The Alligator

Senator Barack Obama’s unequivocal denouncement yesterday of Reverend Wright’s comments and performance was definitive and eloquent. But of course the question many have is “Why did he sit in the pew for 20 years?” Well folks- a lot of well respected people sat in those pews listening to Wright’s sermons for years. It isn’t like Mr. Obama was attending some voodoo ceremony where the pentagram was hanging. He saw a ministry that had a social commitment- he was part of a community of faith that offered ministries to “the least among us”. While Reverend Wright adheres to a “Black Liberation Theology” and every one knew that- it seems clear that part of that theology, the part that spoke to Obama, was outreach to the community and lifting up those with no hope. If one reads Obama’s books and listens to the man- you can see what it was about Trinity – its community work- that appealed to Obama. It was the sense of Christianity being tied to good works in the community that is what brought Obama to Christ and it was that part of Wright that appealed to Obama.

It is clear that Mr. Obama’s relationship with Reverend Wright was complicated. He saw Wright as someone important in his life- and like all of us we have friends who are flawed and we look beyond those flaws to see the good that they do. Did Obama know that his pastor was controversial- sure, did he think that he was a nut case that had views that were so “out there”, no. Even if he had occasionally heard black liberation rhetoric from Wright- it was not pronounced enough to severe his ties. This was a spiritual and emotional relationship- it was complicated.

It says a lot about Mrs. Clinton that she said she would have left the pews of Trinity a long time ago. She either didn’t see or didn’t want to address that these relations are complicated and they are nuanced. No one is totally evil and no one is totally a saint. Mr. Obama was part of a community of faith that was doing good works in the straining neighborhood of Chicago’s south side. Mr. Wright was responsible for building that community of faith regardless of his most incendiary comments- his church has done amazing work.

If Mrs. Clinton sees the world so black and white- with such starkness- I think it tells me that she is not a person of good judgment. Diplomacy, the economy, the disaster where we find ourselves at the present time need someone who can appreciate the nuances and the finer points of these complicated problems. But Mrs. Clinton is a very smart woman- she knows what sort of complexities are involved- but she choses to pander.

Not only did she flippantly remark on a very personal and complicated relationship between a man and his pastor with a quick answer- she said what was politically expedient. She should know how complicated relationships are- she could have thrown Bill under the bus after his lie to her and the country about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky, but she chose not to. Relationships- especially relationships that are based on either intimacy in marriage or intimacy of faith- are complicated. She was pandering.

But that is just the beginning. Sure she threw the kitchen sink at Obama in Pennsylvania and it apparently worked- but now she is offering everything to the voters including that kitchen sink. Let’s take this gas tax holiday.

Mr. Obama is correct that this is a political stunt being played by both Senators Clinton and McCain. 3 months of gas at a few cents less per gallon that may add up to $30.00 per car over the course of the “holiday”. Yes, Mrs. Clinton says that she would pay for this with windfall tax money from the oil companies. But that strategy only works if she is elected president and she has a Congress that agrees with her. Should she be promoting a policy that would occur NOW without knowing for sure how it will be paid for in the future?

In his Op/Ed piece today in the New York Times, Thomas Friedman wrote:

“This is not an energy policy. This is money laundering: we borrow money from China and ship it to Saudi Arabia and take a little cut for ourselves as it goes through our gas tanks. What a way to build our country. When the summer is over, we will have increased our debt to China, increased our transfer of wealth to Saudi Arabia and increased our contribution to global warming for our kids to inherit.

No, no, no, we’ll just get the money by taxing Big Oil, says Mrs. Clinton. Even if you could do that, what a terrible way to spend precious tax dollars — burning it up on the way to the beach rather than on innovation?

The McCain-Clinton gas holiday proposal is a perfect example of what energy expert Peter Schwartz of Global Business Network describes as the true American energy policy today: “Maximize demand, minimize supply and buy the rest from the people who hate us the most.”

Good for Barack Obama for resisting this shameful pandering.”

