will.i.am.milking.this.for.all.it's.worth

Credit for the title of this entry goes to Christopher Beam at Slate. (Who, yes, I kinda knocked earlier in another post.)

So, basically, there's another Obama music video from will.i.am called We Are the Ones. The constant stream of chants of "O-Ba-Ma. O-Ba-Ma..." in the background, as Beam said, "give grist to the dolts crying fascism." Beam called it "creepy," and I kinda see what he means. For me, it's more like a promising new writer's disappointing second novel, except that, while novelists should keep writing novels, is there a really a need for another star-studded Obama music video? (And I think the Obamas agree with me. I got the first one from an email from Michelle Obama herself; the campaign has not sent this one around to its email list.)

It probably is just another brain child of will.i.am, pure and simple, but I can't help but imagine a group of non-white celebrities pissed at themselves for not getting in on the first one--which, you know, officially put them behind Kate Walsh in the line of being badass--so they started circulating a petition, called something like let's-make-another-Obama-video-so-I-can-be-in-one-too. We are the ones features John Leguizamo, George Lopez, Jessica Alba talking about her unborn child (si, se peude), Kerry Washington, Forest Whittaker, Luis Guzman, Ryan Phillippe, Ben McKenzie, and (guess who?) MacymotherfuckingGray! I never stopped rooting for her. Also one of the dudes from Friday Night Lights, a show I find unwatchable, but it's set in Texas, so his appearance might bring in some Texas voters (?).

I'm glad Hollywood, like me, has found change it can believe in. (The more I have in common with George Clooney, the better.) But the tone of this last video planted a thought: that the nationwide O-love is starting to breed

O-stalkers.

There's been buzz recently about how, if Barack's elected, he's at high risk for assassination. When we hear that, we inevitably imagine some ignorant racist white man picking up one of his many legally purchased rifles, but maybe we should be more worried about an assassination in the Selena mold: a fan/member of his team whose love-obsession can only be quenched by a murder-suicide. A person who seems to be part of Obama's success and promotional efforts who is actually a time bomb.

Someone like, oh I don't know, will.i.am.

Like he wants a place in the Ocabinet, you know, in recognition of all his youtube efforts, just something small, like Secretary of Rhyming Words With Themselves... but Obama says "uh, no thanks, brother, the Ocabinet's all full."

And will.i.am like.freaks.the.fuck.out.

That is obviously retarded speculation on my part, right? But then I read things like this, which will.i.am said about getting the video's cast together:

"There's no casting ... the inspiration is the casting director."

I mean, is it me or has he wandered into the suburbs of Crazyville? (...and is that much closer to "the inspiration pulled the trigger.")

Anyway, this video isn't nearly as good as the first one, Yes We Can, which is quite moving. (And if you haven't seen it yet, it means, uh sorry, you didn't survive that accident--YOU'RE DEAD. Everyone alive was emailed the link forty times at least.)



Postscript:
An even more impressive celebrity singing-coordination effort than We Are the Ones is here. It's basically "We are the world" except the chorus is "I'm fucking Ben Affleck." It's even better than you hope it will be.

Yowza. Youtube is the baby daddy of like %70 of the endorphins in my brain.

Did Tina Fey get Bill Clintoned?

The Bill Clinton effect, especially on women, is well documented. Tina Fey, you are still my hero. It doesn't matter that you came out on Saturday Night Live for Hillary--I have no problem with people who support Hillary (or rather, their support for her alone would not give me a problem with them). Especially if they're going to point out so hilariously that Bitches Get Stuff Done.

Tina was a guest anchor on Weekend Update last weekend. Here's a partial transcript:

FEY: Maybe what bothers me the most is that people say that Hillary is a bitch. Let me say something about that:

Yeah, she is.

And so am I and so is this one. (Pointing to Amy Poehler)

POEHLER: Yeah, deal with it.

FEY: Know what? Bitches get stuff done.

Like back in grammar school, they could have had priests teaching you but, no, they had those tough old nuns who slept on cots and who could hit ya and you HATED those bitches.

But at the end of the school year you KNEW the capital of Vermont!

And she ended with:

BITCH IS THE NEW BLACK!

It's okay for an Obama fan like me to admit on the world wide web that it was, in fact, great. And Hillary can use some cultural cache in her corner. (Please compare Hillary for You and Me to Yes We Can, juuuuuuuuust in case you don't know what I mean.)

But all of this is background to point out this tiny fact buried in a Time Magazine article:

After Saturday Night Live lampooned the media for their love affair with Obama, Bill telephoned guest host Tina Fey to thank her.

Tina, did you forget to feed your baby because he make you feel like you were literally the only one in the room? We're suckers for it, I know.

(On a non election note, but sort of a Tina Fey note, the insanest object of my celebrity worship is without a doubt Mariah Carey, who just released this utterly insane video which features 30 Rock cast member Jack McBrayer.)

He's not just charming...HE'S WORKING HIS ASS OFF

Thanks for breaking this down so explicitly, Frank Rich.

I'm a little behind, this column is from February 24th, but I was busy looking for pictures of Beyonce in African garb. They're surprisingly hard to find, given what I can only describe as her tribal flailing at the end of the "Baby Boy" video. But I digress.

The highlights from Mr. Rich's column:

• "The Obama campaign is not a vaporous cult; it’s a lean and mean political machine that gets the job done."
• South Carolina: "where last fall she was up 20 percentage points in the polls, she relied on top-down endorsements and the patina of inevitability, while the Obama campaign built a landslide-winning organization from scratch at the grass roots."
• Kansas: "three paid Obama organizers had the field to themselves for three months; ultimately Obama staff members outnumbered Clinton staff members there 18 to 3."
• Wisconsin "the Clinton campaign was six days behind Mr. Obama in putting up ads and had only four campaign offices to his 11."
• Vermont: "There were four Obama offices and no Clinton offices as of five days ago."
• Pennsylvania: "the Clinton campaign is sufficiently disorganized that it couldn’t file a complete slate of delegates by even an extended ballot deadline."
• I'm going to add that she also admitted in debate at being baffled by the Texas primary system which had "grown men crying." Huh? The grown men on your campaign, Hillary? Not your best, or most competent-sounding, sound bite.
  

In other words, Hillary: You took the nomination for granted and didn't work hard enough to make sure you had it. You had no post-Febrary 5th contingency plan. You, the supposed workhorse candidate, are getting superbly outworked by your opponent. And just because he has the charisma to make it seem easy doesn't mean that it is.

