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NARAL Is Correct: Summing Up the View that Obama Unites & Clinton Divides
The point of the choice by NARAL was that Obama is much better suited to unite us. He has experience doing that. He has top-flight judgment, as evidenced throughout this campaign and most notably in his decision to come out against authorizing the use of force in Iraq. He is winning this race, despite all of his disadvantages. His character is stellar. He is perhaps the least expedient candidate since Lincoln. People who have worked with him in every phase of his life have nothing but praise for his trustworthiness and authenticity. Obama is, most importantly, deeply empathic, as demonstrated in his speech on race when he, unlike any public figure in history, soulfully and with intellectually credible ideas empathized with white workingclass neoracists. The genuiness of his empathy is attested by many people on both sides of the political spectrum who have worked with him. The noted historian, Gary Willis, in the New York Review of Books, compared Obama's speech on race favorably to one of Lincoln's speeches, mostly because both men were able to stem the tide of divisiveness in one speech.
The removed, ideologically driven critics just don't know him, don't know the evidence, haven't carefully studied his close associations he's had throughout his careers.
Hillary has everything going for her except character and temperament. She lied shamelessly re. landing in Bosnia, her husband's politically suicidal infidelities, Obama's views on NAFTA, her actual, true beliefs about Obama staying in Wright's church.
More important, as fair witness Bill Bradley quoted her as saying in a small Democrat meeting, she does intend and always has intended to "demonize" as craftily as possible anyone who opposes her concerning an issue or race that can "establish my place in history." She is entirely Rovian in this regard. She will say or do anything that she thinks will increase her success.
These conclusions about Hillary are documented in extensive articles in the New Yorker and elsewhere. Bill is quoted as saying that he would have a better chance of throwing the huge oak desk in the Oval Office through the window behind it than changing his wife's mind. That trait came into play during her attempts to push through her version of health care reform. When Bill worked out a compromise with her leading opponent on health care, Rep. Cooper, who was widely considered a thoughtful conservative. Bill then deferred to his wife, saying to Cooper that Cooper must get her to sign on to the compromise that he, the President, mind you, already created and agreed to. That compromise, according to Bill, would've increased the number of people covered by 15 mil. Hillary trashed the compromise and politically trashed Cooper.
Why is she amazingly arrogant and destructive? This is an important question, because without some understanding of the cause of her negative traits, they seem fabricated. The most likely answer was inadvertantly supplied by her in various interviews conducted long ago. A likely explanation is that she is driven by the degradation she experienced at the hands of her cruel, merciless father to have a prominent place in history. She's quoted as saying in private that she continued to push for her health care bill because she wanted this prominence. But in the bargain, she destroyed the promise suggested by the 72 percent of the public who, during the early 1990s, said they wanted national health reform. Because of her arrogance and poor temperament, she broke faith with them so that, now 16 years later, we're no further ahead than we were.
Prominence, for many of us, is the most satisfying antidote to our hidden feelings of worthless. I know it's part of my motivation for trying to write a scintilating article despite inadequate training. Now, her amazing competency as a lawyer and politician coupled with her drivenness has put her in a postion to finally quench the fire of self-hatred her father implanted in her. Of course, it ain't gonna work this time, and really there's no satisfying that kind of father. More important, the distortion of character and feeling for others wrought by his cruelty is dangerous for America.
She might be okay in the end. It's too difficult to predict. But it's reasonable to fear her and at least provisionally conclude that can't possibly unite this country. Right up until this moment, she continues to do what's best for her and her most ardent supporters than what's best for America. Most pointedly, she's emphasizing her supposed superior ability to connect with white working class people. I could fly with that much more than I can now if she was making this appeal when she had some chance of winning. But now, it just hammers away at the public the notion that her rival can't connect. She's undermining our nominee, the last great hope we have to avoid more devastation in America and the world.
She just can't be a uniting force. At least Obama is bent that way, as his entire history demonstrates.
Comments (3)
Obama unites??????
Rev. Donnie McClurkin:
"I am delivered and I know God can deliver others, too."
"God delivered me from homosexuality."
"I have battled the curse of homosexuality."
"I can't let off. I didn't call myself -- God called me to do what I do. If this is a war, we are willing to fight. Not a war of violence, but a war of purpose."
"I've been through this and have experienced God's power to change my lifestyle. I am delivered and I know God can deliver others, too."
"They have issues and need someone to encourage them like everybody else -- just like the murderer, just like the one full of pride, just like the prostitute."
