Buchanan's sour nostalgia notwithstanding, so-called Whites do not lose when African-Americans and the rest of other-than-apparently-to-the-eye-European-Americans gain political and economic clout. The whole White-Black-Other con is a divide and conquer shell game where low and average income "Whites" chase the self-defeating chimera of White Nationalist identity, electing conservative reps and presidents (Reagan, Bush) who govern against their interests (tax cuts for the rich, aggressive anti-union policies and laws, wars their sons and daughters die for nothing in, a sane health care system denied again and again...)


It is of course not AT ALL a coincidence that a Euro-Afro-American president and Democratic Congress elected by a broad multicultural voting coalition is, we fervently vote and pray, finally on the verge of getting decent health care coverage for ALL of this country.

"Whites" in Obaman America aren't losing anything but a self-defeating con of The Man that's for decades stripped average Americans of basic rights and benefits enjoyed in every other developed country. Candidate Obama got his necessary bulk of votes not from "Whites" voting for a "Black" man, but from wised-up Americans-formerly-known-as-White who saw through the con and shed their useless "Whiteness" to simply vote in their actual, true best interests.

All Americans gain when "Whites" abandon destructive identity politics and vote for their interests, not for preserving some mythical "racial" identity.

Josh Marshall says Obama's press conference remarks on Henry Lewis Gates' arrest in Cambridge were "all about a black guy getting on the side of another black guy who got crosswise with the cops."

No, they weren't. I know Josh meant his remarks in a good way, but I actually can't conceive a greater misrepresentation of the sense and force of the President's words. And mind.

President Obama's stated point was exactly that no American--not no Black American, but simply no American citizen--would or should accept being arrested in their own home after showing police proper identification proving they were, in fact, standing in their own home. (OK, who wants to argue with that one?) And that Gates' arrest even after proving such was prima facie evidence the Cambridge police acted "stupidly."

The President did not say the police acted as racists--he said the arrest appeared on its face unjustified and wrong, because Gates was standing in his own home and proved it. The President went on to say that racial profiling and police over-arrests/stops of Black and Latino Americans--a simple fact, as the President noted--cast suspicion even on legitimate stops/arrests.

In short, the President very clearly was not gettin' behind a brother. He (pointedly) was making precisely the same argument that any American would make if a neighbor, or they themselves, were so treated by the police. It's a legal argument, Constitutional if you will--not a race appeal, or shout-out.

Which was of course one sly implicit point of the President: It was not he, or Professor Gates, that was involved in any special racial pleading, if anyone was: It was the Cambridge police.

And that's how this President rolls.

Just a fast note to TPMers, prompted by the sparseness of Iran posts: I hope you're glued to huffpost and andrew sullivan (and tweeting @#iranelection), because the revolution may not be televised but it sure as hell is being Youtubed. This is the real thing, and we need to give these incredibly brave and effective folks all our support. And learn: This is what a revolution in defense of democracy looks like, and it's a heckuva lot more than we managed in 2000. Watch and learn...

Sunday, Paul Krugman took the opportunity of his first This Week with G. Stephanopoulos appearance since bagging the Nobel Prize to expose George Will as the garden-variety ideology-trumps-reality, paleo-conservative hack he is. 

If I were a McCain supporter in Colorado or New Mexico, and saw a report that as many as 60% or better of my fellow registered voters had already voted, with estimated 10% and 17% advantages to Obama among those early votes, respectively--mightn't I just say, Aw, heck, who needs to stand in line down at the polls for two hours just to cast a losing vote--?

This Rashid Khalidi thing has really shaken me. I've read his book "Resurrecting Empire," a very smart anti-Iraq War polemic by way of being a pointedly informative recent history of that region. And I've seen him talk modestly, thoughtfully, shrewdly on Charlie Rose a couple of times. He seems to be a very knowledgable, likeable, principled, valuable guy.

Whoa, teachable moment here! Folks who doubt the important idea that racism is essentially a systemic tool of the powerful, something that lives in and needs to be attacked at the institutional rather than the personal level, ought to give McCain/Palin's recent rhetoric a think or two. 

Who does that ticket represent? The most exploitive, reactionary mega-capital interests in the country. Whose votes do they need? Average (White) working class folks in battleground states like Florida, Ohio, and Virginia. So they're diverting extremely stressed-out working folks' justifiable anger and frustration away from themselves and their backers--where of course it belongs and would do some good--to a completely contrived people "not like us." Like that (Afro-American) network sound man who got the N-word spat at him yesterday at Palin's rally in Clearwater, Florida. 