Because, Hillary, it's not easy. As you should know better than anyone. A number of people very close to me work part or full time on Obama's campaign, and they are earning every vote they get. And it's just wack that some members of the media, and you, are equating the Obama support base to a bunch of kids on some political acid.

Here's Frank again, expanding on the organizational failure of her campaign:

Clinton fans don’t see their standard-bearer’s troubles this way. In their view, their highly substantive candidate was unfairly undone by a lightweight showboat who got a free ride from an often misogynist press and from naïve young people who lap up messianic language as if it were Jim Jones’s Kool-Aid.

This must be the first presidential candidate in history to devote so much energy to preaching against optimism, against inspiring language and — talk about bizarre — against democracy itself. No sooner does Mrs. Clinton lose a state than her campaign belittles its voters as unrepresentative of the country.

After the Potomac primary wipeout, Mr. Penn declared that Mr. Obama hadn’t won in “any of the significant states” outside of his home state of Illinois. This might come as news to Virginia, Maryland, Washington and Iowa, among the other insignificant sites of Obama victories. The blogger Markos Moulitsas Zúniga has hilariously labeled this Penn spin the “insult 40 states” strategy.


Haha, that is hilarious. Go blogs!!

Anyway, given that my last post was about how fed-up I am with everyone scrutinizing Hillary's lack of charisma, lack of ability to publicly seem "consistent" and "in control of herself," and pitting that against Obama's sea of calm and cool...God if I read the word "cool"--pejorative or not--to describe Obama I'm gonna... Anyway...

Thank you Frank, for bringing us back to the nuts and bolts of what these two candidates are doing, what campaigning for president is and should be about, and how their actions are, and are not, working on us. And if you happen to read this, I'm that girl you almost hired to be your assistant whom you told to finish college instead.

Who's more awesome? Journalists weigh in--unfortunately

The constant personality analysis, comparison, the stream of adjectives: insecure, nurturing, cocky, graceful, self-deprecating, presidential, vulnerable, feminine, masculine, bellicose, glamorous.....

Is anyone else getting tired of journalists' amateur attempts at psychoanalysis? Not just of the candidates, but us and our responses to them?

Even a huge O-fan like me is getting worried about the frequency of references to how he's making politics "cool." Google two words: "Obama" and "awesomeness." The number of results, I fear, actually lends credence to the (false) argument that he is all hype, no ability to govern. I cringe every time someone playfully writes that his rallies are like raves, girls are fainting, yada yada yada.

To put it another way, writers everywhere are getting in touch with their inner Maureen Dowd.

Let's start with her. Here. And here. Columns called "Begrudging his Bedazzling," and "Quien es less Macho?" have produced this, by now tired, brand of insight:

• "Voters gravitate toward the presidential candidates who seem more comfortable in their skin. The fact that Obama is exceptionally easy in his skin has made Hillary almost jump out of hers."
• "Her sunshine-colored jackets on the trail hardly disguise the fact that she’s pea-green with envy." (And my newspaper is about to be pea green with puke.)
• "Just as in the White House, when her cascading images and hairstyles became dizzying and unsettling, suggesting that the first lady woke up every day struggling to create a persona..." (This stuff is when the misogynist word gets rolled out, leave her hair in the White House alone, even if it is an okay metaphor for your played-out point.)
• "Obama tapped into his inner chick and turned the other cheek."
• Re: Hillary's feistiness, Maureen encourages her to be more feminine, like Barack: "Less towel-snapping and more towel color coordinating, less steroids and more sensitivity."
• Re: Hillary's spending at Dunkin Doughnuts: "But total domination in the snack arena does not cut the mustard."
• "By threatening to throw the kitchen sink at Obama, the Clinton campaign simply confirmed the fact that they might be going down the drain."

It's the word play that kills me. Word play, forced alliteration, mixed metaphors masquerading as insight... I imagine Maureen sitting at her adorable lap top, sexy legs crossed, skim latte within reach, being like, oh! Here I work two sink metaphors into one sentence and...does Brad think I'm smart-funny-threatening or just smart-funny? And the rest of us are stuck with her fucking sink metaphor like, if you uprooted the kitchen sink and threw it across the room, then there's no drain to... never mind.

Another Times columnist Gail Collins can't seem to find anything to offer us except more Hillary pseudo-psychobabble. From yesterday's Hillary, Buckeye Girl:

• "If Hillary Clinton were a state, she’d be Ohio."
• "She has managed to become the boring candidate in this primary. This is one of the great anti-glamour stories in history."
• "If Hillary can win this one — and if she doesn’t, she is as cooked as reheated risotto — it will be because people here worry that Barack Obama is getting show-offy."
• "Back around Debate 10 — lo those many debates ago — ... she was confident and presidential"
• "Now, he’s better than she is — calm and witty at crucial junctures."

A few weeks ago, even political razor Frank Rich devoted his column to a personality profile of JFK and pondered if the comparison is necessarily flattering. After the Wisconsin victory for Obama and McCain, Rich indulged in writing about who looks more like a loser, McCain or Clinton.

Same with Bob Herbert: "There’s a fine line between brash and cocky. You can’t embark on a quest as audacious as Mr. Obama’s without a certain brashness. But cocky turns people off. And the senator seemed at times to stray across that line." And this: "Pride, the nuns told me in grammar school, goeth before a fall."

Christopher Beam's political blog is Slate:

• "Because he’s loose on the stump, self-deprecating yet cocky, Obama gets away with appropriating the language of his own deification."
• He asked a voter why he's supporting Obama: "'Because I just saw him.' That seems to be the way it works for many young people: To see him is to be for him."
• "In other ways, Obama doesn’t act messianic—just cocky."

There's nothing wrong, per se, with pointing these things out, he's witty, more confident, but getting cocky; she still seems presidential but desperate to brand herself... okay, okay.

I was out to dinner with a group last night, and we got into a fun conversation about the something called the enneagram, a Jungian-like outline of the main personality types. It's a way of thinking about people in terms of their personality's pitfalls and strengths. What's annoying me is that much political analysis is framing election results as the by-product of personality nuance--the candidates' and our own. We want more or less glamor, more or less femininity, more or less ease in the candidate's own skin. What all those campaign workers campaigning their Obama-supporting asses off? What about people being legitimately weirded out by a forced "mandate," i.e. uncharted policy territory in the US health care history? What about Iraq votes, not releasing records, conditions of meeting with leaders and pulling out of NAFTA? Repulsion to dirty campaigning?

