Thursday, March 27, 2008

Obama

Some of his bad points

"I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas," Barack Obama declared last week in a speech that seemed to awe just about everyone (wow, he talked about RACE!!!). "I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents; and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible."

Excuse me? Has Barack never heard of Trinidad and Tobago, to take just one example?"

read JT's full post

and then there's Glen Ford's point of view:

"Obama is smart, but his basic game plan is quite simple. Knowing full well the group most hostile to Black progress in the U.S. has always been white males, he aims to neutralize much of this demographic by assuring them an Obama presidency would be aggressively race-neutral. In practice, that means Obama ascribes all racial offenses to the past, where the only guilty white people are dead. The accumulated white wealth and privilege that is the result of hundreds of years of racist exploitation also was due to actions (crimes) of people now mostly dead. Obama forgives the dead racists, and has never expressed any intention of readjusting the ten to fifteen to one disparity in median white to Black household income. Yes, Obama knows perfectly well that wealth disparity, if not aggressively dealt with as a racial problem, will take centuries – if ever – to disappear. But Obama accepts the racial status quo as a fait accompli that can only be altered by methods that do not penalize living white people who benefited from their dead ancestors’ crimes. In practice, this means Obama would leave American race relationships frozen in time."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

None of the 22 Democrats interviewed by the Financial Times at the Clinton rally in West Virginia last week would commit themselves to voting for Obama if he became the Democratic nominee. In fact half said they definitely would not.
Rather than overtly attack him on racial grounds many of them cloaked their criticism of him by doubting his patriotism e.g his refusal to wear a Stars and Stripes badge, others by repeating the internet rumours that Obama was a muslim and his wife an aetheist.
West Virginia has the lowest college graduation rate in the US, the second lowest median household income, and one of the highest proportions of white residents (96%), which may explain their views. However, the FT feels that the Republicans will be happy use the double edged "patriotism" line of attack if he is nominated because they have a 71 year old Vietnam war hero running for them.