UPDATE: These comments ARE NOT from ANDREW SULLIVAN. They were simply LINKED on his blog. So sad that so many who "comment" here are just regurgitating what they think they "know" without actually processing what they are commenting on. Says a lot.
P.S. The comments are not about Obama being MLK, or white people being bad. The comments are about differences in perception of "strength" and "strategy" from folks from different political and racial backgrounds. The lack of nuance in the comments says so much.
P.S.S. If a comment is not directed at you, but you choose to be "offended", then it says to me that YOU feel the comment hit close to home . . . you might want to investigate that.
I saw this comment linked on Andrew Sullivan's blog, and I must say, it represents an original perspective on President Obama that I had not read before.
I wanted to share it with all the folks here who just don't understand where President Obama's "spine" has gone. Turns out, it is in the same place that Martin Luther King hid his.
Here is how the comment begins:
The predominately white progressive intelligentsia don’t see Obama clearly because of our racial blind spot. We don’t see the role of race in how he seems to understand himself and how other perceive him.
First of all, we think that he understands himself as one of us. A progressive activist, heir to the radical and New Left movements most of us were raised in. He is not; I think that he understands himself (and certainly his real base understands him) as the first African American President. We’re thinking Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton. We should be thinking about Harold Washington, the first African American mayor of Chicago. Washington was elected and immediately faced a solid wall of opposition from most white aldermen in the city. Washington understood his role as breaking down that wall of opposition and assembling a governing majority, which he finally did after his re-election. Unfortunately, he died shortly thereafter. By the way, one of Washington’s political strategists was David Axelrod.
Another key excerpt:
White progressives often think that African American elected officials are politically naive. We will far more credit to Cornel West, who has never been elected to anything, than to an elected state senator, or even the President of the United States. We think that Obama does not understand the nature of John Boehner, Mitch McConnell or Eric Cantor, as though he has not sat across the table from them. He doesn’t understand how mean they are, we think.
Obama acts entirely within the tradition of mainstream African American political strategy and tactics. The epitome of that tradition was the non-violence of the Civil Rights Movement, but goes back much further in time. It recognizes the inequality of power between whites and blacks. Number one: maintain your dignity. Number two: call your adversaries to the highest principles they hold. Number three: Seize the moral high ground and Number four: Win by winning over your adversaries, by revealing the contradiction between their own ideals and their actions. It is one way that a oppressed people struggle.
http://weeseeyou.com/...
Click the link to see the rest . . . very important perspective for all to consider I think.
UPDATE: Thanks for putting this on the rec list . . . obviously all credit goes to Tom, the original commentor from Washington Monthly, and not myself. Of course, I am leaving work early today, so I can't stay and play right now . . . but I will check in when I get home. Peace.