Can't his ascent and her decline in popularity be about something other than our need to be nurtured by a feminine leadership style (which, these writers love pointing out, he has and she does not)?

Everyone wants to offer his or her theory about how Hillary's hardness or Barack's grace has made the poll results somehow inevitable. But if he were losing, we'd be calling his "feminine moderation" spinelessness, and claiming Americans feel insecure and want a president who seems tough.

The personality-ergo-poll-results is, of course, only ushered out when the votes are counted, which makes the analysis all the less interesting. No one's actually risking making the wrong prediction based on our reaction to her tears and his Dick Cheney-cousin jokes. It makes reading political analysis kind of like reading a kid's paper about Oedipus' or Achilles' hubris. Like one thing in your personality cemented your destiny... of which you already know the outcome.

And even when the personality assessments are positive ("Obama is just so fricking awesome), I still worry about its effect on his campaign. Shallow praise of his awesomeness from serious journalists feeds Obama doubters more doubts. If I was on the fence, I'd be like, yeah so what's he gonna do as commander in chief, unleash his awesome arsenal of awesomeness and shake it out all over the desert till people put down their guns? Yeah, right.

Maybe there's nothing wrong with any of this. I'm just getting sick of it is all. It's made the most exciting race of my life boring to read about.

Who looks better in African Clothes: Barack or Beyonce?

Tough one. I think our boy has it on Jay-Z though, for sure. Jay-Z looks like he needed a last minute costume to a frat party.

not that there's anything wrong with that...right?

Being a guest in a foreign country... I mean, you know, being a guest and participating in a welcome ritual from your venerable hosts... in the place where your dad and his ancestors are from... the place where you are from...

Sorry, the incoherence--though typed and reread and left as incoherence--is sincere.

I am referring to the alleged Clinton campaign leak of a picture of Obama dressed as a Somali elder on a 1996 trip to Kenya...

According to Tuesday's Ohio debate, Hillary denied knowing about the photo or anyone on her campaign leaking it, and Barack believed her. And they moved on.

Um, that's fine, but pictures of Rudy Giuliani in drag this is not.

An article in Reuters has this quote, which at last echoed my initial reactions to this "controversy:"

The dispute has angered many in Kenya, especially ethnic Somalis from the northeast, who resent the implication that Obama did anything wrong during his visit.

The story explains that a venerable elder dresses a visitor in these clothes to honor the tribe's guest. "We give special treatment and respect to any visitor."

It came up in the debate, and both Hillary and Barack played it cool and acted above the pettiness of it. I guess when an issue is weird and stupid, that's the smart tack to take. But it was a missed opportunity to touch on what it means to be a guest in a foreign place, and to participate in someone else's guest-host culture, accepting it as the honor it is. Especially since doing that gracefully is something seen as so very un-American. Obama is all about crossing boundaries, right? And dissipating the image of America that is arrogant and unresponsive to the local scenery.

I know, I know. I mean, I get it. It's a float in the Barack-wears-a-turban parade, which was supposed to gather a crowd of people nervous that we are about to elect a terrorist to the White House.

I guess I just want to take this chance to point out that this picture represents a notion about how Americans should carry ourselves when we go abroad. In the case of a potential US president, this attitude will serve us at the negotiating table as well as at a dinner table. Our efforts to participate in the development of the rest of the world would be more successful if we were better at the kind of exchange pictured above.

Oh, but here's the next phase of this story (also from the Reuters article):

Mohamed Ibrahim, who attended one of two crisis meetings held in Wajir on Thursday by clan members who hosted Obama on his trip, said Washington must immediately make amends to them and especially to the elder pictured with him.

"The U.S. government must apologise to us as a clan and the old man," Ibrahim told Reuters by telephone. "We have been offended and we cannot afford to just watch and stay silent."

He said it was essential Clinton "clear her name" too....

If there was no apology, the elders said, they would demand the expulsion of U.S. troops based near Garissa town.

Apparently our dumb political tactics are being taken personally in Kenya. Phillip Kennicott in the Washington Post validated my bewilderment, which somewhat assuages my embarrassment over this American cultural moment. He writes:

By the end of the day, the only clear message from the strange episode is that whoever was spreading the image was not particularly sophisticated about the way images work in our new media world...

An image such as this one also needs to circulate first among people inclined to believe the worst about its target. For a smear photograph to function properly, it must begin its journey into the body politic with what one might call a "Have you seen this?" phase. As it circulates under the radar, it gains a kind of credibility momentum, as people inclined to believe begin to think it is actual, documentary evidence of something that is being suppressed. The idea that it is being suppressed -- that it hasn't broken out to a larger audience -- actually helps it build credibility momentum.

If the image debuts to the larger world without that momentum, its smear message will be drowned out by a chorus of other story lines: Where did it come from? Who distributed it? Why did they do it? And that seemed to be case yesterday.

Does negative campaigning work?

Here I am posting two statements from bloggers on the excellent Back Ally Media about Hillary's tactics in Wisconsin over the last week.

The first one is basically saying, don't be mean in Wisconsin, my very kind, unironic state.

I believe Hillary made a big tactical mistake in choosing Wisconsin as the first state to go negative. If you should know anything about the denizens of Wisconsin, it’s that A) we’re big Packer fans who have an affinity for cheap beer, brats, and cheese curds and 2) we’re nice. Wisconsinites - especially progressive Democratic voters - don’t like the nasty stuff. In the last week, Hillary threw a lot of dirty stuff, hoping that something would stick: “Obama ducks debates,” “Obama is an empty suit,” “Obama is a plagiarist.” It all received a lot of coverage, but it clearly didn’t stick and very possibly backfired (though maybe it helped avert a 25-point loss).

The second statement points out that, according to the Wisconsin poll data anyway, the later you decide who to vote for, the more likely you are to support Hillary...and therefore, did the negative campaigning actually work, even if it didn't work well enough to secure Hillary's victory there?

Did negative attacks work?

Probably not, but here’s something interesting. I was looking at the exit polls from Wisconsin, and it seems to me that you could make the argument that Clinton’s attacks on Obama over the last week had an effect. People who made up their minds “today” only support Obama by a 51-49 margin. People who made up their minds in the last three days are for Obama 56 to 44; people who decided ‘last week’ are 68 to 32 for Obama; and people who decided ‘last month’ are 69 to 30 for Obama. So did Clinton’s attacks sway some undecideds?

