Bad News for Hilldog

New polls show Hillary at her lowest point. Obama on top nationally and McCain behind Obama. She appears to be only left with what is being called the "Tonya Harding" option. (Barry, watch your knees!) Though this new video could give her some war-torn street cred.

Two New York Times Opinion Columnists decry the end...

The Long Defeat

By DAVID BROOKS
Published: March 25, 2008

"Hillary Clinton may not realize it yet, but she’s just endured one of the worst weeks of her campaign... [full story]

..For three more months, Clinton is likely to hurt Obama even more against McCain, without hurting him against herself. And all this is happening so she can preserve that 5 percent chance.

When you step back and think about it, she is amazing. She possesses the audacity of hopelessness.

Why does she go on like this? Does Clinton privately believe that Obama is so incompetent that only she can deliver the policies they both support? Is she simply selfish, and willing to put her party through agony for the sake of her slender chance? Are leading Democrats so narcissistic that they would create bitter stagnation even if they were granted one-party rule?

The better answer is that Clinton’s long rear-guard action is the logical extension of her relentlessly political life.

For nearly 20 years, she has been encased in the apparatus of political celebrity. Look at her schedule as first lady and ever since. Think of the thousands of staged events, the tens of thousands of times she has pretended to be delighted to see someone she doesn’t know, the hundreds of thousands times she has recited empty clichés and exhortatory banalities, the millions of photos she has posed for in which she is supposed to appear empathetic or tough, the billions of politically opportune half-truths that have bounced around her head.

No wonder the Clinton campaign feels impersonal. It’s like a machine for the production of politics. It plows ahead from event to event following its own iron logic. The only question is whether Clinton herself can step outside the apparatus long enough to turn it off and withdraw voluntarily or whether she will force the rest of her party to intervene and jam the gears.

If she does the former, she would surprise everybody with a display of self-sacrifice. Her campaign would cruise along at a lower register until North Carolina, then use that as an occasion to withdraw. If she does not, she would soldier on doggedly, taking down as many allies as necessary." [full story]

Hillary or Nobody?

By MAUREEN DOWD

Published: March 26, 2008

"Even some Clinton loyalists are wondering aloud if the win-at-all-costs strategy of Hillary and Bill — which continued Tuesday when Hillary tried to drag Rev. Wright back into the spotlight — is designed to rough up Obama so badly and leave the party so riven that Obama will lose in November to John McCain.

If McCain only served one term, Hillary would have one last shot. On Election Day in 2012, she’d be 65.

Some top Democrats are increasingly worried that the Clintons’ divide-and-conquer strategy is nihilistic: Hillary or no democrat."
[full story]

Giving Rev. Wright his deserved context

What if our preachers' sermons were picked apart and broadcast on the news in 10 second sound-bites? What if our conversations on the phones, over dinner, in private were made into sound-bites without context? Would anyone take the time to try and understand us? No. I've been to Black churches and have heard the style of rhetoric, the heavy handed liberation theology, the waxing prophetic. That's a part of the history and worldview that exists.

Martin Luther King Jr. himself, said in his speech at Riverside Church that "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today [is] my own government." And no one raises objection to "America's Saint" now, much less questions his patriotism, though I'm sure it was cut out and abused as a sound-bite in his time. To be clear, I'm not justifying everything Dr. Wright said in his sermons. Some things need to be objected to. However, in many African American churches in America the prophetic tradition of preaching is alive and well and this needs to be understood by the listener. Dr. Wright's oratory seeks to speak truth to power when justice isn't upheld by those in power. Seen in the proper light, most Christians could actually stand to embrace much of his sermon. After all Christians owe allegiance to God before country. Furthermore, his church puts words into action and has an amazing track record for serving its community (one that many white churches long abandoned).

