CHANGE YOU CAN BELIEVE IN.
Within hours of Barack Obama claiming the Democratic presidential nomination, the world's attention switched from a primary campaign that had riveted outsiders to a presidential contest that raises deep concerns about where and how the United States will lead the world.
Even though Hillary Rodham Clinton did not immediately concede defeat, Obama's claim shifted the focus to the looming battle between relative
youth and relative
age, between experience and renewal and, most of all, between the untested champion of the Democrats to the nominee of a Republican Party whose global image has been scarred by the war in Iraq and fear of neo-conservative adventures.
They are getting old now, but thousands of Black American men and women still alive today can easily remember the time when no Black American could cast a vote in a presidential election in some parts of the United States. If they tried to vote, or tried to register to do so, they risked insult, denial of civil rights and even physical harm. It is a measure of how far and how fast things have changed that within these people's adult lifetime there is today the extraordinary prospect of America electing a Black man as its head of state in November.
Senator Barack Obama may or may not be the next US president, but even his candidacy is itself historic. This is a milestone political moment in the long march from slavery towards racial justice in the United States. Americans are entitled to feel proud of their country today.
Mr Obama's victory in the gripping contest to be the Democratic party nominee means many things. One of them is
proof that who dares wins. Mr Obama saw sooner and more clearly than almost anyone else in US politics that the 2008 election can be
a break with the past. In part, because of his age and relative inexperience in Washington, he understood the degree to which George Bush's catastrophic eight-year tenure - and in particular the war in Iraq - has created a demand among many Americans for more than just an ordinary swing of the pendulum.
Mr Obama's candidacy and campaign have brilliantly articulated that
hunger for change. Whether he can now ride that mood to victory in November and then fulfil the high expectations that he has raised are not yet certain. But his victory in Tuesday's Montana primary and the support of several undecided convention superdelegates mean that Mr Obama's audacity has been dazzlingly rewarded.
Americans will now look at Mr Obama as a potential president. That change of emphasis crackled through his speech on the Middle East yesterday. Suddenly, it was substance, not rhetoric, that mattered. Mr Obama said excellent things - the readiness to focus on the Middle East from the start of his presidency, the willingness to engage diplomatically with Iran, the strong reiteration of Iraq withdrawal. Other parts of his speech - on the indivisibility of Jerusalem, for example - were a reminder that an Obama presidency would not wave a magic wand over America or the world. But it would, thank goodness, be a new opportunity. At last, the real contest begins.
Putting Hillary Clinton on the ticket for vice president creates a ménage-à-trois. Bill Clinton will be the unexpected roommate. Even if a President Obama can discipline Hillary and get her to play second fiddle, there is not the remotest chance that he can get the former president to accept such rules. Even if Bill Clinton wanted to rein in his newly prolific public expressions of rage and frustration, there is doubt that he is any longer capable of doing so.
Hillary, who likely desperately wants to be tapped for vice president, is going about it in exactly the wrong way. She seems to be demanding a kind of coalition government between herself and Obama, a definition of the vice presidency not likely to appeal to the president.
But adding
Hillary to the ticket brings, along with her,
Bill.
The public Bill Clinton has morphed over the past few months from a statesman and philanthropist to a petulant, angry, cursing, spoiled narcissist, accusing everyone of being sleazy and biased and in so doing fashioning himself as a foil for Obama. This unattractive image is not the right one for the bottom of a ticket in a presidential race. And make no mistake, Bill comes along with Hillary.
But the more serious problem is the public record that Todd Purdum, an excellent journalist, laid out in his Vanity Fair piece. Bill’s relationships with billionaires, his pursuit of financial gain, his alliance with the emir of Dubai, and his acceptance of speaking fees and income from some of the least savory of types is not what you need to carry around with you in a presidential race. To put Hillary on the ticket is to confront nagging questions about donors to the Clinton Library and Bill’s refusal to release them. It would be to inherit a load of baggage that Obama does not need as he tries to position himself as the candidate of change, antithetical to the corrupt and corrupting ways of Washington.
On her own, Hillary would be no bargain as vice president. She would never accept direction and never sublimate her ambition or agenda to Obama’s. But with Bill in tow, her candidacy becomes even more fraught with peril should Obama be inclined to bow to pressure and put her on the ticket.
Barack Obama
should not pick Hillary Clinton as his vice-presidential nominee, former president Jimmy Carter has told the Guardian newspaper.
"I think it would be the
worst mistake that could be made," Carter said, adding: "That would just
accumulate the negative aspects of both candidates."
The former president, who formally endorsed the Illinois senator late on Tuesday, cited opinion polls showing 50% of US voters with a negative view of Senator Clinton.
In terms that might discomfort the Obama camp, he said: "If you take that 50% who just don't want to vote for Clinton and add it to whatever element there might be who don't think Obama is white enough or old enough or experienced enough or because he's got a middle name that sounds Arab, you could have the worst of both worlds."
Carter, who insisted he would have been equally against an Obama-Clinton pairing if she, not he, had won the nomination, makes the remarks in an interview with the Guardian's Weekend magazine, to be published on Saturday. The interview was conducted before the final round of voting on Tuesday 3 June night confirmed Obama as the party's presumptive nominee.
The intervention of the former president - regarded as the senior elder of the Democratic party by some, and as a walking reminder of electoral failure by others - comes as speculation of a joint Obama-Clinton ticket is building. Late last night a close Clinton adviser and friend, Lanny Davis, acting on his own initiative he said, launched a petition and website - and wrote directly to Obama - urging him to appoint his defeated rival.
