Subscribe to Breaking NewsObama, A Rock, A Hard Place
“You blacks and gays are getting on my last nerve!”
I’ve been putting this post off. Did my laundry, walked the dog, and went to the gym. Okay I wasn’t even close to the gym. I went to a bakery for some cherry pie, but I had to walk so cardio was involved.
Writing about Barack Obama and his “Embrace the Change” gospel tour means to stub a toe on the fault lines of race and sexuality. For those not in the know, Obama announced a musical tour in South Carolina and one of the folk listed to perform is Donnie McClurkin.
The good Rev. McClurkin has a rather checkered history when it comes to the gays so there was a mini-riot. Heck even HRC got involved. To make amends, the Obama camp put out a press release saying how it disagreed with McClurkin about the gays and then announced that Rev. Andy Sidden would be added to the program. That appeased no one because the big question was why the Obama brain trust couldn’t find someone with more melanin to deliver a gay friendly message to folk who might not want to hear it. Finally Obama took himself over to The Advocate to talk about it all. Hey Barack? Next time give us a call!
Whew. Essentially Obama is caught between two groups that are not going to see eye to eye: out gay liberals and socially conservative religious blacks. Spend anytime going through some of the reports at Pew Research and you will find out white evangelicals and black Protestants mirror each other. From abortion to same-sex marriage, both groups sing from the same “hell to the no” hymnal. The only difference is who they vote for; however, like the Bush team found out in ‘04, shout the phrase same-sex marriage long enough and you are going to get a large sliver of the black vote. In a close race that large small slice can win elections.
Can Obama bridge these two opposing groups? Doubt it but I know Hillary is glad he’s doing it and not her.
The 2008 campaign is going to break the back of the fake ‘lesser evil’ theory and go a long way towards shattering the right centrist consensus that’s dominated American politics since the end of WWII.
Already we’ve seen Edwards, the friend of working people go down in flames after the NY Times exposed him for his huge investment in a mortgage company foreclosing on Katrina victims. The totalitarian christian right distrusts all the Republican candidates except Huckabee and is threatening to split from the GOP. Barak Obama put his foot in his mouth then shot himself in the foot. George Bush is moving towards an attack on Iran and when he vetoed the children health bill everyone realized that what he really meant was “No child left standing.”
To balance that the Democrats keep pouring billions of dollars and tens of thousands of bodies into the cauldron of Iraq and betraying the GLBT communities.
That’s why the polls are all over the place. George Bush is DOA with an approval rating of 25%, 2% above Nixon’s just before he resigned. The approval rating of the Democratic controlled Congress has plummeted to an abysmal 10%. The truth is that it’s getting harder and harder to find real differences between one lesser evil and another.
Obama’s self destruction was similar to that of Pelosi/Frank and the House Democrats. They assumed that we’d be willing to accept second class citizenship and betray the T in the GLBT equation. It’s to our credit that the overwhelming majority rejected them and so few kowtowed to their treachery.
Obama, like Dianne Feinstein, Hillary Clinton and Pelosi/Frank assumed that it’s ok to pander to the bigot vote, to do what bigoted bosses want. Obama and Pelosi/Frank are paying the price now as will Feinstein Clinton as their record is exposed and they move to the right, scrambling to win in 2008.
The ‘lesser evil’ theory has never been accepted by the tens of millions of voters who give elections a pass. Now as the differences in the ‘evil’ part of the equation can be calculated in nanometers it ceases to become unbelievable even for the most naive.
donal1944@msn.com
I read a great commentary on how to stop Sen Clinton
http://joeleonardi.wordpress.com/2007/10/28/how-to-halt-hillary/