Hillary Clinton's supporters in the Democratic primary who still refuse to be coerced into voting for Barack Obama this November were insulted today, Oct. 18, by Derrick Z. Jackson in the Boston Globe and yesterday, Oct. 17, by Lanny Davis in the Wall Street Journal.
Jackson argues in the Globe that Obama’s poll numbers have risen in New Hampshire due to a change of heart by the Granite State’s Clinton supporters, and he provides several examples of anecdotal evidence to make his case. Judging from the 104 readers’ comments posted so far to Jackson’s op-ed, Clinton supporters, outraged by the assumption they've fallen in line with a corrupted Democratic party, far outnumber Jackson’s exaggerated claims.
(By the way, it was Jesse Jackson, Jr., the Obama campaign’s national co-chair, who went into a videotaped rage shortly after Sen. Clinton won in New Hampshire; This top aide to Obama revealed his Neanderthal sexism by accusing Clinton of faking tears to win the primary, and he went on to play the race card by making the horrendously false charge that she had not shown compassion for Katrina victims.)
To read Derrick Z. Jackson’s op-ed in its entirety, go here.
In the meantime, Heidi Li Feldman took issue with Lanny Davis for his suggestion in the Wall Street Journal yesterday that “Democrats should be glad Senator Clinton stayed in the race because she made Senator Obama a better general election candidate.”
Feldman points out:
“Mr. Davis, we were glad Senator Clinton stayed in the race because we watched her win the popular vote. Many of us believe that if the Democratic Party had followed its own rules and the superdelegates and regular delegates had not been coerced by Howard Dean and Nancy Pelosi and Senator Obama's campaign (who Chairman Dean turned over the DNC to in June when no candidate had actually won the party's nomination), Senator Clinton might very well have been the party's nominee.
“We were glad Senator Clinton stayed in the race because we thought she would make a superior President to either Senator Obama or any Republican, including Senator McCain. I still believe that.”
Feldman, a law professor at Georgetown University, highlighted a particularly offensive passage from the Davis piece:
“There always was a danger that certain working-class/rural voters who strongly supported Mrs. Clinton in such state primaries as Kentucky, Ohio, Pennsylvania and West Virginia would not easily transfer their support to Mr. Obama. The same worry was often repeated about Democratic women who were angry or simply grieving about Mrs. Clinton not being picked as the nominee.”
Feldman explains:
'"Mr. Davis, by definition, I do not qualify as one of the 'certain working-class/rural voters' you disparage with the remark. But let me make it perfectly clear: I am not angry or 'simply grieving' about 'Mrs. Clinton not being picked as the nominee.' I am distressed that the Democratic Party rigged its own nomination process and PICKED a candidate rather than ELECTING one.
“You began this election cycle supporting Senator Clinton, Mr. Davis. And as the tagline in the WSJ article states you are ending it as an Obama supporter. Given the patronizing and dismissive tone of the passage I quote above, I imagine you feel much more comfortable with the candidate you now back than the one you originally preferred.”
To read Heidi Li Feldman’s post in its entirety, go here.
Welcome to Katalusis for progressive views on politics, religion, environmental issues, and popular culture. (Photo of the Mississippi River from the University Club in St. Paul, MN.)
Showing posts with label race card. Show all posts
Showing posts with label race card. Show all posts
Saturday, October 18, 2008
Friday, August 1, 2008
Axelrod: Dollar Remark Referred to Race
Photo credits: ABCNews photo illustrationMark Mooney reports at ABC News today, Aug. 1, 2008, that David Axelrod, Obama’s chief strategist, has conceded Obama was referring to race in his comment the other day when he said Republicans were trying to scare voters by suggesting Obama "doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills."
Interesting that several leading online news sources reporting on this latest incident agree with my earlier post that Obama’s attempt to use the race card in the general election is just a replay of his campaign’s repeated efforts to smear the Clintons as racists during the Democratic primary.
Sunday, March 30, 2008
The Obama Team’s Strategic Use of the Race Card
Sean Wilentz, the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus professor of history at Princeton UniversitySean Wilentz, the Sidney and Ruth Lapidus professor of history at Princeton University, has exposed the Obama campaign’s strategy of playing the race card in this Sunday’s Philadelphia Inquirer.