Well, your guess is as good as mine, but I'm am loving the story I (and therefore this blog) keep telling the world: That when someone comes into the ring and insists on playing clean, the business-as-usual mud-slinging from the others looks like what it is: dirty.

Okay, but I'll stop being lazy--no more using dirt/mud/their aerodynamics metaphors. Because here's what really happens when she, or anyone else, starts negative campaigning over bullshit (Barack's compromised oratory integrity, or the Jesse Jackson supposed analogy, etc.): we lose track of Hillary The Candidate, the one with

• experience,
• Republican survival scars,
• a groundbreaking role as a female Democrat who figured out how to wield power, compromise, and get feisty

and instead we're in the room with Hillary the ruthless Campaign Strategist, the one who

• puts winning the election ahead of why we should vote for her,
• has strategy sessions, meetings with handlers, a bevy of consultants about when to "go negative"
• caters to and summons forces that make this election about things other than policy change, political will, and steering America towards a more just, equal, peaceful society

Her deployment of campaign smearing tactics are blatant appeals to our (granted, well-documented) capacity to be distracted from what really matters in a president. And as I said before, even if those tactics win, we won't love the person who showed us how petty we can be.

"Unattributed inspiration"

This from today's New York Times:

The accusation on Monday by Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign that Senator Barack Obama recently plagiarized a passage from a speech delivered two years ago by a friend has opened a door to charges and countercharges about borrowed phrases and unattributed inspiration in the 2008 campaign. (From an article by Sam Roberts, called In Politics, Inspiration Or Plagiarism Is a Fine Line)

I hate this plagiarism controversy--it's a sideshow crafted to distract us from the real event of political discourse--but I do love that it threw the phrase "unattributed inspiration" into the mix. Nice one, reporter Sam Roberts, whoever you are.

The phrase is not only cute. It summons what's tricky about a term like plagiarism in this business of inspiration and oratory. When do we routinely attribute inspiration? I mean, besides the thank yous on Oscar night and when we're on e. Do we diminish how inspiration actually works by demanding it be footnoted? Okay, okay, I'll be more specific.

A day has not gone by since superTuesday that I haven't overheard a compare and contrast discussion about Hillary and Barack. I have heard the same arguments with the same phrases again and again. People are summoning the same phrases, without attribution, not because they are trying to get away with something, but because the wording stuck. We muddle our way through articulations of this contest in the hope of gaining some clarity, from our own words and other people's responses.

These conversations are literally one string of unattributed inspiration after the next. Arguing at a bar is not the same as speech making, but I mention this to point out that phrases that work come into the fold and, if they are useful enough, if they are memorable enough, cannot remain copyrighted. They belong to everyone. Hillary and McCain are now added to the list of people claiming to be "fired up and ready to go." Good for them. It sounds a tad silly coming from them, but it's a good phrase, and that's why they took it. (What are they gonna say, "And as Barack Obama says, I, Hillary/McCain, am fired up and ready to go!"? I mean, attributing him would kinda step on the message, and no one's mad at them for that non-citation.)

So let's move a little further down the spectrum of official words and appropriate citations, from arguing to speechmaking. Twice Barack has used distinct wording originally used by Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts, with Mr. Patrick's blessing.

Question 1: Is delivering the words of your speechwriter plagiarism? No. Clearly. In general, we don't expect a speechmaker to have authored every word that escapes his lips. In fact, we generally don't expect him or her to have authored any of it. As a society, we are familiar with the job "speechwriter" and we assume that the big dog politicians pay good money for the best ones.

Question 2: What, in effect, is the difference between a politician delivering a speechwriter's sentence and a politician delivering another politician's words? One difference is that a speechwriter is paid to put words in Obama's mouth, whereas Patrick, in essence, made a word-choice donation. Another difference is that Patrick previously delivered the words he gave Obama, and, presumably, the speechwriter did not. The big non-difference is that both original authors said to Obama: here, use this, and go win.

Plagiarism is a really serious charge. Taking something that's not yours, taking credit for work you did not do--it offends me deeply. And when we read an author's words in a book, we reasonably expect that the person whose name is on the cover came up with every single one of those printed words, unless she or he cites someone else. But when a politician delivers a speech, we never have the expectation that the politician came up with every single one of those words. Plagiarism is a crime of deceit. Our expectation here is, therefore, highly relevant.

The Times' story points out that the Clintons have invited a glass-house scenario by throwing stones at Obama. Bill Clinton's 1993 inaugural address contained this beautiful passage:

Today we celebrate the mystery of American renewal. This ceremony is held in the depth of winter. But by the words we speak and the faces we show the world, we force the spring. A spring reborn in the world's oldest democracy that brings forth the vision and courage to reinvent America.

It turns out that this and other parts of the speech were based on a four page outline provided by Bill's friend, Father Tim Healy, former president of Georgetown University and then president of the New York Public Library. He died shortly after Clinton's election, but when his friends went to his home, they found in his typewriter a letter to Clinton, including the suggestion to talk about forcing the spring. Clinton in his autobiography said "I wanted to use it in his memory," and he did, unattributed.

Of this incident, the original voice of the plagiarism accusation, Hillary spokesman Howard Wolfson, said: "Tim Healy helped President Clinton write the speech by offering suggestions for it. That doesn't fit any definition of plagiarism I'm familiar with."

EXACTLY! So what is your problem, people? Enough with this sideshow, it's making ya'll look bad... as the good people of Wisconsin so clearly demonstrated last night!

A failure of the feminism rallying cry

Please read my friend's post on how the various "it's a woman's turn" positions put forth by Gloria Steinem, the Women's Media Center, and others, have a ways to go in fitting non-white women into their scheme. Here's an excerpt:

Nobody talks about Hillary's power the same way nobody talks about white women's power whenever they feminist-monger us to death. This is an old (blood) sport and I find that engaging in it in this election is distracting from the point, for me at least, and very toxic. On an emotional level, the persistent inability to grant me the autonomy to say that I am not doing a "pick race over gender" thing when it comes to this election is profoundly dehumanizing.

Now plagiarism? I'm getting tired of her...

This latest plagiarism attack on my boy reeks of desperation. Obama, in responding to attacks that his campaign is "just words," replied:

"I have a dream - just words? We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal - just words? We have nothing to fear but fear itself - just words? Just speeches?"