I think Sen. Obama did the right, but harder thing by embracing the complexity and not sacrificing the man on his way to the top. He rightly recognized the limitations and unjustified aspects that hold communities like Wright's back but also stood up for the legacy that has promoted justice and continues to do so. I think you'll be able to see that in the full sermon context below. Also after the sermon notes, I included two links from NPR. One is a discussion on the controversy from African American professors of theology (well worth the listen), and the second a straight talk discussion "barbershop style."

March 21, 2008

The full story behind Rev. Jeremiah Wright’s 9/11 sermon

Posted: 10:09 AM ET

As this whole sordid episode regarding the sermons of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright has played out over the last week, I wanted to understand what he ACTUALLY said in this speech. I’ve been saying all week on CNN that context is important, and I just wanted to know what the heck is going on.

I have now actually listened to the sermon Rev. Wright gave after September 11 titled, “The Day of Jerusalem’s Fall.” It was delivered on Sept. 16, 2001.

One of the most controversial statements in this sermon was when he mentioned “chickens coming home to roost.” He was actually quoting Edward Peck, former U.S. Ambassador to Iraq and deputy director of President Reagan’s terrorism task force, who was speaking on FOX News. That’s what he told the congregation.

He was quoting Peck as saying that America’s foreign policy has put the nation in peril:

“We took this country by terror away from the Sioux, the Apache, Arikara, the Comanche, the Arapaho, the Navajo. Terrorism.

“We took Africans away from their country to build our way of ease and kept them enslaved and living in fear. Terrorism.

“We bombed Grenada and killed innocent civilians, babies, non-military personnel.

“We bombed the black civilian community of Panama with stealth bombers and killed unarmed teenage and toddlers, pregnant mothers and hard working fathers.

“We bombed Qaddafi’s home, and killed his child. Blessed are they who bash your children’s head against the rock.

“We bombed Iraq. We killed unarmed civilians trying to make a living. We bombed a plant in Sudan to pay back for the attack on our embassy, killed hundreds of hard working people, mothers and fathers who left home to go that day not knowing that they’d never get back home.

“We bombed Hiroshima. We bombed Nagasaki, and we nuked far more than the thousands in New York and the Pentagon and we never batted an eye.

“Kids playing in the playground. Mothers picking up children after school. Civilians, not soldiers, people just trying to make it day by day.

“We have supported state terrorism against the Palestinians and black South Africans, and now we are indignant because the stuff that we have done overseas is now brought right back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.

“Violence begets violence. Hatred begets hatred. And terrorism begets terrorism. A white ambassador said that y’all, not a black militant. Not a reverend who preaches about racism. An ambassador whose eyes are wide open and who is trying to get us to wake up and move away from this dangerous precipice upon which we are now poised. The ambassador said the people we have wounded don’t have the military capability we have. But they do have individuals who are willing to die and take thousands with them. And we need to come to grips with that.”

He went on to describe seeing the photos of the aftermath of 9/11 because he was in Newark, N.J., when the planes struck. After turning on the TV and seeing the second plane slam into one of the twin towers, he spoke passionately about what if you never got a chance to say hello to your family again.

“What is the state of your family?” he asked.

And then he told his congregation that he loved them and asked the church to tell each other they loved themselves.

His sermon thesis:

1. This is a time for self-examination of ourselves and our families.

2. This is a time for social transformation (then he went on to say they won’t put me on PBS or national cable for what I’m about to say. Talk about prophetic!)

“We have got to change the way we have been doing things as a society,” he said.

Wright then said we can’t stop messing over people and thinking they can’t touch us. He said we may need to declare war on racism, injustice, and greed, instead of war on other countries.

“Maybe we need to declare war on AIDS. In five minutes the Congress found $40 billion to rebuild New York and the families that died in sudden death, do you think we can find the money to make medicine available for people who are dying a slow death? Maybe we need to declare war on the nation’s healthcare system that leaves the nation’s poor with no health coverage? Maybe we need to declare war on the mishandled educational system and provide quality education for everybody, every citizen, based on their ability to learn, not their ability to pay. This is a time for social transformation.”

