"Is Barack Obama American Enough?" A new kind of race-baiting campaign

[DeepModem Mom]

TIME: Is Barack Obama American Enough?
By Peter Beinart

....In the past, Republicans often used race to make their opponents seem anti-white. In 2008, with their incessant talk about who loves their country and who doesn't, McCain and Palin are doing something different: they're using race to make Obama seem anti-American.

To grasp the difference, imagine if the Democrats had nominated Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton. Republicans would have slammed them as profligate, divisive and militant but not as foreign. Even racists couldn't deny that Jackson and Sharpton are fully American. In fact, because slavery ruptured ancestral ties of language and culture, African Americans often have fewer transnational connections than Americans whose forebears traveled voluntarily to these shores. Our national vernacular is filled with antiblack euphemisms, but cosmopolitan isn't one of them.

Yet when critics attack Obama, that's the word that keeps popping up. Rudy Giuliani mentioned it in his convention speech. So has Rush Limbaugh, along with several national conservative columnists. Ever since the primaries, Obama's detractors have tried to depict him less as threatening to white America than as distant from America itself. This wasn't a solely Republican idea. In March of last year, Democratic campaign guru Mark Penn urged Hillary Clinton to exploit Obama's "lack of American roots" and "limited" connection to "basic American values and culture." Clinton, he advised, should add the tagline American to everything she did. Fox News and its friends spent most of the spring linking Obama to Jeremiah Wright and thus painting him as a closet racial militant. But in the general election, McCain has hewed closer to Penn's advice. One GOP commercial touted the Arizona Senator as "the American President Americans have been waiting for," as if there were another kind. Over the summer, McCain unveiled a new slogan: "Country first." When Obama traveled abroad in July, a McCain ad showed images of him addressing a Berlin crowd alongside the words "The biggest celebrity in the world." And now Palin is suggesting he doesn't feel the same way about America that most Americans do.

Even though Obama is ahead, the attacks have taken their toll. Polling by the Pew Research Center last month reveals that only 63% of white voters say Obama is patriotic. (That's 32 points fewer than McCain, and 13 points fewer than Hillary Clinton got among all voters in March.) When asked by Pew in May what they dislike about McCain, the overwhelming majority of respondents cited his political views. In Obama's case, however, nearly a third also mentioned "the kind of person he is."

Partly, of course, this is a response to Obama's unusual biography: his African Muslim father, his foreign-sounding name, his childhood outside the continental U.S. But it's also a measure of the times. The racial wedge issues of the 1970s and '80s--busing, crime, welfare, affirmative action--have all but disappeared. When pollsters compile lists of Americans' top concerns, those barely register. What is on the rise is anxiety about globalization. Support for unregulated free trade has cratered on the Democratic left. Hostility to illegal immigration is red hot on the Republican right. And beyond the partisan divide, it's the same demographic that is most upset about both: working-class whites....

***

Fifty years ago, America's racial challenges came largely from within, as black Americans demanded full equality in the country they had inhabited for hundreds of years. Today many of America's racial challenges come from without, as Third World immigration transforms the nation and U.S. workers and leaders struggle to come to terms with China and India, the emerging, nonwhite superpowers. If Martin Luther King Jr. symbolized that earlier transition, Barack Obama may have inadvertently come to symbolize this one. How he fares on Nov. 4 will be a sign of America's willingness to embrace the realities of a new age.

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,1848755,00.html

[sellitman]

1. I never thought I could hate republicans more after bush.

McSame & Palin are making me eat my words.