Keith Olberman said he wanted context. Here is some context. This is why some Americans get uneasy at the thought of a presidential candidate who has proclaimed himself the
Yes, we can! man explaining to his wealthy San Francisco backers that he can not win in Pennsylvania, because the voters are bitter.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mayhill-fowler/obama-no-surprise-that-ha_b_96188.html "You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them," Obama said. "And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."
Now that the whole audio has come out, we know that he was explaining to potential donors why he, an African-American, is trailing Hillary in that state. It is not his fault that he can not get the message across. It is the fault of the voters. They have allowed themselves to be beaten down, duped, reduced to stereotypes out of Tobacco Road. That is why Barack Obama has to go back west, where sensible educated
wealthy people live in order to get more money so he can run more feel good ads back in Pennsylvania in order to persuade the hicks---no, cross that---the
bitter people to vote for him. So that he can lift them out of their misery.
Here is what is going through the minds of unemployed Democrats in the dying factory towns:
“People gonna have a look in their eye. They gonna look at you an’ their face says ‘I don’t like you, you son-of-a-bitch.’ Gonna be deputy sheriffs, an’ they’ll move you on. You gonna see in people’s face how they hate you. An’---I’ll tell you somepin. They hate you ‘cause they’re scairt. They know a hungry fella gonna get food even if he got to take it. They know that fallow lan’s a sin an’ somebody’s gonna take it. What the hell! You never been called ‘Okie’ yet.”
Tom said, “Okie? What’s that?”
“Well, Okie use ta’ mean you was from Oklahoma. Now it means you’re a dirty son-of-a bitch. Okie means you’re scum.” John Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath
Obama is wrong if he thinks that the first thing on the minds of the economically oppressed is anger and bitterness. If they were charged with anger, they would have marched on Washington already. If the people of the United States felt empowered, our 1968 would have been Mai 1968 in France---bigger, more violent, and it would have actually accomplished something besides just a backlash.
Studs Turkel, writing about the Great Depression:
“That there are some who were untouched or, indeed, did rather well isn’t exactly news. This has been true of all disasters. The great many were wounded, in one manner or another. It left upon them an ‘invisible scar’….The suddenly-idle hands blamed themselves, rather than society. True, there were hunger marches and protestations to City Hall and Washington, but the millions experienced a private kind of shame when the pink slip came. No matter that others suffered the same fate, the inner voice whispered, ‘I’m a failure.’”
“True there was a sharing among many of the dispossessed, but, at close quarters, frustration became, at times, violence, and violence turned inward. Thus, sons and fathers fell away, one from the other. And the mother, seeking work, said nothing. Outside forces, except to the more articulate and political rebels, were in some vague way responsible, but not really. It was a personal guilt.” Studs Turkel Hard Times
Obama has been successful because he has followed the model of Jimmy Carter who followed the model of FDR. He has kept his campaign on the message of
Hope . Please refer back to my journals
Barack Obama and the Great Surge of Hope and
Barack Obama Recycles Jimmy Carter for more on Obama’s winning strategy.
Here is how FDR did it as president:
While developing programs to help America emerge from the Great Depression, Roosevelt also needed to calm the fears and restore the confidence of Americans and to gain their support for the programs of the New Deal, including the NRA. One of the ways FDR chose to accomplish this was through the radio, the most direct means of access to the American people. During the 1930s almost every home had a radio, and families typically spent several hours a day gathered together, listening to their favorite programs. Roosevelt called his radio talks about issues of public concern "Fireside Chats." Informal and relaxed, the talks made Americans feel as if President Roosevelt was talking directly to them. Roosevelt continued to use fireside chats throughout his presidency to address the fears and concerns of the American people as well as to inform them of the positions and actions taken by the U.S. government.
http://www.archives.gov/education/lessons/fdr-fireside/
Here is how Jimmy Carter became president:
On May 4, 1974, for reasons that were never made clear, Ted Kennedy invited Hunter S. Thompson to accompany him to the Georgia Law Day Address. There, Thompson heard then Governor Jimmy Carter delivery an extemporaneous speech that so moved him that he rushed to his car and grabbed his tape recorder. Keep in mind that Carter was not running for national office at the time. Also, his audience consisted of rich, powerful, social prominent, mostly conservative people who had little interest in the message he shared that day.