Then there are Mrs. Clinton’s hawkish comments about obliterating Iran if they would attack Israel or any of our friends in the region- creating, in her own mind, a sort of mid-East NATO. Obama said that in response to an attack against Israel (or any other US ally) by Iran, he would act “forcefully and swiftly”. Well, that’s a bit vague, but it’s certainly better than immediately saying “we will obliterate them!” We need a leader who will be forceful and swift, but we also need to know that Obama won’t immediately rush into military attacks or outright war like President Bush did.

Why on earth would Mrs. Clinton begin sabre rattling á la Cheney / Bush? It is probably the same reason she ended the Pennsylvania campaign with an add that featured Osama bin Laden- FEAR. Thanks Mrs. Clinton, I thought we were over that. Playing fear equals pandering in my estimation.

Clearly Mr. Obama is asking voters to think. The times demand hard thinking. Mr. Obama believes that voters will see through fear mongering and pandering on issues like gas taxes. Mr. Obama talk about ”us” making change- that we must work together to make change. This point of view challenges us to think and to look at the nuance in policy.

Mrs. Clinton is promising everything to everybody- like the “Forty Acres and a Mule” promise during the Civil War’s reconstruction. Her blantant stunt with the gas tax, her flippant comment about a personal relationship between Senator Obama and Reverend Wright that is as complex as her own with her philandering husband, and her fear mongering and hawk posturing with Iran point to a cynical sense of the electorate.

Senator Obama was racked over the coals for comments he made “It’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

What Obama was saying is true- people use the spectre of destroying faith and guns, immigrants and jobs – gay marriage and gun control state initiatives, anti-immigration legislation, and blaming everything on NAFTA- to stoke the fears of voters. Republican have been very deft at using these wedge issues to manipulate voters from voting in their economic interest. He was exposing the cynisism of the current political system that expolits these issues and fears as a destraction and assumes the lowest common denominator among our electorate.

Clearly Mr. McCain is continuing this well tried tradition in the Republican party, but Mrs. Clinton is using the same tactics in the primary. Who is elitist? The person who is pandering or the person who exposes the pandering? I think the answer is clear.

I hope we don’t see any more debates between Senators Clinton and Obama. Maybe after more than 20 debates there is little substantive that can be explored- well at least be explored and garner ratings for ABC. Flag pins, Reverend Wright regurgitated, sniper fire, elitism, bitter Pennsylvanians and asking Obama about a relationship, that is tenuous at best, with a former member of the Weather Underground who was an active “domestic terrorist” when Barack Obama was about 8 years old and who is now a Professor at the University of Illinois in Chicago. Thank you Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos for bringing Presidential debates to a new low!

At a moment when the American economy is in a recession, when the U.S. trade deficit is breaking records, when the vice president and the secretary of state stand accused of organizing torture parties in Washington, when the president has gotten us bogged down in two foreign quagmires, and when official gaming of globalization has stirred up food riots around the world, Gibson and Stephanopoulos led Senators Obama and Clinton into the last debate before the critical Pennsylvania primary trying to out-FOX one another.

Wednesday night’s moderators, who pummeled Obama for most of the night — almost made a viewer long for a long-winded intervention by the CNN’s self-absorbed but reasonably serious Wolf Blitzer. And the questions from viewers appeared to have been selected with the purpose of raising doubts about whether these people may be spending just a little too much time listening to Rush Limbaugh.

“In perhaps the most embarrassing performance by the media in a major presidential debate in years, ABC News hosts Charles Gibson and George Stephanopolous focused mainly on trivial issues as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama faced off in Philadelphia,” Huffington Post analyst Greg Mitchell wrote on the site Thursday. “They, and their network, should hang their collective heads in shame.

The absolute low point of a debate that rarely left the low road came when former Clinton aide Stephanopoulos asked Obama about his meetings with Bill Ayers, a 1960s Weather Underground radical who went on to become a college professor.

Bill Ayers and his wife, Bernadine Dohrn, have lived in the Hyde Park area in Chicago. So has Barack Obama. Ayers is one of numerous people, in the Chicago area, whom Barack Obama has run across. Obama has much closer relationships with numerous conservatives on the University of Chicago faculty, many of whom have given money to Obama’s campaign, and many of whom have talked to him at length and been at social occasions with him.

