I received an e-mail from my wife this morning, also sent to a few other people, for which the original source was said to be a Canadian born person who is now living in the U.S. I wish I could claim credit for writing it myself. The e-mail read in part (with some minor editorial changes by me):
What if Barack Obama had finished
fifth from the bottom of his graduating class, like John McCain did, instead of being selected as
President of the Harvard Law Review?
What if Obama was a divorcee, and McCain had only married once? And what if Obama was the candidate who
screwed around on and then left his first wife because she'd been in a severe disfiguring car accident?
What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also
acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
What if Obama had been a member of the
Keating Five, the five U.S. Senators who were accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980's-90's which cost taxpayers over $3 billion in investments and bailout.
What if Obama was as ineloquent a speaker as McCain is?
What if the Obamas had paraded five children across a national stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
What if Obama had
crashed four planes while in the military?
What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious
anger management problem?
I’ll answer those questions:
Any one of those things would be major news and a major part of the McCain/Palin campaign attack plan. Corporate media whores like George Stephanopoulos and Charlie Gibson would have hammered Obama with any one of those things during the
Democratic debates. Tom Brokaw would have had a field day with Obama on
Meet the Press, repeatedly
demanding that he apologize to the American people for all those things. And quite simply, Barack Obama’s Presidential campaign would barely have got off the ground.
Instead, the best they had to throw at him was: belonging to a church ministered by a
preacher who sometimes angrily accused the United States of doing bad things; thin ties to a so-called “
unrepentant terrorist” whose so-called terrorist activities couldn’t hold a candle to those of George W. Bush, Dick Cheney, or John McCain (all who vigorously support a war that has already killed over a million innocent civilians, compared to Bill Ayers’ organization, which protested the Vietnam War and neither killed nor terrorized ANYBODY); and last but not least, the false claim that Obama is a Muslim, and the true claim that his middle name is Hussein.
Why the double standard?In other words, to put it simply, in order to obtain the Democratic nomination and be competitive with John McCain, Barack Obama had to be a far superior candidate to McCain in almost every respect.
There are two interlocking reasons for that, and they both play out somewhat differently. One is that Obama is black. And the other is that he is a Democrat.
Racism isn’t necessarily an all or none phenomenon. Some people are nearly pure racists. Others hardly have a racist bone in their body. And probably most people are somewhere in between those two extremes. Because of our history of slavery, there is a lot of residual racism in our country, especially in those parts of our country where slavery prevailed. There will be millions of Americans who have some residual or latent racism who vote for Obama next Tuesday (and much of that residual racism will disappear after four years of an Obama Presidency). But any of the “What ifs” from the above noted e-mail, if true or believed to be true, would magnify whatever racist attitudes exist in our country with respect to Barack Obama. And that probably would have been the end of his Presidential hopes a long time ago – if he ever had any Presidential hopes to begin with.
The handicap that Obama suffers from for being a Democrat is of a different character. Our national corporate news media have long been anti-Democrat and pro-Republican. Racism was not the reason why Obama was blasted by the likes of Stephanopoulos, Gibson, and Brokaw. I doubt that these people care much about racism. They just work for people who want to maintain their wealth and power, and they know that Republicans are their best bet to help them do that. And the corporate media whores know where their bread is buttered. That’s a big part of the reason why Al Gore and John Kerry lost their Presidential bids. That’s why John Dean’s candidacy was dashed in 2004 and why John Edwards never got his off the ground in 2008.
But this year, being a Democrat is a two edged sword. From the standpoint of our corporate news media it’s as bad as it ever was. But the American people, after eight long years of the worst President in our history, along with 5 years of his rubber-stamp Congress, and our corrupt judiciary, have pretty much had enough of Republican rule for now. Compared with their need for decent health care and economic security, Republican whining about “big government” just isn’t cutting it this year. The American people are sick and tired of a right wing ideology that claims the road to economic prosperity is to give handouts to the wealthy and let it trickle down to everyone else.
But you’d better believe that if Obama possessed any of those “What if” character traits that McCain does, our corporate news media wouldn’t let it go. And the latent racism that would be brought out would not bode well for Obama’s (or out nation’s) political future.
C-SPAN this morningBefore I received my wife’s e-mail this morning I was listening to C-SPAN in my car on my way to work. The topic was the infomercial that Obama gave last night, and the McCain callers spewed out such hatred towards Obama as I have rarely heard. What was there about Obama’s speech that could possibly have incited such hatred, other than that he is a black man on the verge of winning our nation’s presidency?
The best these callers could come up with was that they have (I’m paraphrasing here) “never heard such a blatantly politically choreographed speech in my life”. My God! What do these idiots expect?! A man spends a huge bundle of money on an infomercial six days before a Presidential election, and they expect it not to be choreographed?? Do they think that George W. Bush never gave choreographed speeches? Or Ronald Reagan? These people are far beyond hypocrisy.
Anyhow, I find it very telling that that was the best criticism that these people could come up with. I think that pretty much supports the point I was trying to make about racism.
Some more about the e-mail my wife sent meThe “What if” e-mail that my wife sent me this morning was prefaced with the following remarks from my wife:
Oh, I wish that I had the guts to send this to my sister-in-law and three nieces and their husbands (we might need the Fla. votes!) but I just can't! They are religious, single issue voters and it wouldn't change their minds! I love them and need them as my loving and ever shrinking family! But maybe one of you have some one on your list who might give some thought to this.
The “single issue” that my wife refers to is abortion. That is so sad and so ridiculous. Do these people actually think that there are more abortions under Democratic than under Republican Presidents? Do they not think that a preemptive imperial war that results in
over a million innocent deaths and
4 million refugees is a bad thing? Do they think that 47 million Americans
without health insurance doesn’t result in deaths? Do they think that George W. Bush’s policies aren’t responsible for the
first rise in infant mortality rate in more than 40 years?
I see this issue a little differently than my wife does. It’s not that she doesn’t have the “guts” to send her family this e-mail – it’s just that she doesn’t think that sending it is worth the risk of ruining her relationship with them. I understand that, and I sympathize with her for it.
These are actually very likeable, caring, warm hearted people. I could give a lot of examples to make that point, but I don’t know what good that would serve. But what is wrong with their thinking? Do they not have a clue as to what they’re supporting?
And
What if my wife did send the e-mail to her family? Might it not do a lot more good than harm?
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