His address focused on the issue of the two tiered justice system in Georgia at that time, in which defendants were required to bribe judges or serve draconian sentences for minor crimes. He talked about illegal searches and lack of adequate representation for the poor and about inequality in rates of incarceration and in the treatment of defendants.
http://www.narsil.org/politics/carter/law_day.html My own interest in the criminal justice system is very deep and heartfelt. Not having studied law, I've had to learn the hard way. I read a lot and listen a lot. One of the sources for my understanding about the proper application of criminal justice and the system of equity is from reading Reinhold Niebuhr, one of his books that Bill Gunter gave me quite a number of years ago. The other source of my understanding about what's right and wrong in this society is from a friend of mine, a poet named Bob Dylan. After listening to his records about "The Ballad of Hattie Carol" and "Like a Rolling Stone" and "The Times, They Are a-Changing," I've learned to appreciate the dynamism of change in a modern society.
I grew up as a landowner's son. But I don't think I ever realized the proper interrelationship between the landowner and those who worked on a farm until I heard Dylan's record, "I Ain't Gonna Work on Maggie's Farm No More." So I come here speaking to you today about your subject with a base for my information founded on Reinhold Niebuhr and Bob Dylan.
Snip
I don't want to go on and on; I'm part of it. But the point I want to make to you is that we still have a long way to go. In every age or every year, we have a tendency to believe that we've come so far now, that there's no way to improve the present system. I'm sure when the Wright Brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, they felt that was the ultimate in transportation. When the first atomic bomb was exploded, that was the ultimate development in nuclear physics, and so forth.
Well, we haven't reached the ultimate. But who's going to search the heart and soul of an organization like yours or a law school or state or nation and say, "What can we still do to restore equity and justice or to preserve it or to enhance it in this society?"
You know, I'm not afraid to make the change. I don't have anything to lose. But, as a farmer, I'm not qualified to assess the characteristics of the 9,100 inmates in the Georgia prisons, 50 percent of whom ought not to be there. They ought to be on probation or under some other supervision and assess what the results of previous court rulings might bring to bear on their lives.
I was in the governor's mansion for 2 years, enjoying the services of a very fine cook, who was a prisoner - a woman. One day she came to me, after she got over her 2 years of timidity, and said, "Governor, I would like to borrow $250 from you."
I said, "I'm not sure that a lawyer would be worth that much."
She said, " I don't want to hire a lawyer. I want to pay the judge."
I thought it was a ridiculous statement for her; I felt that she was ignorant. But I found out she wasn't. She had been sentenced by a superior court judge in the state, who still serves, to 7 years or $750. She had raised, early in her prison career, $500. I didn't lend her the money, but I had Bill Harper, my legal aide, look into it. He found the circumstances were true. She was quickly released under a recent court ruling that had come down in the past few years.
Snip
My heart feels and cries out that something ought to be analyzed, not just about the structure of government, judicial qualifications councils and judicial appointment committees and eliminating the unsworn statement - those things are important. But they don't reach the crux of the point - that now we assign punishment to fit the criminal and not the crime.
Snip
The point of the book is, and what Tolstoy points out in the epilogue is, that he didn't write the book about Napoleon or the Czar of Russia or even the generals, except in a rare occasion. He wrote it about the students and the housewives and the barbers and the farmers and the privates in the army. And the point of the book is that the course of human events, even the greatest historical events, are not determined by the leaders of a nation or a state, like Presidents or governors or senators. They are controlled by the combined wisdom and courage and commitment and discernment and unselfishness and compassion and love and idealism of the common ordinary people. If that was true in the case of Russia where they had a czar or France where they had an emperor, how much more true is it in our own case where the Constitution charges us with a direct responsibility for determining what our government is and ought to be?
Well, I've read parts of the embarrassing transcripts, and I've seen the proud statement of a former attorney general, who protected his boss, and now brags on the fact that he tiptoed through a mine field and came out "clean." I can't imagine somebody like Thomas Jefferson tiptoeing through a mine field on the technicalities of the law, and then bragging about being clean afterwards.
I think our people demand more than that. I believe that everyone in this room who is in a position of responsibility as a preserver of the law in its purest form ought to remember the oath that Thomas Jefferson and others took when they practically signed their own death warrant, writing the Declaration of Independence - to preserve justice and equity and freedom and fairness, they pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor.
Thompson wrote
Jimmy Carter and the Great Surge of Hope , an essay that was instrumental in getting Carter attention several years later when he decided to run for president.