3. This is time to tell God thank you for all that he has provided and that he gave him and others another chance to do His will.

By the way, nowhere in this sermon did he said “God damn America.” I’m not sure which sermon that came from.

This doesn’t explain anything away, nor does it absolve Wright of using the N-word, but what it does do is add an accurate perspective to this conversation.

The point that I have always made as a journalist is that our job is to seek the truth, and not the partial truth.

I am also listening to the other sermons delivered by Rev. Wright that have been the subject of controversy.

And let me be clear: Where I believe he was wrong and not justified in what he said based upon the facts, I will say so. But where the facts support his argument, that will also be said.

So stay tuned.

- Roland S. Martin, CNN Contributor
www.rolandsmartin.com

If you want to hear the full sermon yourself, click HERE

-------------------from npr.org--------------------

Religious Scholars Discuss Liberation Theology

Barack Obama's pastor Jeremiah Wright is part of a religious tradition known as Black Liberation Theology. Two religious scholars discuss its foundation and contemporary meaning.

Guys in the Shop Discuss Obama, Kilpatrick

Barbershop regulars Jimi Izrael, Ruben Navarrette and Arsalan Iftikhar are joined this week by professor Lester Spence. The guys weigh in on Sen. Barack Obama's historic speech on race.

"He spoke to Americans as though they were adults."

FYI...The following post will be unapologetically elitist and should be taken with a grain of salt:

"He spoke to Americans as though they were adults" quipped Jon Stewart on The Daily Show following Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech Tuesday.

Sadly, they're not. This is why I salute our forefathers for establishing our representative democracy and not a "pure" democracy. This is why the "superdelegate" structure is not offensive to me. To be completely honest, I don't give a damn what the "Budweiser class" thinks if they're unwilling to invest in learning about the issues that they are so quickly to espouse an opinion on. The polls say that the president people would "most like to have a beer with" are the ones that usually win. Their ignorant ADD "insights" are the reason for eight years of Dubya in the first place. Hell, I'll grab a beer with whomever is voting for the leader of the free world based on this genius logic as long as it keeps them away from the polls that day.

You can disagree with Obama on any of his policies. You can certainly not vote for him and you don't even have to like him. However, the bottom line for me is that Obama's speech is not one that you can objectively disagree with and come out on the right side. It's just not. You can't be an intelligent person with half a brain, or heart for that matter, and not find it honest, compelling and most of all, truthful. The problem is the audience, not the speaker. This is a test for America, not Obama, and it appears it's a test we won't pass.

The article below says it best,

“So here the problem is, Jeremiah Wright is conducive to a 10-second sound bite and the speech is not,” he said. “This is the problem. The Wright thing is perfect for our short attention spans, and this requires a little bit of attention. [The speech] takes some sitting down and settling in and not a lot of folks are willing to do that.”

"More than a dozen interviews [in PA] found voters unmoved by Obama’s plea to move beyond racial divisions of the past. Despite baring himself with extraordinarily personal reflections on one of the most toxic issues of the day."

Here's an open letter from me to not just the uneducated among the people of Pennsylvania, but to blue-collar workers, rednecks, and Larry the Cable Guy fan club gold members everywhere: Turn off Dr. Phil, put down the Bud or bud, read a book that isn't "My Pet Goat", go back and get your high school diploma, actually read the damn speech and then come back to the political table. Until you spend more time studying American history and the candidates policies than you do assembling your NCAA tourney bracket, shut the hell up and for all our sakes, DON'T VOTE.

Jim Wallis's take from the Sojourners blog:

"It has simmered throughout this campaign, and now race has exploded into the center of the media debate about the presidential race. Just when a black political leader is calling us all to a new level of responsibility, hope, and unity, the old and divisive rhetoric of race from both blacks and whites is rearing its ugly head to bring down the best chance we have had for years of finally moving forward.

