state.”

Smith said she thinks there is enough distance between Tennessee Republicans and the heavily criticized national party to allow the local group’s influence to grow in the state, forecasting a full legislative takeover in the near future.

“If we don’t make history in this election cycle, I think we will in 2010,” she said.

Racism Review: On Racism, “Better Angels” and Self-Interest

Racism Review

On Racism, “Better Angels” and Self-Interest

The election is almost here and the news involving racism just gets more complex with each passing day.    While a few commentators wonderwhether the country is truly prepared for a black President, while McCain says race will “play no part” in the election and Obama calls on the “better angels” and tries to reassure voters that they do not need to fear “secret racism.” The facile notion that racists will vote for McCain and those free of racism will vote for Obama is far too simplistic to hold much weight in this intricate knot of an election season (image from here).  Some of the complexity here around racism is illustrated in a thoughtful piece at Salon.com by James Hannaham, called “Racists for Obama”.   About half way in, Hannaham makes this provocative observation:

“The number of racists who aren’t voting for Obama isn’t as interesting as the number of racists who are. That he has any racist supporters at all points to a quality in bigotry that few people ever acknowledge — flexibility. It’s usually assumed that racism is all-powerful, that it alone will cause someone to vote against a black candidate. But blackness is just one possible plus or minus in a balance sheet with many entries. In an abysmal economy during which the white candidate’s campaign has seemed disorganized and erratic, common sense or shared values can prevail over gut fears about the color of a candidate’s skin.”

Hannaham then goes on to refer to the analogy (attributed to Democratic strategist Paul Begala) about asking a white voter, “How would you feel about a large black man kicking your door in,” they would say, “That doesn’t sound good to me… “   But any reasonable person would change their response if they heard the additional information that “Your house is on fire, and the firefighter happens to be black.” Hannaham uses that to argue:

“Perhaps urgent circumstances require so much self-interest that racism can wait, at least until the crisis is over. Maybe this is why Obama’s poll numbers seemed to rise along with the volatility of the world’s financial markets.”

These are interesting times to try and understand the complexiites of racial politics.  I do hope that tomorrow people will call on their “better angels,” or simply their self-interest, and vote for change.

Minnesota Independent: Crystal ball: The future looks (extreme) right

Minnesota Independent

Crystal ball: The future looks (extreme) right

There’s little doubt Sarah Palin is poising herself to become the new voice of the Republican party. As she campaigns for McCain, going rogue has not only become her norm, it’s become her platform. Her pro-”redneck” America, her “real” America, is really code for white, rural America. And like in the late 60s, when the white supremacist George Wallace  used thinly veiled hate speech so as to inoculate himself from claims of overt racism, Palin and her followers are gaining momentum by embracing fear and intolerance and using similarly coded language. In yesterday’s Op-Ed column in the New York Times, Paul Krugman predicted this new movement–led by the Palins and the Michele Bachmanns–will only get uglier and increasingly bigoted.

But the G.O.P.’s long transformation into the party of the unreasonable right, a haven for racists and reactionaries, seems likely to accelerate as a result of the impending defeat.

This will pose a dilemma for moderate conservatives. Many of them spent the Bush years in denial, closing their eyes to the administration’s dishonesty and contempt for the rule of law. Some of them have tried to maintain that denial through this year’s election season, even as the McCain-Palin campaign’s tactics have grown ever uglier. But one of these days they’re going to have to realize that the G.O.P. has become the party of intolerance.

Nerve: 20 Greatest Political Campaign Ads of all Time

Nerve

20 Greatest Political Campaign Ads of all Time

(ed note, check #19, 16, 11, 4, and this one not on the list.)

 

The Threat of Race: PRESIDENTIAL RACE by David Theo Goldberg

The Threat of Race

PRESIDENTIAL RACE by David Theo Goldberg

Barack Obama’s candidacy for the American Presidency has proved that racism in America is pretty much a thing of the past. Whether or not he wins, a black man has broken the barrier of racism in American politics. His candidacy has proven how inconsequential racism has become in a land long scarred by it.  If a black man can rise to the nation’s highest office and can occupy the most powerful position in the world, racism can be no more than the sometime pernicious, occasionally violent but decidedly intermittent expressions of misguided individuals. The deep commitment to freedom of expression means that the country will just have to put up with these anomalies. It is the price to be paid for America’s unstinting commitment to liberty.

Or so mainstream political pundits would have it. And perhaps America’s Main Street too.

Underpinning this position is the presumption, sometimes a charge, that any invocation of race is wrong. Whether to signal differentiated experiences, to explain pernicious treatment, or to indicate unfair burdens borne, invoking race is considered a wrong worse than the experiences, treatment, or burdens themselves.  Expression, it seems, is free so long as hewing to the prescribed script. Some, it turns out, are freer than others. And that freedom  still very much tracks racially.

To keep insisting that Obama introduced race into the presidential campaign by saying he doesn’t look like past presidents on America’s paper currency is to keep introjecting race into the campaign. It is to keep reminding the electorate that Barack Obama is black, “not like us,” different than “we” are used to, a “risky choice.” And to do so in the guise of insisting that in this polity one should not now publicly speak of race by naming it; race can only be spoken for the most part by indirection. ThatObama is black introduces race into the campaign; which is another way of saying that in America a serious black presidential contender still inevitably makes race a factor. Just as an all-white field would but only silently, without mentioning it, making it a non-thought.

Why should this surprise? One of George W. Bush’s Republican Convention Committees had three joint honorary chairs, each representing America’s major minorities (blacks, Hispanics, women). This at a party convention the racial minority delegates for which comprised less than 5 percent of the total. The point, of course, was to attract “target of opportunity” votes.  For a polity in which race and gender are to make no preferential distinction, they clearly have remained compelling variables in the political calculus.  It may be illegitimate to name race; but the denial is at once to re-affirm its tentacled hold.  Perhaps the very point of the persistent denial.

BAGNews: Campaign ’08 Final Weekend 1: Presidential Suspect Escapes On Foot

BAGNews

Campaign ’08 Final Weekend 1: Presidential Suspect Escapes On Foot

Not surprisingly, there’s a lot of nasty business going down this weekend.

Drudge never runs a photo credit so I don’t know where he got this shot of Obama and Sasha on Halloween. I couldn’t find it anywhere else.

What happened is that Obama had first admonished the regular pool crew to give him and his daughter some space. After they backed off, though, a Polish crew (that didn’t understand English) kept pursuing him. At that point, Obama, who had been walking Sasha to a Halloween party in his neighborhood, broke into a run.

The appropriately named Chi Trib “Swamp” blog had the cute idea to write up the incident in the form of a police report. You know, the kind where the black suspect is being pursued on foot until he makes a run for it. Here are snips:

Obama was wearing sunglasses, dark slacks, a dark jacket partly unzipped to show a white shirt, no tie. Sasha was wearing a white cape and what appeared to be a black leotard. This costume had been described previously as a “corpse queen.”

…

Michelle and daughter Malia’s whereabouts could not be confirmed.

…

Staking out the Halloween party now.

If you check out Drudge’s accompanying headlines (besides the testy/uppity allusion in the first one), the last one is particularly odious in the way it ties back to the photo. Besides the inference of a race war, it actually speaks of: a blood running in the streets.

The more damaging aspect of a pic like this, however, is how much it challenges the truth of how temperate and contained Obama is and has been throughout the campaign. It could be a long weekend.