When Chris Matthews felt that thrill go up his thigh and Keith Olbermann felt the great surge of hope which I wrote about in my journal, it was because Obama was doing what he does best. However, there is an undercurrent of bitterness and anger within his own campaign that is at odds with his theme:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jeff-coryell/racism-and-clintons-vict_b_90219.html Racism and Clinton’s Victory in Ohio: Jeff Coryell
I have four points to make about racism and the result in Ohio's Democratic presidential primary on Tuesday.First, racism undeniably played an important role.
http://my.barackobama.com/page/community/post/gauravsood/CGxMQ(Regarding Obama’s loss in
Nevada on Barack Obama’s Campaign Website)
Will Hispanic racism kill Obama's campaign
By Gaurav - Jan 20th, 2008 at 2:12 pm EST
The answer is probably not because Latinos like African Americans don't like to vote. However the other big story from Nevada is how convincingly Hillary won the Latino vote. Lets explore why?
Just two days ago while I was going back home a bus, I started conversing with the driver, who was of Peruvian descent. The talk moved from everyday things to politics and I asked him whom did he support for presidential candidate. He said Hillary and he in turn asked me and I mentioned Obama. Then this guy looks back at me and says, "Blacks no good". "Always doing drugs ...no no he won't be good. Blacks no good." I gulped and made some lame remark. Now it is useful to note that I am brown skinned and latinos will sometimes confide things in me they may not confide in "gringos". Of course the Peruvian driver was a "Hispanic white".
But anecodtal evidence doesn't quiet count as proof. So add to the above story two things: Racial resentment that Hispanic whites feel against African Americans comes up consistently high on surveys done in Political Science (in fact their resentment against Asians is pretty phenomenal too), and the recent results from Nevada. Even these don't quiet add up to conclusive proof but it gives you a fair idea of the challenges Obama faces.
Let me stress again that this is on the Barack Obama for President campaign website. His slogans are at the top of the page. Now that I have pointed this out. I hope that someone will delete it.
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/03/the_crucial_racist_vote.php(Mathew Yglesias About
Texas)
The Crucial Racist Vote According to MSNBC exit polls, it seems to have put Hillary Clinton over the top.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2008/jan/09/barackobama.usa1 Did racist voters cost Obama the primary?
Haroon Siddique looks at whether Barack Obama's shock defeat in New Hampshire was a result of the so-called Bradley effect, which suggests that although voters claim to support black candidates they will vote for the white runner on the day
http://matthewyglesias.theatlantic.com/archives/2008/02/obamas_asian_problem.phpRegarding Hillary’s California win, Matthew Yglesias again, this time on
Obama’s Asian Problem , the top most reply:
Is this really that hard? A lot of Asians are really racist, especially the more recent immigrants.
Posted by John | February 8, 2008 8:53 AM
http://www.topix.com/forum/source/berkshire-eagle/T4M2ACHE7NRVL69DG Is Massachusetts Racist?
Feb 6, 2008
Voters in Alabama and Georgia, states in the Deep South long alleged to be racist, came out in droves to vote for Barack Obama for President.
Whereas, Massachusetts voters, which like to think of themselves as true blue Liberal and enlightened, voted overwhelmingly for the white candidate, Hillary Clinton.
It would appear Massachusetts is far more racist than the Deep South.
GMHeller
Monterey,MA
Bethesda,MD
McLean,VA
Online posts like these create a sad picture. Sadder still when I recall the times I have read these sentiments at Democratic Underground. Racists have a perfectly good party that caters to their prejudices—the Republican Party. In my experience, people join the Democratic Party because it is the party of affirmative action, equal justice, peace, environmental responsibility and a host of other issues. Race matters in the general election but is negligible in the primary. People who harp on poll questions like “Did race influence your decision?” do not stop to consider the possibility that the consideration was “Which candidate will win the general election?” That is not racist. That is pragmatism. The same pragmatic voters think
Can a woman win the general ? No doubt after the flurry of sexist attacks on Hillary, many have decided that a woman could never survive a general election in this country, since sexism is still tolerated even within the mainstream press.
No doubt Barack Obama and his supporters feel that it is unfair that some Democratic voters believe that they are taking a chance in the general by voting for an African-American. This makes them bitter. No doubt some Hillary Clinton’s supporters feel that it is unfair that some Democrats believe that they are taking a chance in the general by voting for a woman.
The Obama supporters are so bitter that even though his camp has declared his words “true” (though the word choice poor)
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/04/13/us/politics/13campaign.html?_r=3&pagewanted=print&oref=slogin&oref=slogin&oref=slogin Mr. Gray also said Mr. Obama was right that voters were bitter, although he said he would have used the word angry. He pointed to a recent poll that found 81 percent of voters believed the country was on the wrong track. He said Mrs. Clinton sounded like “a Pollyanna” in saying that workers were optimistic.
his supporters have declared a secular fatwa on the reporter who reported Obama’s words:
http://roadkillrefugee.wordpress.com/ But there remains a need to explore why the author’s story was posted online gift-wrapped with spin that happened to serve Hillary and McCain’s talking points, and how Hillary’s campaign seemed unusually well prepared to discover it, push it in the MSM, twist it further, and exploit it politically.