And that is indeed the real issue here. A black man is closer to possibly becoming president than ever before in U.S. history. And this black man is not even running as "a black man," but as a new kind of political leader who believes the country is ready for a new kind of politics. But a new kind of politics and a new face for political leadership is deeply threatening to all the forces that represent the old kind of politics in the U.S. And all the rising focus on race in this election campaign has one purpose and one purpose alone—to stop Barack Obama from becoming president of the United States.

Barack Obama should win or lose his party's nomination or the presidency based on the positions he takes regarding the great issues of our time and his capacity to lead the country and the U.S.'s role in the world. He must not win or lose because of the old politics of race in the U.S. That would be a tragedy for all of us."

here's the original article that inspired this rant:

Obama racial issues may extend to Pa.
By: Carrie Budoff Brown
March 20, 2008 12:00 PM EST

PHILADELPHIA — Stephanie Gill, a bartender in a white working-class neighborhood, noticed the shift immediately.

A week ago, her customers at Rauchut’s Tavern in Tacony didn’t have much to say about Barack Obama. But when she returned to work Wednesday, a day after the Illinois senator attempted to quell the furor over his pastor’s racially incendiary remarks, the reaction inside the corner bar was raw and unapologetic.

“People are not happy with Obama,” Gill said. “It’s the race stuff.”

Obama has always been a tough sell in largely white Northeast Philadelphia and in the city's blue-collar river wards, a collection of white ethnic enclaves where customers at the local watering hole are often born and raised in the neighborhood that supports it.

And his speech Tuesday, although widely praised by the pundit caste and Obama supporters, has only seemed to widen the gulf with the Budweiser class here.

More than a dozen interviews Wednesday found voters unmoved by Obama’s plea to move beyond racial divisions of the past. Despite baring himself with extraordinarily personal reflections on one of the most toxic issues of the day, a highly unusual move for a politician running for national office, the debate inside taverns and beauty shops here had barely moved beyond outrage aimed at the Rev. Jeremiah Wright and Obama’s refusal to “disown” his longtime pastor.

story continued / click link below:

http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0308/9132.html

Moving a nation: Obama's Lincoln moment

Never before has a candidate for national office spoken so frankly about race in America. For days pundits have pondered whether Sen. Obama could weather the controversy over Rev. Jeremiah Wright's racially polarizing comments. The question at this juncture is not whether the candidate will rise to the occasion, but rather, whether America will.

March 19, 2008 / LA Times
Author: Tim Rutten

One hundred and fifty years ago this June, a lanky Illinois lawyer turned politician gave a speech that changed the way Americans talked about the great racial issues of their day.

The lawyer was Abraham Lincoln, and the speech was the famous "House Divided" address with which he accepted the Republican Party's nomination as a candidate for the U.S. Senate. Lincoln lost to Stephen Douglas, but the address changed the national conversation on slavery and, two years later, Lincoln was on his way from Springfield to the White House.

America's political story is studded with such addresses -- historical signposts that divide that which went before from all that followed on an issue of crucial national importance. Franklin Roosevelt's "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself" speech fundamentally changed Americans' expectations of their government in times of social and economic crisis. John F. Kennedy's address on Catholicism and politics to the Greater Houston Ministerial Assn. in 1960 forever altered the way we think about religion and public office.

Sen. Barack Obama, another lanky lawyer from Illinois, planted one of those rhetorical markers in the political landscape Tuesday, when he delivered his "More Perfect Union" speech in Philadelphia, near Independence Hall. The address was meant to dampen the firestorm of criticism that has attached itself to the senator's campaign since video clips of race-baiting remarks by his Chicago church's former pastor began circulating last week.

But instead of offering a simple exercise in damage control, Obama chose to place his discussion of the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright's incendiary comments in a wider consideration of race in America -- and the results were, like those Kennedy achieved in Houston, historic.

