Barack Obama made a healthy name for himself in 2004 with pithy observations like this;
You see, electing a black president wasn't exactly what the Great Emancipator had in mind before or during the Civil War. Lincoln opposed slavery because he believed that it dehumanized
whites, not because he was such a huge fan of blacks. In fact, if it were up to Lincoln, he would have had them all deported. Indeed, he sent some to Haiti, where they died of diptheria, and others to Liberia, where they were eaten or something.
Throughout his career generally - and during his 1858 debates with Stephen Douglas in particular - Lincoln was pretty outspoken on his views on race. Here's just a little of what he is
on the record as having said and written;
I am not, nor ever have been in favor of bringing about in any way the social and political equality of the white and black races. I am not nor ever have been in favor of making voters or jurors of negroes, nor qualifying them to hold office, nor to intermarry with white people; and I will say in addition to this that there is a physical difference between the white and black races which I believe will ever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality. ... And inasmuch as they cannot so live, while they do remain together there must be the position of superior and inferior, and I as much as any other man am in favor of having the superior position assigned to the white race.
-Fouth debate with Stephen Douglas, 18 September 1858
I have never had the least apprehension that I or my friends would marry negroes if there was no law to keep them from it, but as Judge Douglas and his friends seem to be in great apprehension that they might, if there were no law to keep them from it, I give him the most solemn pledge that I will to the very last stand by the law of this State, which forbids the marrying of white people with negroes.
-Fourth debate with Stephen Douglas, 18 September 1858
Negro equality! Fudge!! How long, in the government of a God, great enough to make and maintain this Universe, shall there continue to be knaves to vend, and fools to gulp, so low a piece of demagogism as this?
Speech notes, 1859
Those quotes should not be taken to malign Lincoln, but rather to point out that he was representative of his region and era. And even the abolitionists never intended for the result of their work to be a black president of the United States. The Emancipation Proclomation was not intended as a grand statement in the cause of civil rights but as a tactical blow against the Confederacy in the Civil War. As a former professor of constitutional law and a really bright guy, I'm pretty sure that Senator Obama is aware of that.
However, it is brilliant politics and the optics are practically unbeatable. If you can think of a better image of an attractive, bright and charismatic African American invoking the Great Emancipator as he announces his intention to lead the free world, you're more politically astute than I am. Just because the historical and intellectual foundations of the presentation are misleading, it doesn't make the presentation itself any less brilliant.
As I've mentioned earlier, I didn't expect Barack Obama to run and I still can't see him winning. I think he knows that too, and is running for vice-president. I assume that he knows political history as well as I do and therefore knows that the vice-presidency is a much better launching pad for the presidency than is the Senate. And at 45, Obama is young enough to wait four or eight years to run a serious campaign. I think this race is more about positioning than it is actually winning.
However, Obama does present a unique threat to the frontrunner, Hillary Clinton. His announcement that he was forming an exploratory committee completely overshadowed Hillary and her insipid "conversation" and essentially destroyed Joe Biden's game in record time. Seeing a presidential campaign deflate as quickly as Biden's has is a rare, strange and beautiful thing - like a minatour. You only see it once in a lifetime, but the memories are forever.
Barack Obama is to the 2008 race what John McCain was to 2000's. The media, quite simply, is in love with the guy. It doesn't matter that he doesn't look old enough to shave, has been in Big Time Politics for 10 minutes and speaks only in platitudes, the mainstream media is not going to shit on their golden goose. That job will be left to the other campaigns and the fringe media.
The Clinton years are highly instructive on how this works. When right-wingers wanted to put out a particularly salacious story against President Clinton, they had a highly effective way of doing so. First the story would appear in a small conservative (usually lunatic) journal like
The American Spectator. Then it would be picked up by the British tabloids, which are famous for printing anything. From there, the story would go to
The Drudge Report and/or Fox News and onward to
The New York Times, Washington Post and the three broadcast networks. After going through so many hands, the original fingerprints on the story would be indistinguishable.
I think what we're beginning to see the genesis of a clandestine effort to get Obama. Over the last few weeks, there has been
something of a brouhaha about the possibility that Obama was educated in a madrassa in Indonesia. Did you know that people with odd names in madrassas aren't really appreciated in modern American political life? Neither did I.
The story first appeared in the ironically titled
Insight magazine, which is about as credible as you would expect a property of the Reverend
Sun Myung Moon would be. From there, professional idiots like Sean Hannity took it to town. The story had the potential to be the perfect smear. It isn't at all likely that the American people would elect a president who shared an alma matta with
Ayman al-Zawahiri. It's bad enough when the cocksuckers graduated from Yale. But guilt by association is a pretty powerful and fundamentally neat thing in politics, ain't it?
The problem with the story was that it was complete and utter horseshit. CNN has since done a rather
creditable job of debunking that piece of xenophobic nonsense. I
hate it when that happens. Just when you think that the American people are going to wind up with their first Manchurian Candidate from Hezbollah, the carpet gets yanked out from under all of us. Xenophobic nonsense, along with the vulgar, hypersexual text messages congressmen send to teenage boys, is what makes politics fun.
Some would point out that a negative story, if not refuted within 24 hours, does its damage whether it's true or not. This is correct, but only to a point. For a false or questionable story to be damaging, it has to be at least somewhat plausible. Given his shifting record on the Vietnam War, the
Swift Boat Veterans For Truth story about John Kerry was plausible and therefore lethal. On the other hand, Matt Drudge floated a story from the British tabloids about Kerry fucking an intern and that wounded him not at all. John Kerry's been called a lot of things, but "notorious fuck master" hasn't been one of them. The story was so patently silly that it evaporated all on its own.