Snip
We have the “citizen journalist” Mayhill Fowler who wrote the article after attending the private fund raiser and recording Obama’s remarks at the event. She claimed she recorded Obama’s comments because she was troubled by what she heard — but her article only mentions her being troubled by what she recorded and quoted — how did she know he was going to say something that bothered her before he said it?
On the other hand, if the facts are she recorded the whole thing, and only afterwards chose to release the part that allegedly offended her, why has she held back the rest of the audio recording
The spin is getting me dizzy here. Obama spoke the "truth" (only he used the wrong words), but the reporter who recorded him doing it committed a sin for recording him and is being labeled either a Hillary or an RNC mole (or both) and she should not have released his "truthful" words, even though they are just the "truth". By this I am guessing that the Obama camp is waiting to see how the MSM is going to spin this and they are trying to offer them plenty of different stories to choose from.
At this point I have to interject something. How many Obama supporters took up arms when Matt Drudge took Hillary’s
60 Minutes interview and doctored it so that she appeared to say something that she didn’t really say? I am sure that a lot of you will claim that you did, but I recall the episode, and I remember how many of you insisted that you said “No…as far as I know” as her one and only response to the question. Even though Media Matters had debunked Drudge’s lie (in case anyone needed Media Matters to tell them that Drudge is not reliable). I know that Keith Olbermann kept repeating the Drudge lie and he is supposed to know better Here some links for those of you are insisting at this moment “Yes, she
did say it.”
http://mediamatters.org/items/200803030004http://therealspiel.blogspot.com/2008/03/hillary-clinton-never-said-obama-was.htmlReaders, are you happy? We’re all Matt Drudge now! Drudge says it—and we agree to believe it! Meanwhile, Keith goes on the air to complain about what those *ss-holes at SNL said. We’re all cheerful moo-cows now, given this level of leadership.
Very bitter, but that is what this primary has become, with all the sniping back and forth and "gotcha" politics that did not start with either Hillary or Obama's camp. As I have documented so many times that my fingers are worn to nubs, the right wing media started it, because the way that the Republican stay in power in this country is----altogether now---
Divide and Conquer .
And now, we can add
class into the mix along with
race and
gender politics. Oh joy! I hope everyone has followed my advice and read Angela Davis’s
Women, Race and Class I’ve been recommending it for months.
In her book, Davis writes about the Grimke sisters, born in the South, they became outspoken abolitionists, feminists and early champions of rights for the working class. This speech which Angelina Grimke delivered in Philadelphia is quite revealing:
http://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/grimke.html Men, brethren and fathers—mothers, daughters and sisters, what came ye out for to see? A reed shaken with the wind? Is it curiosity merely, or a deep sympathy with the perishing slave, that has brought this large audience together?
Those voices without ought to awaken and call out our warmest sympathies. Deluded beings! "they know not what they do." They know not that they are undermining their own rights and their own happiness, temporal and eternal. Do you ask, "what has the North to do with slavery?" Hear it—hear it. Those voices without tell us that the spirit of slavery is here, and has been roused to wrath by our abolition speeches and conventions: for surely liberty would not foam and tear herself with rage, because her friends are multiplied daily, and meetings are held in quick succession to set forth her virtues and extend her peaceful kingdom. This opposition shows that slavery has done its deadliest work in the hearts of our citizens. Do you ask, then, "what has the North to do?" I answer, cast out first the spirit of slavery from your own hearts, and then lend your aid to convert the South. Each one present has a work to do, be his or her situation what it may, however limited their means, or insignificant their supposed influence. The great men of this country will not do this work; the church will never do it. A desire to please the world, to keep the favor of all parties and of all conditions, makes them dumb on this and every other unpopular subject. They have become worldly-wise, and therefore God, in his wisdom, employs them not to carry on his plans of reformation and salvation. He hath chosen the foolish things of the world to confound the wise, and the weak to overcome the mighty.
This is the message of hope, or populism. It does not meet behind closed doors on the other side of the country and ask for money to save oppressed people from themselves. It speaks openly, it tells people the truth directly, and then it calls upon those same people to act to better themselves.