Well, it turns out that the governor of Massachusetts Deval Patrick had said something virtually identical in one of his speeches in October 2006, so the chief spokesman for Hillary's campaign comes out with this statement:

"Senator Obama's campaign is largely premised on the strength of his rhetoric and his promises, because he doesn't have a long record in public life. When the origin of his oratory is called into question, it raises questions about his overall candidacy."

I have to say that although this statement seems to focus on the authenticity of Barack's speeches, hidden in plain sight in the premise of the question is an attack on him that I keep having to reject: Senator Obama's campaign is largely premised on the strength of his rhetoric and his promises. His promises are no more "untested" than Hillary's.

Okay, but back to the question. What did Obama say back to this?

"Deval and I trade ideas all the time. He has occasionally used lines of mine and at the dinner in Wisconsin I used some words of his. On occasion, Senator Clinton has used words of mine as well." When asked if he should have attributed the words, he said: "I am sure I should have. I am happy to give Deval credit."

As a former teacher and tutor, I have a plagiarism button that can perhaps be pushed too easily. I also have an ear for good rhetoric that I will play back, often without attribution. But so often, when I have been writing an essay or blog entry, and been emailing my friends about it for feedback or just to develop more coherence on a matter, my dear friends will say things like, "my words are yours," or "feel free to use that." Sometimes I cite them, sometimes I don't. It really depends on if the citation diminishes the punch of the message, rhetorically.

If Obama's friend says: here's a good answer to these empty rhetoric nay-sayers, use it, can't he just use it? What I wonder is if the Hillary camp called Mr. Patrick's office to get his take on how it feels to be ripped off. If they didn't, they certainly should have.

But whatever Mr. Patrick did or did not have the chance to say in Obama's defense is, I am sure, besides the point. Hillary's campaign was looking for a chance to puncture a hole in one of our boy's most unique and memorable qualities, his ability to stir a crowd. Funny how the point of the supposedly plagiarized passage was how words are more than just words. But the opportunity to cast doubt was too good to pass up.

If that's not empty rhetoric, I don't know what is.

One more thing to think about on this point: on more than a few occasions, when Hillary and her camp (Bill!) have tried to pull a cheap trick to discredit Obama, what happens? The public relations debacle falls on her, not him. (Barack: I'm rubber, you're glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.) Hillary's failed attempts at humiliating him are actually demonstrating a turning point in how to play public political games: unlike past campaigns, it's better to play clean. Dirt, it seems, doesn't throw as well as it used to. I just hope that today's Wisconsin voters prove me right on that.

Getting gay about Obama

Joel Stein, thanks for this ohilarity.

The whole piece is worth reading, but here's a taste:

Obamaphilia has gotten creepy. I couldn't figure out if the two canvassers who came to my door Sunday had taken Ecstasy or were just fantasizing about an Obama presidency, but I feared they were going to hug me. Scarlett Johansson called me twice, asking me to vote for him. She'd never even called me once about anything else. Not even to see "The Island."

This is cuter than 10 kittens

Donate a minute of your life here. It's so worth it.

"What are you bitches waiting for?"

Just one of many great moments from Chris Rock's prediction that our boy will be the next president.

Superdelegates: So Much For Change

If the Democratic nomination is decided in Hillary's favor by superdelegates... this corner of the blogosphere will be spewing firey wrath, and my guess is a lot of other people will be, too.

Please note that pledged delegates have Barack and Hillary neck to neck: as of 8:15 am EST, 632 -626. She's ahead, but not significantly closer to the necessary 2,025 to win the nomination.

Her almost 100 total delegate lead comes from unpledged delegates, the party members who vote in the nominating convention who are not beholden to represent the popular vote.

EXCITING UPDATE!: OBAMA HAD TAKEN THE LEAD IN PLEDGED DELEGATES: 603-590! This as of almost 10 am Wednesday. Not sure where those delegates went for both of them, but my source is still the election center at CNN. So, now the unpledged delegate distribution is even deeper. If Barack gets the majority of popular-vote delegates, but fails to have the total delegate majority because of the unpledged guys (superdelegates), we're going to be hearing a lot more about the fine print of the nomination process... and then expressing outrage at it.

Here, Matt Bai for the Times Magazine explains the little understood role of the unpledged delegates, who make up one fifth of the total votes at the nominating convention. He writes, "If there isn't a clear Democratic winner on Tuesday, the decision may fall into the hands of so-called superdelegates. So much for change."

If Clinton wins the nomination because she has more clout with the Democrats already in the system, she will demonstrates what "experience" actually means: pull with the keepers of the gate.

Lest we forget what we're up against

...this brand of heartbreaking bullshit.

If he gets the nomination, Barack's candidacy is going to summon some ugly demons from people who might need change (and to change) more than most, but who'll be damned before they unify themselves with, or even tolerate, a black American named Hussein. It just sucks so damn much when you remember that people are actually embracing and touting our sickest, most bigoted nature. Let's elect Barack and plant ourselves a few steps further away from this foulness.

We really do need change and to change.

SuperTuesday's Eve: The Healthcare Debate

Among liberals in my world, one problems with being unabashedly pro-Obama has arisen with particular force over the weekend: health care

On all Super Tuesday’s eve, I shall address this head on.

HEALTHCARE

A succinct attack of Obama’s health care campaign in favor of Hillary’s was put forth today by Times’ columnist Paul Krugman. Not only does her plan cost a lot less per person, apparently, but it also mandates universal coverage, that most distant of democratic stars that Clinton (and once upon a time, Edwards) now tells us is within reach. For those of you worried about Krugman's analysis, READ THIS from Harold Pollack in the Huffington Post.

In short, health care mandates mean everyone is ordered to have health insurance, either through some government program, through an employer, independently, or some combination thereof. Hillary (and Krugman) are going after Obama for not including mandates as part of his plan.

How will Hillary enforce the mandates? How do you actually force people to pay up for health care if they don't voluntarily sign up? She claims to be ready to go to the mat. Her on ABC's' “This Week”

"I think there are a number of mechanisms. Going after people's wages, automatic enrollment, when you are at the place of employment, you will be automatically enrolled, whatever the mechanism is."

Word to the wise, Hil: "going after people's wages" ain't the best soundbite you every came up with, but it's cool, soundbites aren't your thing and that's fine.

Obama’s criticism of Clinton’s plan has been two fold:

1) It’s unfair to force people to buy health care if they don’t want to (this problem is the very definition of a mandate), and

2) That plenty of people can’t afford the mandated insurance, so we’d just be adding another back-breaking bill.