Gail Collins in her New York Times Op/Ed piece wrote: “I know it’s been a hard couple of weeks, people. You were all excited about this election and now you feel like someone who got all dressed up for a great event and wound up at a B-list party with a cash bar. You never want to hear the words “bitter” or “Bosnia” again. And the only political story that you’ve really enjoyed lately is the one about Cindy McCain’s list of favorite recipes being cribbed from The Food Network.

But as upset as many of us are who had to sit through the intolerable trerrible tabloid debate, Senator Barack Obama is making lemonade out of the lemons from last night.

At a town meeting today in North Carolina, where he arrived to campaign in advance of the May 6 primary, Mr. Obama seemed intent on seeking to quell any political fallout from the debate in Philadelphia. “That was the roll-out of the Republican campaign against me in November. That is what they will do,” Mr. Obama said. “They will try to focus on all these issues that don’t have anything to do with how you pay your bills at the end of the month.”

With a wide smile, and a sarcastic tone, Mr. Obama sought to brush aside criticism about his performance in what he said was the 21st debate of the presidential nominating fight.  “I will tell you, it does not get much more fun than these debates. They are inspiring events,” Mr. Obama quipped.

Obama said, “Last night, I think we set a new record because it took us 45 minutes before we even started talking about a single issue that matters to the American people. It took us 45 minutes! Forty-five minutes before we heard about health care. Forty-five minutes before we heard about Iraq,” he continued. “Forty-five — 45 — minutes before we heard about jobs. Forty-five minutes before we heard about gas prices.”

He told the audience that he intended to let the criticism roll off of him. As he spoke, he made a dramatic gesture of wiping off his sleeves and dusting off his dark suit.  “That’s what you got to do,” he said, drawing loud applause from the audience. “That’s what you’ve got to do. But understand this, that is also precisely why I’m running for president – to change that kind of politics.”

After Mr. Obama’s opening remarks, a woman in the audience asked how he intended to forcefully challenge Senator John McCain, the presumptive Republican nominee.  “It’s a little hard to do with a fellow Democrat. I’m trying to show some restraint. I won’t have as much restraint with the Republicans,” Mr. Obama said, adding: “That’s the debate that I am really looking forward to. I am confident that that’s the debate the American people are going to want to have. What they are going to figure out is who is the person who can lead this country and actually solve problems,” he added. “We’ve been going through this politics – tit for tat silliness – for decades now.”

Well, Senator Obama- I’ll take my lead from you and ignore the idiocy of last night’s debate. But truly this debacle was not just an insult to Senator Obama (and to some extent Senator Clinton) it was an insult to the American people. Maybe I am part of that undefined “elite” but I hope my fellow citizens are more intelligent than falling for the garbage that passed for issues last night. I hope that the American people learn from mistakes- those mistakes are George W. Bush first term and George W. Bush second term. It is possible we only made one mistake since in 2000 Al Gore actually won the popular vote.

Let’s get out of the muck and mire, the tit-for-tat, the gotcha politics and take this election seriously. There are serious issues in this country and in the world. Having a debate on tabloid stories is demeaning, demoralizing and just plain wrong.

Senator Obama’s recent comments about the frustration that many middle class Americans feel were poorly worded, especially in the world of 24 hour news cycles, repetitive loops, pundits bloviating ad nauseum and where cynicism reigns supreme. 

But the sentiments are right on target. Many Americans feel that their government, their issues and their lives have been long forgotten by the power elites in Washington.  Both Senators Clinton and McCain qualify, in spades, as members of the inside the beltway power elite.  Mr. McCain has been in Congress since 1982 and Mrs. Clinton has been in the power elite since 1992 when her husband was elected President.  Let’s see that is twenty six years of inside the beltway mentality for McCain and sixteen years of the same mentality for Mrs. Clinton. 

