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HRC:
Blacks Need Not Apply
By
Armstrong Williams
May
1, 2008
Oh,
what a tangled web the Democrats have woven
these past few months. I almost feel
sorry for them. Almost. Now, the
latest Reverend Wright diatribe has the
Obama campaign scrambling to contain the
fallout from such a radioactive figure who
has publicly endorsed both Obama and the
Reverend Louis Farrakhan in their escapades.
That's quite a duo, and I, for one,
know Obama doesn't want that spread around
too much.
Gone
for now are the nostalgic references to
Kennedy; the days-gone-by comparisons to MLK.
In their place are questions about
Obama's judgment and his choices of the
company he keeps; more importantly, those he
chooses to put on his campaign advisory
panels.
If ever there was a seminal moment
for this campaign, it is now.
If Senator Obama doesn't shut up
those bombastic, moronic voices, his
campaign will be forced to shut down.
Yet it appears the spin cycle on the
Obama Campaign washing machine is broken for
now. New
polling out this week shows the Wright
spectacle has cost this most famous
churchgoer seven points in the national
polls – down to 47% favorability from a
54% high just 8 weeks ago.
But
all this talk lately of Wright is a mere
symptom of the larger problem with the
Democratic Party I've written about
before– their failure to deal with the
massive undercurrent of identity politics.
After all, they created this cottage
industry, but they clearly don't know how to
manage it.
Just
one year ago, pundits like myself were
speculating about how in the world
Republicans would be able to cope with the
racial subtexts that haunt them every
presidential election cycle – that
awkwardness of appealing to minority voters
and visiting NAACP candidate forums, the
mass exodus of Latinos from the party due to
their failed immigration policies, the list
went on… Yet here we stand, ruminating not
about McCain being "too white" for
this color-wheel country, but wondering
instead if Barack can get past the argument
that black preachers in black churches say
the darnest things.
I
have to believe that the Obama campaign
longs for the days where they could play the
race card on their opponents, or, better
still, rise above the veiled innuendo and
make Bill Clinton look foolish in the
process. But those days are gone, and
identity politics are back in full effect.
The
sad irony here is that Barack Obama is not
the biggest perpetrator of this phenomenon.
Rather, it's Senator Clinton who
peddles this issue the hardest, for she
stands the most to gain from its success.
While hers is a brand of identity politics
far
more
subtle, you hear it in her speeches out on
the hustling – the talk of how, for too
long, a woman's place was in the
kitchen. For too long, the identity
politics of the 20th Century
dictated that sisters should bide their
time; and the Oval Office was a room they
could only hope to clean, never govern from.
"Those days are over," she
says triumphantly. But are they?
What about the same opportunities for
the political advancement of the Black Man?
Does he not count this election
cycle? Should he not count? You
see, to agree with the Hillary camp, to
accept her premise that this is the Year of
the Woman, and then you must acknowledge the
converse of that argument: Black men
can wait.
Yes,
Mr. and Mrs. America, affirmative action is
dead to the Senator from the great state of
New York. For if it lived, if it was
truly a principled centerpiece of Senator
Clinton as a liberal Democrat, then she
would step aside tonight and let race-based
selection work its twisted will. Think
I'm saying these things just to be
provocative? Perhaps. But just
look at what her surrogates have said or
implied these past few months:
"shuck and jive" … "if
Barack weren't black he wouldn't be in this
race…" and running ads comparing
Obama to Osama. Are those the clumsy
words of a desperate campaign, or calculated
attacks aimed at reminding Democratic voters
that Obama is a black man, Clinton is a
white woman, and in 2008, the right
thing to do is go with the safer color
gambit and select her?
Bicker
on, Democrats, perhaps McCain has more than
an ice cube's chance on a stove of becoming
President after all!
www.armstrongwilliams.com
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