As for complaint number two, Clinton's plan includes subsidies for the poor, and, if those turn out to be insufficient, a promise to up the subsidies. Whether you find it unlikely that she can pull that off in congress, you can't say that her plan is more cruel to poor people than his plan. It's not.

Krugman is right to point out that argument number one is pretty Republican. And okay, I know it sounds like I’m hating on my boy's Unity/One America thing, but I’m not. This criticism taps into something we're going to choke on if Obama becomes president and no point in pretending otherwise.

How's this for a debate question :

When Change goes up against Unity, which are you going to choose?

Or

When there isn’t common ground, who crosses over?

These notions are not cynical. They are inevitable.

There will be a serious conflict between Republicans in Washington and a Democratic-led attempt to enforce the insurance of the 50 million Americans without health care. The fear among some liberals is that Obama will do a Bill, and make nice with the conservatives instead of fighting for a better life for more Americans.

Uh, in case you missed it, I just pointed out that Hillary’s husband (whose presidency she has vociferously added to her Experience Resume) pretty much created the mold for being the overly yielding Democratic centrist. But that was a different historical moment so I’m not going to bug her about that anymore.

Yes I will. Sorry. If her “baptism by fire” (her words in the last debate) during Bill’s years was so instructive, so fucking mettle firming, how did she just get talked into Iraq by that bit of Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld theater in the senate? Plenty of colleagues saw the same show and were unconvinced. (See previous post for more wrath on that topic.)

Okay but moving on. As a soul-searching Obama supporter, the health care questions for me are:

Do I simply support him, in spite of him being to the right of Hillary's healthcare plan, because of everything else great about him, and everything else less great about her?

Or,

Do I harbor skepticism in the power of the Democrats moment right now (I do) and therefore believe that the Democrat who wins the nomination with universal health care in her plan will get chewed up in the general election and/or the White House for pushing a sweeping reform that America is just not ready for? (And if I think that, am I not just like the cynics with a shrunken political imagination whom Obama urges me to rise above?)

Or,

Do I think he’s shrewdly learning the lesson of the Clintons' health care debacle in 1994, and proposing a policy that is the closest to universal we can get right now, period? I mean, who’s going to come out and say “I’m against health care for children!”** And when those children grow up, they’ll be used to the idea of universal health care, and that’s how this change is going to come, through the coming of age of a generation of universally covered children? (I mean, it sounds good, but someone took off with my crystal ball at our Christmas party...along with my My-So-Called-Life DVD boxset.)

**(His plan insists on insurance for everyone up to age 25, and would add about 23 million of the uninsured to the ranks of the insured...that's not nothing)

I don’t know. The truth is, I have never lived a day in my life in an America with close to Universal health care.

I have also never lived to see an electorate that is ON FIRE with a presidential candidate. Until now.

I’m having a seeing-is-believing moment: the imagined possibility of a competent, seasoned Clinton pushing through universal health care is not as real to me as the people mobilized by this man to care. To really care, people.

Count me in the camp with the people who are on fire they care so much. Who are volunteering state to state for the first time in their young lives because they share a leader's vision of themselves and of our country. It's too real to deny, and for me, it's too real to vote against.

Alright, I'm so exhausted. Gay rights issue (since it's not different from Hillary, and therefore, doesn't have the same supertuesday urgency) will come tomorrow.

BARACK THE VOTE, PEOPLE!

Why Not Hillary

This is a letter I wrote to my sister and one of my best friends, who asked why I'm not a Hillary fan. This is what I wrote back:

First of all, I do want to like Hillary and I often do. I find myself defending her, even though, the truth is, I don't know what to make of her. She's worked her ass off in the Senate, and the criticism that she did so just to make her bid for the presidency I think is hollow and perhaps tinged with ugly reactions to unabashed female ambition. I think she wins the Government Experience category hands down, but I'm not sure that's an obvious plus. Frankly, I wish more presidents had experience being community organizers in our cities, or had spent time fucked up on drugs, so that when they do things like set a national drug or education policy, they know first hand what the fuck they're talking about, what we're actually up against. (Government Experienced people are absolutely capable of fucking up the government and us—see Donald Rumsfeld and Condi Rice, two of the most experienced, "qualified" people in Washington.)

But on that topic, Barack's not running on experience, but that one term in the Senate is a really impressive roster of activity, bills, passion projects, and bipartisan cooperation on the environment, campaign finance, and transparency in federal funding. (Though he is wrong about ethanol.) In my opinion, Hillary's experience claim over Obama's has one real point of noteworthiness: her hellish experience with the Republican machine when Bill was president. I don't know that her tactics for dealing with those guys are ultimately going to be more effective than Obama's, but she sure knows what the fuck she's talking about with them. And, frankly, as long as Obama is pro-choice, they're gonna go after him with pitch forks and hunger for his blood. I worry that the same way he seemed phased by vituperative bullshit in the debates he'll be dumbfounded by the attacks for the extreme right he is obviously in for if he wins.

I also do not hold it against Clinton that she doesn't stir a crowd like Obama. I think with Hillary we have a case of the smartest girl in the school running for student council president. To win, she's got to win the popularity contest, but she is not good at manufacturing popularity where she doesn't already have it. That's a real obstacle in her campaign, but it's not a problem with me. I don't need a president who has a talent for being likable. People love that about Bill, including me, but it did fuck all for his effectiveness in the White House. So my reservations about her are not about that. (To use that famous W. Bush president test: sure, I'd love to have a beer with Hillary, but nowhere near as much as I want to have a glass of, oh I don't know, pisswater with Barack--but that's not a plug for his campaign so much as it is evidence of my ridiculous crush on him.) I do absolutely love how Obama stirs a crowd—and stirs me—but I recognize that that is a rare gift, and it's shitty to hold it against someone for not having it.

I also don't buy the claim that she won't work across party lines to achieve her goals. Because she has: she has worked closely in the senate with people like Trent Lott, Republican from Mississippi who was an enthusiastic member of the witch hunt against Bill and with Lindsey Graham, the House impeachment manager over Bill's trial (citation: January 28 New Yorker article by George Packer).

I'm the same age as Chelsea, and I often think that if Chelsea were, say, one of my friends from high school (she went to school near me), I'd love her mom. Hillary is really smart. She speaks her expertise fluently, and her combative debate style means that when she's at the table with the assholes running the world, she will not cower and will probably impress the good ones as well as the bad. It is a presidential skill. The debates greatly showed off that side of her. I also do think she's mostly motivated by a desire to make shit better for more people.