Where do these centimillionaires come off claiming that Mr. Obama is elitist?  It is indeed baffling that Mr. McCain with his multiple homes and a wife worth $100 million and Mrs. Clinton who has been entrenched in the upper echelons of the Democratic party for as long as some new voters have been alive would call a man of mixed race with a single mother as elitist. Mr. McCain is the son of an Admiral who, I am sure, used family ties to enter the Naval Academy where he graduated 3rd from the bottom. Mrs. Clinton grew up in the upper middle class suburb of Park Ridge IL and went to the prestigious women’s college- Wellsley.

Mr. Obama entered a California liberal arts college before transfering to Columbia University and later became the first African American editor of the Harvard Law Review.  You can bet your bottom dollar none of that academic success came with the ease of a well-off middle class girl going to Wellsley or that of a well connected midshipman. Neither Senator Clinton or Senator McCain has a clue as to what it means to wonder whether or not government has left them behind. It is quite plausible-if not likely- that the black son of a white mother who was for the most part a single mom may have more of sense of how government can disappoint.  

Let’s look at the ENTIRE quote- not just those incendiary sentences. 

I think it’s fair to say that the places where we are going to have to do the most work are the places where people feel most cynical about government…. Because everybody just ascribes it to ‘white working-class don’t wanna work — don’t wanna vote for the black guy.’ That’s…there were intimations of that in an article in the Sunday New York Times today - kind of implies that it’s sort of a race thing.

Here’s how it is: in a lot of these communities in big industrial states like Ohio and Pennsylvania, people have been beaten down so long, and they feel so betrayed by government, and when they hear a pitch that is premised on not being cynical about government, then a part of them just doesn’t buy it. And when it’s delivered by — it’s true that when it’s delivered by a 46-year-old black man named Barack Obama (laugher), then that adds another layer of skepticism….

But the truth is … our challenge is to get people persuaded that we can make progress when there’s not evidence of that in their daily lives. You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing’s replaced them. And they fell through the Clinton administration, and the Bush administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. So it’s not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.

….[Y]ou can go in the toughest neighborhoods, you know working-class lunch-pail folks, you’ll find Obama enthusiasts. And you can go into places where you think I’d be very strong and people will just be skeptical. The important thing is that you show up and you’re doing what you’re doing.

Robert Kennedy said rather similar things four decades ago when he challenged many rural Indiana voters. As I recall, RFK did pretty well when the votes were counted.

The faux outrage expressed by Senators McCain and Clinton calls to mind the emotional torment suffered 16 years ago by then-Senator, now McCain backer, Al D’Amato. Ordinarily known for his salty demeaner, D’Amato pretended to cry when his hapless opponent Robert Abrams made a clumsy remark that could be construed as anti-Italian.

Barack Obama spent years of his life organizing out-of-work steelworkers on the south side of Chicago - people just like those who live in Allentown or Erie or Pittsburgh or the Monongehela Valley in western Pennsylvania. He stood shoulder to shoulder with them, sat at their kitchen tables, spent hours in their church basements.

He didn’t do those things as a famous candidate, but as a community organizer being paid $8,000 a year by a coalition of churches. You don’t build a resume or a client list organizing unemployed steel workers. You do it because you respect the people and you care about justice.

In fact, the trademark of Barack Obama’s campaign for president is the honest, respectful way he talks to everyone — and stands up for everyday Americans.

Senator Obama has given voice to the frustration of millions of Americans.  It is the height of cynicsm for either Senator Clinton or Senator McCain to feign being stunned and flabbergasted that Barack Obama would imply that Pennsylvanians are bitter over, say, thirty years of economic decline in their local communities.  The fact that they are parsing Mr. Obama’s words in order to manipulate the very people who are angry to feel disrespected is disgusting and is the “politics as usual” that Senator Obama has shunned.

If they in fact believe their own press than they are completely out of touch with the anger and the disillusionment among many Americans- that is why the message of change is so appealing.  Mrs. Clinton and Mr. McCain, both of whom epitomize the power elite in Washington, are either completely out of touch or are playing purely cynical politics.  You can decide for yourself which it is. 

Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered 40 years ago today just after 6pm as he stood on a balcony of the Lorraine motel in Memphis, Tennessee. A single rifle bullet hit him in the jaw, then severed his spinal cord. James Earl Ray, a white man, was convicted of the killing and sentenced to 99 years.