Wilentz introduces his op-ed by explaining how Hillary Clinton chose to remain silent about the inflammatory sermons preached by Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
“Quietly, the storm over the hateful views expressed by Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has blown away the most insidious myth of the Democratic primary campaign. Obama and his surrogates have charged that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has deliberately and cleverly played the race card in order to label Obama the "black" candidate.
“Having injected racial posturing into the contest, Obama's "post-racial" campaign finally seems to be all about race and sensational charges about white racism. But the mean-spirited strategy started even before the primaries began, when Obama's operatives began playing the race card - and blamed Hillary Clinton.
“Had she truly conspired to inflame racial animosities in January and February, her campaign would have brought up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his incendiary sermons. But the Clinton campaign did not. And when the Wright stories and videos finally did break through in the mass media, they came not from Clinton's supporters but from Fox News Network.
“Although Wright had until recently been obscure to the American public, political insiders and reporters have long known about him. On March 6, 2007, the New York Times reported that Obama had disinvited Wright from speaking at his announcement because, as Wright said Obama told him, "You can get kind of rough in the sermons." By then, conservative commentators had widely denounced Wright. His performances in the pulpit were easily accessible on DVD, direct from his church. But Clinton, despite her travails, elected to remain silent.”
Wilentz then proceeds to debunk the Obama camp’s repeated efforts to smear the Clintons by injecting racism into the Democratic primary:
Wilentz introduces his op-ed by explaining how Hillary Clinton chose to remain silent about the inflammatory sermons preached by Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright:
“Quietly, the storm over the hateful views expressed by Sen. Barack Obama's pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright, has blown away the most insidious myth of the Democratic primary campaign. Obama and his surrogates have charged that Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton has deliberately and cleverly played the race card in order to label Obama the "black" candidate.
“Having injected racial posturing into the contest, Obama's "post-racial" campaign finally seems to be all about race and sensational charges about white racism. But the mean-spirited strategy started even before the primaries began, when Obama's operatives began playing the race card - and blamed Hillary Clinton.
“Had she truly conspired to inflame racial animosities in January and February, her campaign would have brought up the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and his incendiary sermons. But the Clinton campaign did not. And when the Wright stories and videos finally did break through in the mass media, they came not from Clinton's supporters but from Fox News Network.
“Although Wright had until recently been obscure to the American public, political insiders and reporters have long known about him. On March 6, 2007, the New York Times reported that Obama had disinvited Wright from speaking at his announcement because, as Wright said Obama told him, "You can get kind of rough in the sermons." By then, conservative commentators had widely denounced Wright. His performances in the pulpit were easily accessible on DVD, direct from his church. But Clinton, despite her travails, elected to remain silent.”
Wilentz then proceeds to debunk the Obama camp’s repeated efforts to smear the Clintons by injecting racism into the Democratic primary:
“Instead, she had to fight back against a deliberately contrived strategy to make her and her husband look like race-baiters. Obama's supporters and operatives, including his chief campaign strategist David Axelrod, seized on accurate and historically noncontroversial statements and supplied a supposedly covert racist subtext that they then claimed the calculating Clinton campaign had inserted.
“In December, Bill Shaheen, a Clinton campaign co-chair in New Hampshire, wondered aloud whether Obama's admitted youthful abuse of cocaine might hurt him in the general election. Obama's strategists insisted that Shaheen's mere mention of cocaine was suggestive and inappropriate - even though the scourge of cocaine abuse has long cut across both racial and class lines. Pro-Obama press commentators, including New York Times columnist Frank Rich, then whipped the story into a full racial subtext, charging that the Clintons had, in Rich's words, "ghettoized" Obama "into a cocaine user."
“The Obama campaign and its supporters pressed this strategy after Clinton's unexpected win in New Hampshire. Pundits partial to Obama, including Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and John Nichols of the Nation, instantly mused that their candidate lost because of supposedly bigoted New Hampshire whites who had lied to pre-primary pollsters - an easily disproven falsehood that nevertheless gained currency in the media.