The guy who shouted the N-word is responsible for being a dangerous fool, but he's not the real racist in this picture: Palin is. McCain is. They're the ones framing the debate for their supporters, they're the major party candidates in a national election drawing the lines where they want them.

They're inciting (to use Josh Marshall's word) racism, for the benefit of themselves and the much more vastly moneyed interests they represent--and, note importantly, to the knowing disadvantage of the voters whose interests they claim to carry close to their hearts.  

McCain/Palin: The plain, appalling face of systemic racism in America.


    

(Expansion of a brief earlier comment to another post.) 

Re/that vexing question of the day: Why is Sarah Palin still so deliriously incoherent on almost any topic of national import, even after weeks of coaching?


It's not just what she doesn't know, it's what she does. Or believes, anyway.

She's a beauty pageant alum. She's all about presentational skills: It's not what you know (she believes), it's how you present yourself. Be confident. You're a winner! DON'T BLINK!

Hence the incessant lying--even back in Alaska, on Troopergate, pre-McCain: Look 'em in the eye and give 'em your best shot! Truthiness? Not really relevant. ('Til the audiotape shows up.) 

And she's a dedicated, wholly credulous Christianist zealot. She "thinks" dinosaurs and people shared the Earth. That geology is a well-intentioned but Satan-friendly hoax. Etc. Boatloads of that stuff!

And that's about it.

So: It's not just that she knows almost nothing about any area of domestic or foreign policy, about any Supreme Court decision beyond Roe v. Wade. It's that what she's got in there already is absolutely without Velcro for any reality-based knowledge or judgment about anything. 

Sarah Palin, the candidate with the Teflon mind.  




   

(Expansion of a brief earlier comment to another post.) 
Re/that vexing question of the day: Why is Sarah Palin still so deliriously incoherent on almost any topic of national import, even after weeks of coaching?

It's not just what she doesn't know, it's what she does. Or believes, anyway.
She's a beauty pageant alum. She's all about presentational skills: It's not what you know (she believes), it's how you present yourself. Be confident. You're a winner! DON'T BLINK!
Hence the incessant lying--even back in Alaska, on Troopergate, pre-McCain: Look 'em in the eye and give 'em your best shot! Truthiness? Not really relevant. ('Til the audiotape shows up.) 
And she's a dedicated, wholly credulous Christianist zealot. She "thinks" dinosaurs and people shared the Earth. That geology is a well-intentioned but Satan-friendly hoax. Etc. Boatloads of that stuff!
And that's about it.
So: It's not just that she knows almost nothing about any area of domestic or foreign policy, about any Supreme Court decision beyond Roe v. Wade. It's that what she's got in there already is absolutely without Velcro for any reality-based knowledge or judgment about anything. 
Sarah Palin, the candidate with the Teflon mind.  




   

Most of the pundits and bloggers are concentrating on style/tactical stuff: Was Obama too professorial? Did he give pithy responses or use too many big words? Was he aggressive enough? Etc.


Not the point. Look at the poll numbers: In the CNN post-debate poll, Obama's biggest numbers were on "more in touch with needs and problems of people like you" (Obama 62%, McCain 32%)  and "stronger on the economy" (Obama 58%, McCain 37%).  


Same thing with CBS's poll: On "Would make the right decisions about the economy," Obama trounced McCain66% to 42%.


And the Fox post-debate focus group with "absolutely uncommitted" voters showed exactly the same responses:


--A middle-aged woman: "[Obama] seemed to know what he was doing, he cared about the average person, and he got to me." 


--Another woman: "Yes, Obama moved me. He seemed to care about everyone in America, he was very articulate..."



These numbers and responses show that Obama won the debate on substance, not style. I think Obama won by emphasizing his middle-class tax cuts and hitting McCain for his big corporate give-aways. Especially effective may have been Obama's chiding McCain for over-emphasizing earmark reform, when McCain's own $300b corporate tax cuts would dwarf any savings on earmarks. Obama: We're not going to build a future for the middle-class on earmark reform. Obama emphasized job creation, health care reform, getting us off expensive foreign oil.


As a boxing match, the contest may have been a draw, as many well-paid on-air pundits and comfortable bloggers have said. But it seems most average viewers wanted to know who was on their side, especially on pocketbook issues. There, on the core national concerns, Obama won in a walk. 


So, a very big night for Obama.