King made a famous denunciation of America’s war in Vietnam exactly a year before his murder, before a crowd of 3,000 in the Riverside Church in Manhattan. He described Vietnam’s destruction at the hands of “deadly Western arrogance”, insisting that “we are on the side of the wealthy, and the secure, while we create a hell for the poor… taking the black young men who had been crippled by our society and sending them 8,000 miles away to guarantee liberties in Southeast Asia which they had not found in southwest Georgia and East Harlem.”

Within hours of King’s murder, rioting broke out in 80 cities across the country. Dozens of people, mostly black, were killed. On April 6 the Oakland police cornered the Black Panther leadership and when one of the young leaders, Bobby Hutton, emerged with his shirt off and his hands up, shot him dead.

In contrast to Bobby Hutton, the Panthers and above all Malcolm X, slain in 1965, white liberal opinion has hailed King as a man who chose to work non-violently within the system. Near the end, King himself was haunted by a sense of failure. In his last months he was booed at a mass meeting in Chicago and, as he lay sleepless that night, he knew why: “I had urged them [his fellow blacks] to have faith in America and in white society… They were now booing because they felt we were unable to deliver on our promises… They were now hostile because they were watching the dream they had so readily accepted turn into a nightmare.”

As the journalist Andrew Kopkind wrote shortly after King’s assassination, “That he failed to change the system that brutalizes his race is a profound relief to the white majority. As a reward they have now elevated his minor successes into major triumphs.” The night before he was shot, King said in a speech to the striking garbage workers of Memphis: “But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people will get to the promised land.”

Forty years on, history has not vindicated King. America is still disfigured by racial injustice. Militant black leadership has all but disappeared.

To black radicals, the sedate homilies of Barack Obama are to the fierce demands for justice of Malcolm X and of King - in his more radical moments - as muzak is to Beethoven. Obama is caught, even as King was. The moment whites fear (admittedly with scant cause) he might raise the political temperature; he’s savaged with every bludgeon of convenience, starting with the robust sermons of the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, whose sin is to have reminded whites that there are black Americans who are really angry.
“God damn America,” roared Wright, to white America’s consternation and fury. King was just as rough at the Riverside Church in the speech that so terrified the white elites: “I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today: my own government.”

Pundits and others are trying to posit that their obsession with Reverend Wright because they see him his comments as “Anti-American”. Well, maybe Reverend Wright was following the example of Martin Luther King Jr.- speaking out of the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today- the government of the United States.

Is it “anti-American” to speak out and be angry with your government? Do you have to engage in jingoist flag waving to be a “true American”? Is it wrong to discuss some of the problems that infect our society as a result of our nation’s original sin- slavery? Is it “anti-American” to damn America when our government makes a colossal error or swaggers with Bush style hubris? Does being angry with your country mean that you don’t love your country? That’s what Reverends King and Wright did.

It saddens me that Senator Obama’s loyalty to his pastor- a man he speaks out fervently when he is outraged by our nation’s behavior and a man who served it honorably as a United States marine- is being used as a veiled racist wedge by some- both in the Democratic and Republican parties.

I have hope that we can move further towards Dr. King’s mountain top. I hope we can see his dream. In 1967 Dr. King eloquently challenged the nation and its role of violence in the world. He was the same man that spoke these words:

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

A man who dreams these dreams for our nation and a man who can be incensed by the nation when its policies are wrong headed, dangerous and are not centered on equality and peace is a man that truly loves his country. Maybe if someone sits back for a moment and looks at Reverend Wright- his life, his work AND his words- they will see a man that loves his country with honesty, not with blind nationalism.

Senator Obama hasn’t done the politically expedient thing and disavowed a man who was complicated but clearly loves his country enough to speak about it with passion when he angry with its actions and serve it honorably- both within the community of Chicago and as a man inspired by President John F. Kennedy’s 1961 challenge to “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country,” Wright gave up his student deferment, left college and joined the United States Marine Corps.

I wouldn’t have walked out of that church either.