Just as every seasoned political hand in 1960 knew that, sooner or later, Kennedy would have to tackle the question of his Catholicism head-on, it's been clear for some time that Obama would have to speak explicitly to the question of race in this campaign. Still, polished orator that he may be, no one could have predicted an address of quite this depth and scope.

"That was the most sophisticated speech on race and politics I've ever heard," said CNN's Bill Schneider, the only network pundit who actually has taught American political history at elite universities.

It was all the more remarkable because, while Kennedy presided over what may have been the greatest speech-writing team in electoral history, Obama -- like Lincoln -- wrote his address himself, completing the final draft Monday night.

Obama did what he had to do, unequivocally repudiating Wright's extreme rhetoric. But what was truly radical about his analysis was his implicit demand that black and white Americans accept the imperfection of each other's views on race. Embedded in such acceptance is the seed of that "more perfect union" toward which this country -- unquestionably great but itself imperfect -- must strive.

It was a concept that Obama subtly invoked near the beginning of the speech by pointing to the fact that although the Constitution "was stained by the original sin of slavery," the "answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution -- a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time."

Theologically, original sin is the source of man's fallen nature and the root of his imperfection. Obama went on to build on that concept, invoking the authority of his own mixed heritage -- son of a black immigrant father and white mother, raised by a loving white grandmother -- and refusing to reject either Wright, a man of good works as well as extreme rhetoric, or his loving grandmother, who was prone to racial stereotypes. Obama demanded that black anger make an allowance for white anxiety and that white resentment make a place for black grievance.

No candidate for national office has ever spoken so candidly or realistically about race as it is lived as a fact of life in America. As he put it Tuesday, "The profound mistake of Rev. Wright's sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country ... is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past."

timothy.rutten@latimes.com
Permalink:
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-rutten19mar19,0,526998.column

Obama steps out of safety, tackles issue of race in historic speech

Sen. Barack Obama on Tuesday tried to stem damage from divisive comments delivered by his pastor, while bluntly addressing anger between blacks and whites in his most racially pointed speech. In an address at the National Constitution Center, a building steeped in the nation’s historic symbolism, Mr. Obama delivered a sweeping assessment of race in America, confronting America's legacy of racial division head on. It was the most extensive speech of his presidential campaign devoted to race and unity, a moment his advisers conceded presented one of the biggest tests of his candidacy.

Full speech:



It's worth the read, so here's the full transcript:
link to transcript:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/18/obama.transcript/index.html

'Mother Jones' Commentary:
"Black and More Than Black": Obama's Daring and Unique Speech on Race
http://www.motherjones.com/mojoblog/archives/2008/03/7695_black_and_more.html

LA Times Summary:
http://www.latimes.com/news/politics/la-na-campaign19mar19,1,4641756.story

CNN Anchors' Analysis:
http://www.cnn.com/2008/POLITICS/03/18/obama.speech/index.html#cnnSTCOther1

Excellent Criticism of News Pundits Takes:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jay-rosen/obama-tells-the-best-poli_b_92139.html

A reaction from listeners:
"Obama's speech, throughout, asks its listeners to transcend themselves -- it asks them to choose nuance over cartoonish political controversy; it asks them to acknowledge stuff about race they don't want to acknowledge; it asks them to think big instead of small."

"I am a 29 white woman who grew up in Idaho, incredibly naive about racial difference and the legacy of racism. After college, I spent 3 years in rural Mississippi teaching at an all black high school in one of the most impoverished parts of the nation. I have lived and worked on both sides of the racial divide and have learned along the way how complicated issues of race, justice, & economic disparity intersect. Obama presents some of the most honest & difficult truths I have ever heard from a politician with candor, humility, & grace. He is not a perfect man — but he has enormous insight & wisdom. This was a courageous moment in American politics. I can’t conceive of voting for anyone else. Even if his campaign should somehow fail, I consider myself lucky to have heard this speech today & to be part of the generation that has witnessed & worked for his campaign."