“Next morning, Obama's national co-chair, Jesse Jackson Jr., cast false and vicious aspersions about Hillary Clinton's famous emotional moment in New Hampshire as a measure of her deep racial insensitivity. "Her appearance brought her to tears," said Jackson, "not Hurricane Katrina."
“Obama's backers, including members of his official campaign staff, then played what might be called "the race-baiter card." Hillary Clinton, in crediting both Lyndon Johnson as well as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the Civil Rights Act in 1964, had supposedly denigrated King, and by extension Obama. Allegedly, Bill Clinton had dismissed Obama's victory in South Carolina by comparing it to those of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. (In fact, their electoral totals were comparable - and in the interview at issue, Clinton complimented Obama on his performance "everywhere" - a line the media usually omitted.)
“Thereafter, Obama's high command billowed further race-baiter allegations into the media. Pointing to the notoriously right-wing Drudge Report, Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton campaign of deliberately leaking a supposedly racist photograph of Obama in African garb, which actually originated on still another right-wing Web site. Finally, David Axelrod trumpeted Geraldine Ferraro's awkward remarks in an obscure California newspaper as part of the Clinton campaign's "insidious pattern" of divisiveness.
“One pro-Obama television pundit, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, fulminated that the Clinton campaign had descended into the vocabulary of David Duke, former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
“(In his Philadelphia speech on race, Obama pressed the attack by three times likening Ferraro to Rev. Wright.)
“Since the Philadelphia speech, the candidate and his surrogates have sounded tone-deaf on the subject of race. On March 20, Obama described his Kansas grandmother to a Philadelphia radio interviewer as "a typical white person." The same day, Sen. John Kerry said that Obama would help U.S. relations with Muslim nations "because he's a black man." Another Obama supporter, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, called him the first black leader "to come to the American people not as a victim but as a leader." Her history excluded and conceivably denigrated countless black leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Rep. John Lewis. Obama remained silent, refusing to take Kerry and McCaskill to task for their racially charged remarks.
“Neither candidate can win sufficient elected delegates in the remaining primaries to secure the nomination, and so the battle has moved to winning over the superdelegates. Obama's bogus "race-baiter" strategy is one of the main reasons he has come this far, and it is affecting the process now. But by deliberately inflaming the most destructive passions in American politics, the strategy has badly divided and confused Democrats, at least for the moment. And having done so, it may well doom the Democrats in the general election.”
Note: The HuffingtonPost, one of Obama’s chief megaphones on the Internet, is running a headline over a photo of Hillary today claiming her campaign can’t pay its bills. I didn’t read the article as most of Huffpost’s headlines about Hillary are misleading – the Huffpost is the online answer to the National Enquirer.
However, the first quarter ends tomorrow at midnight. I’ve donated twice to Hillary’s campaign this weekend, and I’m urging all of her supporters to do the same. The best way to thwart the well-oiled Obama machine is by helping Hillary level the financial playing field. With a level playing field, she’ll easily leave Obama in the dust.
“In December, Bill Shaheen, a Clinton campaign co-chair in New Hampshire, wondered aloud whether Obama's admitted youthful abuse of cocaine might hurt him in the general election. Obama's strategists insisted that Shaheen's mere mention of cocaine was suggestive and inappropriate - even though the scourge of cocaine abuse has long cut across both racial and class lines. Pro-Obama press commentators, including New York Times columnist Frank Rich, then whipped the story into a full racial subtext, charging that the Clintons had, in Rich's words, "ghettoized" Obama "into a cocaine user."
“The Obama campaign and its supporters pressed this strategy after Clinton's unexpected win in New Hampshire. Pundits partial to Obama, including Eugene Robinson of the Washington Post and John Nichols of the Nation, instantly mused that their candidate lost because of supposedly bigoted New Hampshire whites who had lied to pre-primary pollsters - an easily disproven falsehood that nevertheless gained currency in the media.
“Next morning, Obama's national co-chair, Jesse Jackson Jr., cast false and vicious aspersions about Hillary Clinton's famous emotional moment in New Hampshire as a measure of her deep racial insensitivity. "Her appearance brought her to tears," said Jackson, "not Hurricane Katrina."