My biggest complaint with her is I don't think her political persona is guided by integrity. I really don't. I think she takes pragmatism to the brink of going whichever way the wind blows…and then crosses that line. There have been some public moments where something she did reeked of opportunism or just plain bad judgment, and she's had nothing convincing to say in her defense.

FOR EXAMPLE, THE WAR VOTE:

The biggest example for me is her Iraq war vote, and the whole controversy over the National Intelligence Agency report. She keeps repeating the line: "My vote was a sincere vote based on the facts and assurances that I had at the time." But either she did know better or she should have, and that truth is made clear here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/magazine/03Hillary-t.html?_r=3&adxnnl=1&pagewanted=1&adxnnlx=1201618916-cGtAIp6JTmLiJaxFrhJ5uQ

(It's a long article, but the page that starts really going into her not reading this report is page 3, here:)
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/29/magazine/03Hillary-t.html?_r=3&pagewanted=3&oref=slogin

To sum up the story, Jeff Gerth is calling Hillary out on her "sincere vote…what I knew then" catch phrase about the authorizing force vote by saying, Okay, Clinton, you really should have known more at the time. Your other democratic senators read the Intelligence report which outright contradicted the Bush-Cheney story about Saddam and the situation over there, and if this is something that you are saying "was one of the hardest decisions of your life" why didn't your soul-searching take the form of reading a 90 page document that was our best estimate of the situation over there? No, but instead of doing that, she parroted the Bush-Cheney line when she spoke before the senate. The Times sums up her turn on the senate floor at the time of the Iraq vote as follows:

…she went on to offer a lengthy catalog of Saddam Hussein's crimes. She cited unnamed "intelligence reports" showing that between 1998 and 2002 "Saddam Hussein has worked to rebuild his chemical and biological weapons stock, his missile-delivery capability and his nuclear program." Both the public and secret intelligence estimates on Iraq contained such analysis, but the complete N.I.E. report also included other views. A dissent by the State Department's intelligence arm concluded — correctly, as it turned out — that Iraq was not rebuilding its nuclear program. Clinton continued, accusing Iraq's leader of giving "aid, comfort and sanctuary to terrorists, including Al Qaeda members."

But the report from the N.I.A. said that the evidence that Iraq was stockpiling WMDs is questionable, and that there is virtually no support for the claim that Saddam was doing any favors for al Qaeda. In fact, all the intelligence agencies pretty much agreed that Saddam and bin Laden were not about each other at all, bin Laden opposing Saddam's secular government (and all secular governments), and Saddam being like, why do I would these violent pirates running amok in my country, telling the people who I'm trying to control what to do, trying to get them to, ultimately oppose me? The argument that Saddam is aiding al Quaeda is an argument that plays on the assumption that all mean Muslims are aligned and don't act in their own best interest, you know, like everyone else.

This is what Nicholas von Hoffman (the Nation) has to say about her vs. Edwards in that same same vote/report:

In fairness to Hillary, she is not the only Democratic presidential aspirant who had a chance to read the National Intelligence Estimate and did not. John Edwards did not read it either and also voted for war. Since then Edwards, unlike Hillary, has recanted his vote, but he still has some explaining to do. Also with some explaining to do are Joe Biden and Christopher Dodd, two other Democratic senators running for the nomination. But Hillary is the only one saying that she would still vote for war knowing what she did then. (my emphasis)

Obama was not in the senate at the time, but he was an outspoken opponent of Bush administration policies on Iraq. In the fall of 2002, before the war started, he addressed an anti-war rally in Chicago, saying:

"I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Quaeda."

I'm so glad that statement is on the record because his prediction, five years later, is dead fucking on.

But Clinton not reading that report kills me. It was confidential, and only available to Senators. We don't get to read that stuff. The whole idea behind electing people is that they actually know more than what we do, are better at their jobs than we would be, and that's why every policy decision in the senate is made, well, in the senate, and not, say, by national referendum. That she had access to our most accurate evaluation of the situation in Iraq and didn't fucking read it before authorizing the president to use force…I'm sorry, force is not a vote, it's not a decision, it's force, meaning guns and bombs and airplanes and human lives. Authorizing force is an authorization of death of people on many sides. Do your goddamn homework. It's a disgraceful moment, which she has done nothing but avoid with an unsatisfactory sound bite. You know what? If Chelsea were a marine, she'd have fucking read the 90 pages.

Oh, when asked if she read it, she refuses to answer the question. And I'm sorry, just because we're used to that shit from politicians doesn't mean it ain't some Bull. Shit.

HER CAMPAIGN

I'm getting disenchanted with her campaign, Barack or no Barack. A particularly shameful bit of campaigning is here:
http://thepage.time.com/transcript-of-clinton-call-2/

Her basic pitch, that she is effective and pragmatic (and wink wink, willing to be nasty) but ultimately working for the good guys, is backed up by her Senate record....But stuff like the above campaign message about John Edwards... that shit is nasty and, to use the word of the moment, fucking divisive. And I'm trying to summon my sympathy for her by being thinking stuff like, well okay, her claws are so sharp because they had to be that sharp to get into the ring with the Republican beast that attacked her family during Bill's terms, but damn. But let's ask, is it a plus that Hillary came of age, politically, in that most bitterly hateful of environments? Barack's campaign is making such a point to not be about that shit, he's saying play clean, play clean, because this is the kind of crap that makes politics irrelevant to like half the country. Her team is looking dirty. I found myself nodding a lot to Bob Herbert's editorial on Saturday: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/26/opinion/26herbert.html?_r=1&oref=slogin

Her team is also looking kind of full of shit. See the Washington Post's Dana Milbank call out her Florida "victory party" farce for what it was:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/29/AR2008012902998.html

ATTRACTING PEOPLE WHO DON'T NORMALLY GIVE A FUCK

For me this is one of Obama's crucial selling points over Clinton.
In January 2008, Obama won the Iowa caucus with 37.58% support, ahead of 29.75% for John Edwards and 29.47% for Clinton. The biggest part of that significant lead came from record turn-out of voters under 30—the majority of whom were first time primary voters. To me that means, usually young people, who don't see enough of a difference between this or that democratic candidate and so stay home, went out to say, I want this democratic candidate. Barack is speaking to people who aren't usually interested in listening. His massive volunteer campaign staff largely consists of people who have never volunteered for a political candidate. To me this indicates he is chipping away at one of our biggest national problems, that people simply do not engage the political process. This taps into a scene from last Saturday in Fort Greene: a bevy neighborhood 8 year olds having a bakesale for him. How exciting is it that an eight year old is moved to bake for a presidential candidate? This guy means they might be more active, engaged citizens when they're old enough to have real influence. My seven-year-old godson really responds to him too in the most visceral way. (Obama says on T.V. "There is nothing false about hope!" and he replies in earnest: "That is very true.") And there's nothing wrong with a president who actually inspires, who is actually appealing to people's best nature.