Most of the pundits and bloggers are concentrating on style/tactical stuff: Was Obama too professorial? Did he give pithy responses or use too many big words? Was he aggressive enough? Etc.
Not the point. Look at the poll numbers: In the CNN post-debate poll, Obama's biggest numbers were on "more in touch with needs and problems of people like you" (Obama 62%, McCain 32%)  and "stronger on the economy" (Obama 58%, McCain 37%).  
Same thing with CBS's poll: On "Would make the right decisions about the economy," Obama trounced McCain66% to 42%.
And the Fox post-debate focus group with "absolutely uncommitted" voters showed exactly the same responses:
--A middle-aged woman: "[Obama] seemed to know what he was doing, he cared about the average person, and he got to me." 
--Another woman: "Yes, Obama moved me. He seemed to care about everyone in America, he was very articulate..."

These numbers and responses show that Obama won the debate on substance, not style. I think Obama won by emphasizing his middle-class tax cuts and hitting McCain for his big corporate give-aways. Especially effective may have been Obama's chiding McCain for over-emphasizing earmark reform, when McCain's own $300b corporate tax cuts would dwarf any savings on earmarks. Obama: We're not going to build a future for the middle-class on earmark reform. Obama emphasized job creation, health care reform, getting us off expensive foreign oil.
As a boxing match, the contest may have been a draw, as many well-paid on-air pundits and comfortable bloggers have said. But it seems most average viewers wanted to know who was on their side, especially on pocketbook issues. There, on the core national concerns, Obama won in a walk. 
So, a very big night for Obama.  
But to average workin

Yes, Obama needs to respond to the McCain campaign's Britney/vacuous celeb/uppity Black guy ads. Now. Here's my suggestion to Obama's campaign:

A new ad campaign of their own, featuring not Obama or a faceless narrator, but ordinary Americans, speaking to the camera and explaining why they strongly support Obama--why they show up at those big rallies, why maybe they've knocked on doors for his campaign, or simply how he won their vote and their respect.

Show it: It's not because they view Obama as a celebrity, not because they're foolish groupies, but because they're solid, smart Americans who've responded to Obama's plans to get us out of Iraq; expand health care coverage; take on our economic challenges; and finally do something real about both spiraling energy prices and onrushing global warming. And, because they believe Barack Obama will restore Americans' confidence in their president, and in the possiblity of democratic change that's by and for average Americans. Sunrise in America.

And, yes, also some folks who are dismayed and disgusted by John McCain's bizarre, ugly attack ads--the whole negative, bullsh-- character assassination stuff that gets us nowhere good--and can say so sensibly and convincingly.

Lots of different folks, of course--all ages, regions, ethnicities. Individuals, groups of folks, families.

In short, let Obama voters and supporters themselves put the lie to McCain's lies, and remind the Americans seeing McCain's trash ads why, in fact, so many  people are indeed streaming into those big campaign rallies. Because Barack Obama is of course not a celebrity, but an elected senator and a candidate for president, a political leader, whose apparent integrity, intelligence, grit and vision have encourged millions of Americans to support his candidacy at a time of crisis, in an historically important election. Serious stuff, and a long, long way from Britney Shields.

But you can't just say it, you look defensive; you have to show it.

The Republicans want to suck the hope out of Obama's campaign, and replace it with cynicism and division. Throw $10 million into a campaign such as I'm suggesting (right now, before the conventions), go big, especially in swing states--and you could knock a lot of that evil wind right out of McCain's sails.

(For some reason TPM's formatting removed paragraph breaks from the first version posted. Please read this one!)
With W. Virginia supposedly about to go very big for Hillary Clinton, I'd like to dig into something that's been bugging me throughout this campaign--especially so in the past week, with all the brouhaha over Clinton's "hard-working Americans, White Americans" comment-- obviously relevant to the W VA situation. That's the way the media habitually take it for granted that these "White Americans" Clinton is talking about actually do objectively exist--like Buicks or ham sandwiches. 
Indeed, that's what Clinton is implicitly arguing: Like it or not, she's saying, it's just a fact that lots of these White Voters are prejudiced and won't vote for a Black Candidate (another type that Factually Exists), so you've got to nominate me. There it is, super delegates--you've got to deal with reality. 