From a public health standpoint, this is the only way one can effect meaningful lasting social change. When a government agency comes in, identifies a problem, throws some money at it and leaves, the local people do not feel that they have invested anything of themselves in the solution. They do not really believe that the problem or the solution matter. They are not part of their world—especially if the one throwing around the money or the pills or the regulations is perceived of as coming from a distant, hostile agency. The way to facilitate change is to get locals involved in every step of the process, as FDR did. Explain the problem directly to them in simple non condescending but not inflammatory or fear mongering tones. Discusses the strengths of the community as well as its weaknesses That way you win friends and can create solutions. Devise a strategy for working on the problem that uses local resources, so that the people on the ground feel that they are not just the problem, they are also the solution. And always, always keep lines of communication open to build up trust.
We often hear the question asked , What shall we do?" Here is an opportunity for doing something now. Every man and every woman present may do something by showing that we fear not a mob, and, in the midst of threatenings and revilings, by opening our mouths for the dumb and pleading the cause of those who are ready to perish.
How does one help the poor? Liberation theologist Leonardo Boff discusses this in St. Francis: A Model for Human Liberation . Rejecting traditional Catholic methods of tossing money at the problem and enforcing Church rules to save souls, Boff uses the Saint’s life to suggest that poverty---or more accurately society’s acceptance of wealth disparity---dehumanizes both the poor person by making him seem subhuman or not worthy of basic rights and dignity and the person of means by forcing him to deny his natural instinct for compassion (because if he feels true compassion for the poor then he must, necessarily, become like St. Francis and cast aside his own privilege).
What do the poor want? They do not really want to hate or become robbers or steal. They want to be acknowledged as human beings.
“To live humanly means to feel the warmth of someone who says to us, in spite of our physical and moral misery: It is good that you exist, Brother. You are welcome. The sun is also yours, the air is everybody’s, and love can unite our hearts.”
An article which appeared in the New York Times one year after Bill Clinton’s poverty tour had as its premise the fact that little had changed. Legislation had never made it through the Republican controlled Congress. Poor people were still poor. However, the interviews are revealing:
http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9D04E5DD123AF935A1575AC0A9669C8B63 A lot of people say the same thing. Hardly anyone blames the president, though. In Clarksdale, people pay as little attention to Washington politics as Washington politics pays to them. No one faults any of the presidential candidates for not coming around; they are used to being ignored.
They tend to blame Wal-Mart for their problems, for stealing business from downtown. Or Memphis, 75 miles away, for stealing brain power. Or the local politicians, for letting downtown slip into a coma without a fight.
They blame themselves, too.
''People got to want to improve,'' said Ethel Mae Clark, sitting on her mother's porch on downtown Yazoo Street. Next door was a boarded shack of a house. Across the street, where houses used to be, was a lot overrun with weeds.
snip
President Clinton, with an entourage that included the Rev. Jesse Jackson and several cabinet members, promised that East St. Louis would not be forgotten. But while his brief visit has yielded little concrete change, residents overwhelmingly vote Democratic, all the time. Few people have anything but praise for the president's gestures toward their city.
''The visit shed a lot of light on the things that we have to offer,'' said Greg Lewis, one of a dozen members of the local Democratic club who was spending his Sunday afternoon renovating a building the club recently bought for its headquarters. ''A lot of it,'' Mr. Lewis added, to a chorus of yeahs, ''depends on us.''
Snip
There is a lot of that kind of talk in Eastern Kentucky. People are weary of the image of Appalachian hillbillies in miners' hats and rope belts. Time and again they said it would be wrong to take pictures or interview the rural poor without including the rest of the people. Some were insulted that the president's visit was part of a ''poverty tour.''
As poor as the region is -- nearly 35 percent of the people in Jackson County, which includes Annville, live below the poverty line, as do 30 percent of those in Perry County, where the president addressed a rally in Hazard -- the emphasis is on telling the world that encouraging private investment is the way to go.
Snip
''I'm a Republican, and I really think he did us a great honor,'' said Mr. Gorman, who traces his family's roots in the region to the Revolutionary War. ''The greatest problem I've seen with people is the lack of hope. You give them hope and they'll conquer the world.''
You give people hope by talking to them directly, as St. Francis did and as Leonardo Boff recommends. When you put a human face on misery, "they" becomes our kin. The beauty of
The Grapes of Wrath and the novels of Charles Dickens and of the photos taken by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans was that they showed the human face behind the statistics and forced us to acknowledge that "the poor" are us.
Hope has been Obama's great political strength. It goes without saying that his political rivals will attempt to deprive him of this, just as Obama and McCain and the press attempted to deprive Hillary of her strength as a truth teller by spinning the Tuzla episode out for weeks. If Obama survives this political slip of the tongue unscathed, it will be because most members of the TV punditry know nothing about the poor in America (unlike the journalists of yesterday who actually interviewed real live people for stories). "They" are not a valued advertising demographic.
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