“Obama's backers, including members of his official campaign staff, then played what might be called "the race-baiter card." Hillary Clinton, in crediting both Lyndon Johnson as well as the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. for the Civil Rights Act in 1964, had supposedly denigrated King, and by extension Obama. Allegedly, Bill Clinton had dismissed Obama's victory in South Carolina by comparing it to those of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in the 1980s. (In fact, their electoral totals were comparable - and in the interview at issue, Clinton complimented Obama on his performance "everywhere" - a line the media usually omitted.)
“Thereafter, Obama's high command billowed further race-baiter allegations into the media. Pointing to the notoriously right-wing Drudge Report, Obama's campaign manager David Plouffe accused the Clinton campaign of deliberately leaking a supposedly racist photograph of Obama in African garb, which actually originated on still another right-wing Web site. Finally, David Axelrod trumpeted Geraldine Ferraro's awkward remarks in an obscure California newspaper as part of the Clinton campaign's "insidious pattern" of divisiveness.
“One pro-Obama television pundit, Keith Olbermann of MSNBC, fulminated that the Clinton campaign had descended into the vocabulary of David Duke, former grand dragon of the Ku Klux Klan.
“(In his Philadelphia speech on race, Obama pressed the attack by three times likening Ferraro to Rev. Wright.)
“Since the Philadelphia speech, the candidate and his surrogates have sounded tone-deaf on the subject of race. On March 20, Obama described his Kansas grandmother to a Philadelphia radio interviewer as "a typical white person." The same day, Sen. John Kerry said that Obama would help U.S. relations with Muslim nations "because he's a black man." Another Obama supporter, Sen. Claire McCaskill of Missouri, called him the first black leader "to come to the American people not as a victim but as a leader." Her history excluded and conceivably denigrated countless black leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Rep. John Lewis. Obama remained silent, refusing to take Kerry and McCaskill to task for their racially charged remarks.
“Neither candidate can win sufficient elected delegates in the remaining primaries to secure the nomination, and so the battle has moved to winning over the superdelegates. Obama's bogus "race-baiter" strategy is one of the main reasons he has come this far, and it is affecting the process now. But by deliberately inflaming the most destructive passions in American politics, the strategy has badly divided and confused Democrats, at least for the moment. And having done so, it may well doom the Democrats in the general election.”
Note: The HuffingtonPost, one of Obama’s chief megaphones on the Internet, is running a headline over a photo of Hillary today claiming her campaign can’t pay its bills. I didn’t read the article as most of Huffpost’s headlines about Hillary are misleading – the Huffpost is the online answer to the National Enquirer.
However, the first quarter ends tomorrow at midnight. I’ve donated twice to Hillary’s campaign this weekend, and I’m urging all of her supporters to do the same. The best way to thwart the well-oiled Obama machine is by helping Hillary level the financial playing field. With a level playing field, she’ll easily leave Obama in the dust.
Wednesday, February 27, 2008
The Obama Campaign’s Destructive Tactics
Photo credits: Associated Press File PhotoIn an article in The New Republic today, Princeton historian Sean Wilentz explains how Barack Obama played the race card and blamed Hillary Clinton. In the process, Wilentz addresses an issue related to one that I raised in a previous post, that is “the gap between Senator Barack Obama's promises of a pure, soul-cleansing ‘new’ politics and the calculated, deeply dishonest conduct of his actually-existing campaign. But it remains to be seen whether the latest ploy by the Obama camp--over allegations about the circulation of a photograph of Obama in ceremonial Somali dress--will be exposed by the press as the manipulative illusion that it is.”
Noting the media’s complicity in the Obama campaign’s destructive tactics, Wilentz states, “This development is the latest sad commentary on the malign power of the press, hyping its own favorites and tearing down those it dislikes, to create pseudo-scandals of the sort that hounded Al Gore during the 2000 campaign. It is also a commentary on how race can make American politics go haywire. Above all, it is a commentary on the cutthroat, fraudulent politics that lie at the foundation of Obama's supposedly uplifting campaign.”
Sean Wilentz is a contributing editor at The New Republic, and the author of The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (Norton).
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