Well, here's my point: That's just a lie! The whole thing is just total nonsense, which Clinton knows better than anybody--because the whole point of her "hardworking White Americans" comment and all the rest of the furious race-baiting both Clintons have been up to for months--is to manufacture White voters. That's the whole reason to race-bait in the first place--to turn average American citizens into "White" Americans. "Whites" are made, not born, as are "Blacks," and the sole function of race-baiting is to create them.  D'uh, that's why the Clintons have been race-baiting!
Here's my take on how the process works: What's a "White" American? A "White" American is an American who's been persuaded that she/he has something to gain by self-identifying as "White,"and just as much to lose by self-identifying as simply "American"--i.e., having common cause with all other Americans. Whenever an American can be convinced that he/she has something to gain by self-identifying as "White," and plenty to lose by defining "Americans"  inclusively--hey presto, a "White American" has been created.

A quick review of the historical videotape should remind us of how painfully effective this technique has been:

You can create "White" people by enslaving, under law, every African living throughout broad swaths of American territory, labeling them "Black," buying and selling them as chattel and depriving them of all citizens' rights. That technique was employed for hundreds of years, and was extremely good at creating millions of highly convinced "Whites," who were only too happy, under the circumstances, to enthusiastically police the color line created by their betters.

After slavery was finally ended and Americans of African descent gained (on paper) full constitutional rights, those authorities with an interest in maintaining the ranks of "Whites"and "Blacks" passed  the Jim Crow laws,  pretty much undoing the Fourteenth Amendment. They also encouraged shooting or hanging in a public place any Afro-American who actually tried to register to vote or exercise other of his/her citizen rights. Again, those measures, in place in much of the country for the 100 years up 'til the '70s (including areas far outside the South) were really effective at persuading anybody who could get away with it to self-identify--and vote--as "White."

And let's not forget that until the mid-1950s, the Constitution totally barred from citizenship all "non-Whites" such as Americans of Japanese or Indian descent, a provision the Supreme Court upheld on more than one occasion. The U.S. government could round up and imprison tens of thousands of Americans of Japanese ancestry for the duration of World War II--simply for having Japanese ancestry--because they weren't citizens, and had no citizens' rights.  They weren't "White." Those circumstancess also long encouraged the adoption of a "White" identity by anybody who could manage it.

After World War II, the GI bill and Federal Housing Administration-backed cheap mortgages allowed millions of Americans to buy their first home, going a long way toward creating today's middle-class. Those federal tax-funded programs also heavily subsidized the creation of the suburbs, that middle-class's natural habitat. But those mortgages, and most of those suburbs, were legally barred to "non-Whites." The resultant enrichment of "White" suburban home-owners, directly accompanied by the urban ghettoization and impoverishment of "Blacks" and other "Non-Whites," was also a really successful technique for reminding those Americans who could that they'd better self-identify as "White."

And finally, in the past forty years or so, after the civil rights movement finally succeeded in pushing the Feds to abolish all that Jim Crow etc. crap and start dismantling all the elaborate legal, social and economic structures that sustained all that "White" (relative) privilege--well, then Republican politicians cleverly started arguing to "Whites" that anything the government did to ensure "non-Whites" ("minorities") their full rights as just plain citizens was actually an unfair, unconstitutional attack on the rights of..."White people!" Reverse discrimination! Cheating welfare queens! Political correctness! 

And so those--both "White" and "Black"--who'd maybe started to consider the possibility that they could finally just be Americans, were again frog-marched back into the Dance of Exploitive Categories. And we've had forty years of no universal health-care, Republican wars, ludicrously regressive taxation, and all the other miserable fruits of "White" voting for race-baiting Republicans.

Today is the West Virginia primary. Hillary Clinton may well win, who knows, 70% of the vote. But PLEASE--do not tell me that that's because "White voters just won't vote for Obama." W. Virginians are just Americans like everybody else. If they vote so skewedly "White," it's because for decades they've been skillfully pushed and prodded, in the ugliest of ways and with the ugliest of outcomes--most recently by a leading Democratic candidate--to do so.

Barack Obama has built his campaign on the assertion that an electorate that self-identifies "racially," where "Whites" see voting as a zero sum game where they lose if other Americans win, is actually an America where everybody loses.  And that if instead, all Americans can vote just as Americans, for the broad common interest,  we can finally make some real progress on health care, a sane foreign policy, taxes, etc. 

He had some real success with that approach in Iowa, Virginia, Maryland and some other states.

But then Hillary Clinton came along... and started manufacturing "White" folks. 

One thing that everybody ought to understand about the   disastrous storm in Burma is that it was a hurricane--a powerful hurricane, which drove a destructive storm surge of ocean water up through the Burmese delta lowlands, pretty much exactly as hurricane Katrina did in the Louisiana/Mississippi delta in 2005. So that's what we're talking about.
 