Often, the unintended consequence of flinging such obvious bullshit at someone is that it engenders sympathy for the target and may make them a stronger candidate. Obviously, people who don't automatically believe everything they hear on television are a minority of the electorate, but they might swing a close election if inundated with enough lies. If the target is also wildly popular, the smear often serves only to make him more popular, particularly if the basis of the attack is race, religion or gender.
The logical implications of the world's Sean Hannity's in telling the Obama/ Madrassa story are pretty clear. "Look, black folks are plenty scary when they have innocuous names like 'Fiddy Cent.' This one has a an extra-creepy Arab name! And he went to a kooky school, to boot! Watch the fuck out, America! This darkie is dangerous!"
One of the interesting aspects of the Fox News story is that they are saying that it came from Hillary's campaign. That should surprise no one because, even though they deny it, it's plausible. Her staffers over the years aren't exactly tripping over one another to state for the record what a pleasant person she is. Also, her campaign is being run by the cold pros who got her husband twice elected. Those fuckers are ruthless and they'll do anything to win. Say what you will about Bill Clinton personally, but you have to admire the tenacity and skill of a draft dodger who beat not one, but two war heros.
The story is also heavy-handed enough to come from Hillary, who isn't exactly celebrated for her subtlety. For the first time, a major candidate has been accused of terrorist sympathies. Usually these things are merely implied. And planting that kind of a story with the fucking Moonies is something that's just clever enough to have been engineered by the Clintons.
Because Obama is almost effortlessly sucking away all of her media oxygen, Hillary obviously wants to kneecap him. That's a given. But it's also very dangerous. While I think that Barack Obama's chances of winning the presidential nomination next year are between slim and none, he's a
natural for the other half of the ticket. As a matter of fact, he's one of a very few vice-presidential nominees who brings real, live votes to the table. No rational Democrat should want him so dirtied up that he can't be nominated. Unfortunately, rationality isn't a quality often attributed to the Democratic Party.
The Democrats would also be idiotic to crate a martyred, John McCain-like figure in their own party. Most folks forget this, but McCain beat Bush in New Hampshire by 19 points. Actually, 19 points is much closer to a disembowlment than it is a mere beating. The Bush team knew that this would never do and that McCain had to be annhiliated in South Carolina.
The problem is that they were overly vicious about it. Tales were told of mysterious black babies (who were in fact adopted Bangladeshis) and the dark possibilty that McCain was driven mad by his Vietnamese captors. Unlike most folks, I'm honest about my love for gutter politics and what was done to McCain made even me cringe. The Democrats even did a passable job of acting sad about it, and "South Carolina" became national shorthand for the evil Karl Rove is capable of before breakfast. Does the eventual Democratic nominee really need to be tsked by the Republicans over the treatment if Barack Obama during the primaries? And if you were wondering, yes, the Republicans actually are hypocritical enough to do just that.
Furthermore, you can only go to a dirty well for the same water so many times before you die. You may remember how effective the Republican campaign slogan of "a vote for the Democrats is a vote for
Abu-Musab al-Zarquawi to cut off your fucking head" was despite being to unwieldly for a bumper sticker. It worked like gangbusters in 2002 and 2004. in '06...not so much.
There's another problem with going nasty on Obama.
His numbers go off of the fucking charts with white broads! Then, running preliminary polls, his advisers noticed something remarkable: Women responded more intensely and warmly to Obama than did men. In a seven-candidate field, you don't need to win every vote. His advisers, assuming they would pick up a healthy chunk of black votes, honed in on a different target: Every focus group they ran was composed exclusively of women, nearly all of them white.
There is an amazingly candid moment in Obama's autobiography when he writes of his childhood discomfort at the way his mother would sexualize African-American men. "More than once," he recalls, "my mother would point out: 'Harry Belafonte is the best-looking man on the planet.' " What the focus groups his advisers conducted revealed was that Obama's political career now depends, in some measure, upon a tamer version of this same feeling, on the complicated dynamics of how white women respond to a charismatic black man. "I remember when we realized something magical was happening," says Obama's pollster on the campaign, an earnest Iowan named Paul Harstad. "We were doing a focus group in suburban Chicago, and this woman, seventy years old, looks seventy-five, hears Obama's life story, and she clasps her hand to her chest and says, 'Be still, my heart.' Be still, my heart -- I've been doing this for a quarter century and I've never seen that." The most remarkable thing, for Harstad, was that the woman hadn't even seen the videos he had brought along of Obama speaking, had no idea what the young politician looked like. "All we'd done," he says, "is tell them the Story."
It should go without saying that this phenomenon drives Hannity up the goddamn wall, but there's a more important point here.
President Bush's re-election victory in the popular vote (as opposed to the Electoral College, where gay marriage fetchingly saved the day) rested entirely on the backs of white women who were very much afraid of Abu Musab al-Zarquawi cutting their fucking heads off. Zarquawi might be gone now, but I'm certain that anyone - Republican or Democrat - who holds the blade to Harry Belafonte's throat will pay a
very steep price for it on election day.
With Iraq in the shitter, the "security moms" are back on the market. And they're really not
looking for Mr. Goodbar. An attack on their man will be perceived as an attack on them. It seems to me that gutting Obama is one of the very few fun things in life that is all negative and no positive.
If you have to break out the ugly stick, you don't do so for someone who can't win, yet would still be a general election asset. You put it in reserve for a real threat to your ambitions. You save it for Al Gore.
Besides, you can't get too ugly with Barack Obama! Hasn't anyone told you that he's Abraham Fucking Lincoln?