Donny McClurkin - GOP Convention Center - 2004 - speaking of gay people:
"I’m not in the mood to play with those who are trying to kill our children."
Donny McClurkin - MC OF BARACK OBAMA'S GOSPEL TOUR by personal invitation of Barack Obama - October, 2007 - S. Carolina
"There is a side of Christ that deals in judgment, and all sin is against God."
"Don't call me a bigot or anti-gay, when I have been touched by the same feelings," ... "When I have suffered with the same feelings. Don't call me a homophobe, when I love everybody … Don't tell me that I stand up and I say vile words against the gay community because I don't. I don't speak against the homosexual. I tell you that God delivered me from homosexuality."
Press release from the Obama campaign: "OBAMA DOES NOT AGREE WITH MCCLURKIN'S VIEWS ON GAYS."
Barack Obama - 3/18/08 - Philadelphia
"But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren't simply controversial. They weren't simply a religious leader's effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam."
"As such, Reverend Wright's comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems."
"On one end of the spectrum, we've heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it's based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we've heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike."
"Like other predominantly black churches across the country, TRINITY EMBODIES THE BLACK COMMUNITY in its entirety."
"He contains within him the contradictions - the good and the bad - of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.
I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe. These people are a part of me."
"Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, 'The past isn't dead and buried. In fact, it isn't even past.' WE DO NOT NEED TO RECITE HERE THE HISTORY OF RACIAL INJUSTICE IN THIS COUNTRY. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow." "Segregated schools...." "Legalized discrimination...." "violence...." "exclusion...." "income gap...." "poverty...." "shame and frustration...." "welfare..." "cycle of violence, blight and neglect...."
"The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright's sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning."
Barack Obama - 3/20/08 - Philadelphia
"The point I was making was not that my grandmother harbors any racial animosity, but that she is A TYPICAL WHITE PERSON. If she sees somebody on the street that she doesn't know (pause) there's a reaction in her that doesn't go away and it comes out in the wrong way."
Jeremiah Wright - National Press Club - 4/28/08
"Politicians do what they do based on electability. What I mean is what several of my white friends and several of my white, Jewish friends have written me and said to me. They've said, 'You're a Christian. You understand forgiveness. We both know that, if Senator Obama did not say what he said, he would never get elected.' Politicians say what they say and do what they do based on electability, based on sound bites, based on polls, Huffington, whoever's doing the polls. As I said, whether he gets elected or not, I'm still going to have to be answerable to God November 5th and January 21st. That's what I mean. I do what pastors do. He does what politicians do. He didn't distance himself. He had to distance himself, because he's a politician, from what the media was saying I had said, which was anti-American."
"I was not invited [to stand beside Obama when he announced his candidacy], because that was a political event. Let me say again, I am his pastor. At a political event, who started it off? Senator Dick Durbin. I started it off downstairs with him, his wife and children in prayer. That's what pastors do."
Barack Obama - Denouncing Jeremiah Wright a day after downplaying Wrights remarks and denouncing the media for showing video clips of Wright's sermons - 4/29/08 - Winston-Salem, N. Carolina
"The fact that Reverend Wright would think that somehow it was appropriate to command the stage for three or four consecutive days in the midst of this major debate is something that not only makes me angry, but also saddens me. At a certain point, if what somebody says contradicts what you believe so fundamentally, and then he questions whether or not you believe it in front of the National Press Club, then that’s enough. That’s a show of disrespect to me."
"His comments were not only divisive and destructive, but I believe that they end up giving comfort to those who prey on hate, and I believe that THEY DO NOT PORTRAY ACCURATELY THE PERSPECTIVE OF THE BLACK CHURCH."
__________
Add to the above Obama's accusation that Hillary belittled Martin Luther King when she made remarks about LBJ, and that Bill was making racially inflammatory remarks when he used the term "fairy tale", even though he was talking about Obama's Iraq war funding votes.
Feel free to add.
May 14, 2008 6:40 PM | Reply | Permalink
You could have saved yourself much typing, Otto. Your cause is neither just nor successful. Your candidate has lost. Live with it.
Hillary's high initial negatives should have warned you of her likely defeat.
May 14, 2008 7:52 PM | Reply | Permalink
Apparently HRC lied about Obama record on choice too...Which is to trivialize choice not support it.
Check ot the video by Lorna Brett Howard, former Chicago NOW president.
http://www.dailykos.com/story/2008/5/14/154352/219/992/515638
May 14, 2008 7:05 PM | Reply | Permalink
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