Why do all the MSM call this killer storm a cyclone? Well, a bit unbelievably, they persist even in 2008 with a centuries old Euro-American tradition of imperialistic, ethnocentric deceptiveness and mystification.

The generic meteorological term for this type of storm is a tropical cyclone. However, that's not a term widely used outside of scientific circles. Going back to the days of the British empire, Euro-American cultural elites have long used a version of a word found in Asian languages from Chinese to Urdu, picked up by European sailors and colonial officials in Asia, "typhoon," to describe these storms when they occur in the northwestern Pacific. "Cyclone" was designated the term for the southern Pacific and Indian Ocean colonial zones; "hurricane," from a Caribbean storm god, for storms in the colonial Atlantic.

They're all the same thing; bizarrely, the three different names represent, basically, the racializing of tropical storms. They're wog storms--all colored people and their storms in their proper place.

And the American MSM persist with this bit of imperial double-talk  today--confusing readers, and blocking empathy, solidarity, effective response. Southern Burma is now experiencing its own Katrina--but even worse. We ought to understand that that's what has happened, but the media aren't helping.

Over on the thread following clearthinker's very important post "Clinton firewall--based on race," over on Most Recommended Reader Posts (clearthinker's post is basically a link to a David Sirota column in In These Times, accessible directly at the ITT website)...on that thread, there's a query from a Hillary Clinton supporter: Do her critics really claim she's a racist? That BILL is a racist?

It's a great question. Basically, I think the assumption is this: OK, maybe the Clintons have played the race card once or twice or three times. Bill's "Y'know, Jesse Jackson won here in '84" comment in S. Carolina, Hillary's Muslim waffling on 60 Minutes, the whole sustained Geraldine Ferraro campaign, the current Wright campaign--OK, yeah, they're playing the race card. But thta's not personal racism, that's just politics--as George Bush memorably said to John McCain after that earlier S. Carolina primary. As Bill Clinton himself basically said last week: "You shouldn't go into politics if you don't want to get roughed up a little bit."

But it's not personal, right? Stooping to race-baiting as an electoral strategy doesn't make the Clintons--the first Black president! And his first lady!-- racists, right?

Wrong, wrong wrong. The Clintons are true racists--much bigger and truer racists than the unemployed White steelworker in Youngstown who drops the n-word over a beer.

What's racism? It's not an attitude, it's a strategy. Let's remember its pedigree: U.S. racism originated as the ideological strategy of choice by the early European and American financiers, merchants, shippers and plantation operators to maintain their labor strategy of choice: slave labor. They created racist categorization and language expressly to sustain, police and justify the hugely profitable slave labor system that was the basis for the 19th C. Euro- American economy--for that matter, for the whole Industrial Revolution. It was all about the Benjamins.

The monied interests started it--the racist strategy--and the politicians and societal leaders (usually of the monied class themselves) designed it into the Constitution, law and civil institutions. The average "White" guy on the street, more likely to be an indentured servant (a slave-for-a-decade) than a capitalist, was far down the ideological food chain.

In some fundamental ways, things really haven't changed that much. For the past 40 years of presidential elections, Republicans have been exploiting that same old racist ideology, still deeply embedded in the American labor system and so in American society, on behalf of their big-money corporate interests. Very effectively. That's racism, true, devastatingly effective racism. As ever, that White guy in Youngstown who got up off his barstool in 1980 and voted for Ronald Reagan is far down the chain of exploitation.

And last month, when that guy's son climbed off that same barstool--the Youngstown economy is more cratered than ever--and went and voted for Hillary Clinton in the Ohio primary, he was still less a racist, a true racist, than the powerful politicians, Bill and Hillary Clinton--Democratic politicians!--who pushed every race-baiting button they could think of to remind that guy that Barack Obama is Black. And of course, Black interests aren't White interests. (Democratic politicians! Who does that race-baited vote benefit? The guy on the bar stool? I don't think so. Only Hillary Clinton...and the same old monied interests that have always lived off of splitting American workers against each other.)

I think Sirota's underlining of the Clintons' "race firewall" explains why they've been so insistent this past week that they're staying in through the convention. This is their bottom-line strategy to win, and they think they can keep playing the race card (the Wright card) through Pennsylvania, Kentucky, W. Virginia...it's how they think they can grab the nomination.

That's racism. That's what it's all about.