I'd like to say, first off, that any Democrat running for President should be able to say something when FOX News runs racially divisive attacks on their network non-stop with the intention of dividing Democrats. If one can't give a speech, and, since Senator Clinton has made praising John McCain and belittling speeches the signature line of her nomination campaign that's understandable, then one should, at least, be able to speak out.
But, here's the thing to remember, the Clintons don't speak out unless the polls tell them to. You see, the Clintons don't take stands, they take polls. That will never change. That's their m.o. That's why Mark Penn is still running the show.
What was our ex-President saying last weekend while the Wright clips were running non-stop on FOX?
Bill Clinton was claiming he'd been mugged.
There's a better way...
from the kitchen sink to the kitchen table in two minutes
I'd like to invite you to take a look at this video of Senator Barack Obama talking about the direction he'd like to take this campaign.
That clip makes a very clear point: Senator Obama is going to take the kitchen sink attacks from FOX and the Clinton campaign alike and respond with the kitchen table. He's going to talk about economic issues that bring Americans together, not what tears us apart. And, significantly, he laid the framework for that with his historic speech on race and class in Philadelphia and his speeches over the last two days about working families and the war in Iraq.
Read this from Sheldon Drobny quoting an email from a WWII vet he knows:
In my opinion, what Obama succeeded in accomplishing for the national Democratic Party is a fundamental restatement of what should be the core value and message of the party for coming decades. Up to now the Democratic Party has relied on the Black vote through their past welfare programs and the fact that they are not as presumptuously racist as the Republican Party.
The Clinton centrists, who now are the congressional leadership of the party, have turned their back on the working and middle class in favor of their wealthy corporate liberally inclined major funders. Even now in pandering to working class citizens Clinton has the audacity to claim she was and is opposed to NAFTA in spite of clearcut evidence that this is not true. The leadership of the party continues to court the working and middle class citizens who have increasingly been swayed by the conservative and rightish arguments of the Republican Party by talking "Republican Lite" on many issues. These citizens interpret this as patronizing and demeaning to their intelligence while having bought into the propaganda that the Democratic Party is protecting the blacks at their expense.
Obama's thesis, by centralizing and recognizing the conflicting racial attitudes of blacks and the white working class has established a frame for the Democratic Party to speak to what has been the core constituency of the Party prior to the DLC takeover and the move to becoming a corporate rather than a peoples party. Obama has framed the Democratic position in a way that puts at risk whites along with blacks as aggrieved partners suffering under destructive national economic and foreign policies.
I think that gets it right.
This is a new direction in the campaign for the nomination. Senator Obama is going to pivot from the discussion of race to discussing kitchen table issues that affect American households making less than $50,000 a year...ie. most of us...in a way that brings us together across racial lines.
::
silence vs. speaking out
In politics, timing is everything.
Senator Clinton could have taken the high road in response to the attacks on Trinity United Church of Christ. Those attacks on FOX were intended to do one thing, to tear the Democratic coalition apart. Goodness knows, the American public would trust Bill and Hillary's experience of African American churches and respect their record of fighting to heal racial wounds.
She did not. She stood silent in the face of an unrelenting and divisive race-based attack. Clinton demurred when she should have been bold.
And that's nothing new.
Senator Clinton could have called Geraldine Ferraro and asked her, when the news of those unfortunate comments came out, for the good of her campaign, to cease and desist from her divisive comments regarding Senator Obama. She did not. And that's a crying shame, because Geraldine Ferraro, with her subsequent interviews and TV appearances has permanently damaged her reputation in a way that hurts all of us.
Now, when we speak frankly and candidly about race, we are bound to offend and to misspeak. That's part of the process. That's part of the risk we take talking about difficult issues. It is so much easier to hate than to heal. You see, when it comes to issues of race, silence always means support of the status quo. Which is why the silence at predominantly white churches and congregations over these last decades is just as significant as the voices raised challenging business as usual in divers houses of worship across the land. To make change we do need to speak out, and at times, to stumble.
For my part I will always admire Senator Obama for standing up when a poll-driven, focus-grouped, clipped and prepped speech written by committee could have been merely effective in aiding his campaign. What Senator Obama offered instead was a speech he wrote himself, a speech that opened up a discussion across racial and age and class lines across this nation, and a speech that has created a groundswell that has been ongoing from Wednesday morning to this day.
If anything that speech put to rest the now essentially Clintonian notion that a speech is merely words and Senator Obama merely an empty rhetorical suit. Something changed in that moment in Philadelphia when Senator Obama walked out alone to face the American public in an hour of mutual need and strode off the stage thirty substantive and eloquent minutes later with the hearts and goodwill of multitudes.
This is a good and an honest, but not perfect, man. And that's a good thing to realize. What we saw on that stage was a leader giving a speech about his biography and his deeply held views with one central and implicit message: he was asking us to help make him our next President. He was demonstrating the leadership we ask for and he intends to deliver in that office.
::
There is so much work to do.
We need to help with Pennsylvania, Indiana and North Carolina. We are in for the fight of our lives. We have to turn from the kitchen sink to the kitchen table in each of these states.
Here are three simple and urgent things any of us can do to help:
REGISTER VOTERS. TAKE ACTION. DONATE.
Those three simple actions are ways that you can help.
::
Conclusion
The blog discussions of Reverend Wright have had a kind of "political junkie" tone to them. As if the career of the most promising Democratic candidate of his generation, the man whose campaign has driven the energy and shaped the 2008 election cycle, a man who has already shown leadership that has changed our nation even in the process of running for president, as if all that could be derailed because...
somebody chose to attack him on FOX News.
Think about that for one second. And think about the kind of politics you aspire to and what our values are.
And then think about the fact that silence is always easy, is always safe, is always the route where cynics and critics will have the least ability to tear you down.
But silence also supports the status quo. And sometimes, in the face of a kitchen sink of bias and divisiveness and, yes, bigotry, it is incumbent upon us to be bold, to lead, and to take the risk that's always an inherent part of taking action...
sometimes it is necessary to speak out.
::
If you've never been to a step dance, or step competition, you should go. Here are some future champions from TUCC: