My, my, my...how did we get to this point? When the Democratic Primary began, race, religion, gender and other such things didn't matter as much as a person's stances on the issues and their legislative and/or executive record.
As a participant on this site, my primary concern was finding a Democrat who was both progressive enough to set a new path for this country and moderate enough to get the crucial independent, undecided and Frustrated Republican votes. When the field was narrowing down, I kept my "criteria" and eventually made my choice electorially. I've stopped short of saying "I can't vote for candidate X" because as I've always believed our "worst" is ten times better than their "best."
That belief has been shaken to it's core, but I'm sticking with it for now. Nevertheless, reality has to be acknowleged: there is a definitive frontrunner and trailer here.
Before the media caught on to this, we had three primary candidates who were, initially, using their credentials and their positives to make their case. I go back to Rachel Maddow because, goshdarnit, I still believe she put it best:
And I think that Obama and Clinton and Edwards are actually identifying what needs to be changed in three really different ways. I think Hillary Clinton is saying the Republicans and Bush need to be out and Democrats need to be in. I think John Edwards is saying the special interests and the lobbyists need to be out and the people need to be in, in the populist way. And I think that Barack Obama is saying that he needs to be in because he can transcend the differences across the political divide right now. There’s three very different visions of what you would do to the country if you had the reins.
And just to show that she wasn't alone, here's the WashPost's Eugene Robinson:
What Democratic primary voters have to decide, as they cast their ballots, is not just how they view the candidates but how they view the moment. After suffering through the infuriating Bush years, are Democrats ready to fight, as Edwards believes? Are they nostalgic for the Clinton era, which had its pluses and minuses but at least holds no mystery? Or are they ready to follow Obama on a promising new path, trusting that he knows the way?
That was the tone and the frame: Democrats want change, but what kind do they want?
We are soooo far away from that type of dialogue now it's not even funny. I saw Sen. John Edwards bowing out as something gracicious and noble; who knew the guy was basically "pushing the button?"
The debate that's going on, right now, is whether Sen. Barack Obama is too black, too militant, too liberal or too "all-of-the-above" to be President of the United States.
I'm not surprised it's come to this; afterall, it's been done time and time again. I'm not even surprised that Camp Clinton has borrowed a snippet here and there; it's not that they're racist, they just understand that racist people vote. Only two things out of this...mess...surprise me: (1) that Sen. Clinton is getting little to no heat from the Old School Civil Rights Community (who have time and time again taken swipes at Obama), and that (2) few media types are seeing how this "issue" on race is lowly turning into a frame on liberalism.
In other words:
If Barack Obama associates with a militant black preacher, he must himself be a Militant black Man. If he is a Militant Black Man, his words on healing race relations mean nothing. If his words on race relations mean nothing, then other words he has spoken may mean nothing as well. If we cannot go by his words, we have to go by his "militant blackness," which means that he's no different than Black Politicians of the 60's, 70's and 80's. Those Black Politicians associated themselves with liberals.
Barack Obama is not a "new politician," Barack Obama is an angry, liberal black man.
Paul Waldman explains how this ball got rolling...
When the controversy over Obama's former pastor Jeremiah Wright reached critical mass last week, it was the political equivalent of the green flag at a NASCAR race. The conservative strategists and talkers had been slowly circling the track, feet itchy on the accelerator, just waiting for the signal to floor it. But now, as The Politico reported in a story titled "GOP sees Rev. Wright as path to victory," the Republican strategists know exactly what must be done, starting with famed ad man Alex Castellanos:
"All the sudden you've got two dots, and two dots make a line," said Castellanos. "You start getting some sense of who he is, and it's not the Obama you thought. He's not the Tiger Woods of politics."
As Castellanos knows well, these kinds of attacks have their greatest power when they tap into pre-existing archetypes voters already carry with them, and the deeper they reside in our lizard brains the better. So they will make sure white Americans know that Obama is not Tiger Woods. He's not the unthreatening black man, he's the scary black man. He's Al Sharpton, he's Malcom X, he's Huey Newton. He'll throw grievance in your face, make you feel guilty, and who knows, maybe kill you and rape your wife.
...and how this ball has rolled down the hill and smashed into the skull of the Voters Whose Race We Shall Not Mention:
Though you wouldn't know it by listening to the disingenuous conservative commentators who have been desperately trying to characterize Barack Obama's speech last Thursday as a litany of black complaint, the most compelling part of the speech -- particularly coming from an African-American -- was when he talked about bitterness whites feel over race: "Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race," Obama said. "Their experience is the immigrant experience -- as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything, they've built it from scratch."
Another Politico story after Obama's speech talked to one of those voters in Pennsylvania:
"It was a great speech," one man said. "But what concerns me is that on the website for his church, they say they are unabashedly Afro-centric. ... The underlying message is they are perpetual victims and they enjoy the victim status and by proxy, me as a white person is their victimizer. And as long as we perpetuate these divisions, we will never heal."
Look at the distance this man traveled to circle back to his own racial resentment and find a way to blame it on Obama: The web site of Obama's church discusses black identity, which he interprets as an "underlying message" saying they are "perpetual victims," which he believes means they are accusing him personally of being a victimizer, which becomes the justification for rejecting Obama. The fact that Obama spoke directly to his grievances didn't manage to break through that wall. And yet the man closes by talking about the need for racial healing.
But wait, you ask, What does this have to do with being a liberal?
Well...
In Obama's New Message, Some Foes See Old Liberalism
Sen. Barack Obama offers himself as a post-partisan uniter who will solve the country's problems by reaching across the aisle and beyond the framework of liberal and conservative labels he rejects as useless and outdated.
But as Obama heads into the final presidential primaries, Sen. John McCain and other Republicans have already started to brand him a standard-order left-winger, "a down-the-line liberal," as McCain strategist Charles R. Black Jr. put it, in a long line of Democratic White House hopefuls.
Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign has also started slapping the L-word on Obama, warning that his appeal among moderate voters will diminish as they become more aware of liberal positions he took in the past, such as calling for single-payer health care and an end to the U.S. embargo against Cuba. "The evidence is that the more [voters] have been learning about him, the more his coalition has been shrinking," Clinton strategist Mark Penn said.
The double-barreled attack has presented Democratic voters with some persistent questions about Obama: Just how liberal is he? And even if he truly is a new kind of candidate, can he avoid being pigeonholed with an old label under sustained assault?
Huh? Oh, wait, I get it: Obama's the New Age Black Panther, so naturally he wants his 40 acres and a mule, and giving people stuff so that everyones happy is a liberal thing.
Angry. Liberal. Black.
Boo!