Meanwhile, Bob Johnson, a close Clinton backer and founder of Black Entertainment Television, said that he hoped to persuade the Congressional Black Caucus - the umbrella group for African-American members of Congress - to lobby for an Obama-Clinton partnership.
Former President Jimmy Carter's remarks could slow that momentum, coming from the only living Democrat to have won more than 50% of the popular vote in a presidential election, even though the former president, who left office in 1981, insisted he was "on the outside" and no longer had any role in internal Democratic affairs.
His comments are also likely to be seized on by those Democrats who believe Obama needs to pick an experienced, white and probably southern man to "balance" the ticket.
The former president said: "What he needs more than a southerner is a person who can compensate for his obvious potential defects, his youthfulness and his lack of long experience in military and international affairs."
For that reason, Carter says, he favours Sam Nunn, the former chairman of the Senate armed services committee, who hails from his own state of Georgia. "That would be my preference, but there are other senior Democrats who would have similar credentials to Sam Nunn."
In its final days, Hillary Clinton's 2008 presidential campaign has come to echo George Wallace's 1968 run.
Like Clinton, Wallace as a candidate stalked the Northeast exploiting white anger. Like her, he bypassed the nation's more educated and liberal parts to focus squarely on those who felt left behind, rallying animosity against elites.
But behind the mask of populism, it was race that fueled Wallace's campaign from the start. And it is race that has brought new life to Clinton's campaign in its final days.
Like Wallace, Clinton doesn't address racial prejudice squarely, but cloaks the appeal to our darker fears in seemingly neutral issues. He used opposition to school busing; she has played off Obama's alleged elitism and ties to the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Clinton isn't a racist, but she's still using race to win elections. (So, by the way, did Bill Clinton in 1992, with his criticism of Sister Souljah and his much-publicized backing for capital punishment.)
Racism is as racism does. When a politician consciously exploits racial divisions, fears and animosity to win an election, he or she deserves condemnation.
But Hillary Clinton is neither a racist nor a populist; she's an opportunist. Discovering that the establishment consensus has left behind millions of disgruntled voters - the angry white men of yesteryear — she, like Wallace before her, is creating new fissures in the electorate in the hopes of upsetting a harmony that doesn't serve her ends.
Her advocates say that Clinton has found her voice. But this new voice is but an echo of a a discordant note in a discredited past.
In the coal mines of Kentucky and West Virginia and the former factory towns of western Pennsylvania and central Ohio, the anger into which this voice taps remains alive, hot and glowing. But most of America has moved beyond prejudice, beyond diversity, beyond even tolerance, into a post-racial era.
It was a proud feature of our politics in 2008 that we seemed to have crested this wave of progress — until Clinton, embittered by frustrated ambition, blew on the smoldering embers of racial fear to stage a comeback for the nomination.
It wasn't her proudest moment.
Senator John McCain, a 72 year old man with melanoma cancer, has chosen
Govenor Sarah Palin, a 44 year old mother of 5, with no national or internation foreign policy experience, to be his Vice Presidential running mate. On 29 August 2008 when he announced her selection, he had met her only one time. She had been mayor of a small town of only 7,ooo people near Anchorage, Alaska after winning a local beauty contest and blowing the whistle on a bunch of fat cat, corrupt politicians in Alaska.
I find it
incredibly startling that Senator McCain would choose a person he hardly knows for a job as important as the Vice Presidency of the United States. It is so obvious that he is doing this as a political tactic that
it makes me question his judgment.
Is that the way he will make decisions about our economy, our security, our well-being as a nation?
If, God forbid, Senator McCain dies during his presidency then he will entrust this nation with
a person with zero foreign affairs experience, whom he hardly knows to be the Commander in Chief?
How irresponsible is that?
The legacy of
Geraldine Ferraro was supposed to be that no one would ever go on
a blind date with history again. But that crazy maverick and gambler
John "Hundred Years War" McCain does it, and conservatives and evangelicals rally around him in admiration of his refreshingly cynical choice of Sarah Palin, an evangelical Protestant and anti-abortion crusader who became a hero when she decided to have her baby, who has Down syndrome, and when she urged schools to debate creationism as well as that stuffy old evolution thing.
Palinistas, as they are called, love Sarah's spunky, relentlessly quirky "Northern Exposure" story from being a Miss Alaska runner-up, and winning Miss Congeniality, to being mayor and hockey mom in Wasilla, a rural Alaskan town of 6,715, to being governor for two years to being the first woman ever to run on a national Republican ticket.
John McCain is 72, and he's been operated on for malignant melanomas -- the most dangerous kind of skin cancer -- four times.
At this point in the campaign, it looks as though McCain has a 50/50 chance of becoming President. And while I wish him 120 birthdays, it is no great stretch to imagine Sarah Palin ending up in the Oval Office. This is the entirely possible outcome that the Republicans are putting on the table.
Maybe Americans won't want to take that risk. But McCain could well win. More Americans may vote to watch the real life movie about the moose-hunting Alaskan beauty queen who goes to Washington, than to see the one about the charismatic half-Black Hawaiian who ends up at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
If John McCain wins, it is entirely conceivable that whatever scares you most in the world, and whatever you care most about doing at home, Sarah Palin will be in charge of it.
Oh, My God,
judgement has fled to brutish beasts and men have loss their reason!..(
Labels: Black American Firsts