From Obama's victory speech in South Carolina:

[W]e're also up against forces that… feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation. It's the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon.

And I now must wonder if, in fact, I make such a point to be areligious and unpatriotic because I so resent the forces Obama bemoans here. Political candidates humiliate us, profoundly, when they appeal to religious and patriotic loyalties that summon our most defensive, fearful, bigoted selves. And, fine, let's entertain those tactics in the name of pragmatism; let's say those tactics win the day, and we learn, once again, that the surest road to the White House is the divide and conquer superhighway. Could we really love the man or woman perched in the Oval Office who brought that out in us? (That from my first post.)

I think Hillary has and will continue to stoop to those tactics to win. I don't know if it's her nature or her political upbringing by the conservative right during Bill's terms (or both), but it's there. Bob Kerrey going on on Larry King about Barack being decended from Muslims, his middle name is Hussein (all true, but I am deeply suspicious when your opponents keep bringing that up) and that HE SPENT TIME IN A MADRASA?? Which is a LIE. So where exactly do you come up with that shit, and more importantly, why?? If yall don't offer a better explanation, I'm going to go with what it looks like: that you are gagging us with our Anti-Muslim sentiment and trying to get us to puke it up all over Barack. Same deal with the Bill-Jesse-Jackson crap on Monday. Ultimately, maybe those little quibbles disappear when someone is president, but Bill's Jesse Jackson maneuver was calculated to play on the fact that, if you throw it out there, people will associate Barack with Jesse because they're both black, even though Barack is wayyyyyyyyy mainstream (he out-fundraised Hillary for the majority of fund-raising quarters!) and Jesse wasn't really every mainstream. Even though Jesse was running heavily on race and Barack has not made his campaign about that (everyone else is doing that for him, to his obvious dismay). Even though ultimately Jesse's campaign was insignificant in that race (it was historical, but it didn't effect the other candidates or their campaigns much; he wasn't a real threat). But Bill was out to belittle Barack's accomplishments and his candidacy by aligning him with another black man, one who is famous for losing, one whom we know is no real political force today. And shit like that, damn, okay, it's not criminal, it's not an authorization of force in Iraq, but it's dirty and cheap. And like I said, just because we're used to it doesn't mean it doesn't suck shit through a sock.


OBAMA'S RECORD

Charles Peters in the Washington Post on Obama's senate record is here:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpdyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303303_pf.html

and his other bills in Illinois and the Senate are here:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barack_Obama

It's good. But the late term abortion thing drew criticism and it should have.

And in conclusion...

FROM TONI MORRISON'S LETTER OF ENDORSEMENT TO OBAMA:

I have admired Senator Clinton for years. Her knowledge always seemed to me exhaustive; her negotiation of politics expert….I cared little for her gender as a source of my admiration, and the little I did care was based on the fact that no liberal woman has ever ruled in America.

Nor do I care very much for your race[s]. I would not support you if that was all you had to offer or because it might make me "proud."

That in addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom.

When, I wondered, was the last time this country was guided by such a leader? Someone whose moral center was un-embargoed? Someone with courage instead of mere ambition? Someone who truly thinks of his country's citizens as "we," not "they"?

That was Toni. This is me again: And in conclusion, I'll say it again: there is absolutely nothing wrong with the president of the United States being hot.

One Name, Infinite Possibilities

Note: I am not suggesting that the following is a reason to vote for someone.

But.

This man’s name has endless possibilities. Imagine being me: you are starting a blog – your first and only blog - about Barack Obama. What should you call it? This is a great moment in your young life. Your imagination takes a glorious leap into the Obyss and it feels like flying in a dream except the air is made out of letters, most of which are Os, B’s and phrases that involve the word “rock." Here’s what I and those consulted came up with:

IWannaBarackWithYou.com
I’mJustKatyFromTheBarack.com
BarackEmSockEmRobots.com
SweetHomeObama.com
Obamarama.com (taken…by someone not using it! Arr.)

A particularly great 7-year-old I know had a moment of confusion during which he called him: Orack Barama, hence the web address

Orackbarama.com

And let’s not stop at blog titles. We have a movement here, and the name is just another fun aspect of our movement’s culture.

We can go Barack to the Future.
In Atlantic city, tell people at the roulette wheel to “Bet on Barack!”
If he loses, we will all suffer acute Barack pain.
And “If it ain’t Barack, FIX THAT SHIT!!”

Plus the letter “O” becomes the prefix to all things Obama like “e” now prefixes all things electronic.

Students who vote for Obama and get a B.A. the next year get an Obaccalaureate.
Any medieval lit students in the house? If a serf pays homage to Obama he pays Obameisance. (I’ll just say I’m sorry.)
Obama supporters with kids under age 3 have cute little Obabies!

Oh. And when Bill tries that Jesse Jackson shit, it OBACKFIRES. Holla!

I am writing this in a coffee shop in Fort Greene, and I just threw this Barack Obama name-culture idea out to the group here. (I have a rotation of barristas instead of co-workers.) The French girl behind the counter didn’t miss a fucking beat. (Please read the following with an adorable French accent.)

“So if you are Obama supporter and you like, order food from a nice restaurant you can get a Barack of lamb?”

Folks, a French person.

But seriously, see what I mean?

Me and Patriotism and Obama

Tuesday, January 29^th, 2008

When I encounter the phrase “proud to be an American,” usually I am not. I find it pasted on things like 9/11 memorials and bumpers which also urge me to support the troops and to never forget and never forgive. These arenas don’t make me prouder to be an American any more than the Crimson-Tide-like ads for enlisting in the military make me want to be all I can be in the deserts of Iraq and Afghanistan. I do support the troops. I suggest we support the troops by not lying to them about why they’re risking their lives; let’s support them by not bringing them into a war we don’t have the man-power to sustain, thereby forcing them to stay on for extra terms they never signed up for. Let’s support them by creating an atmosphere in which torture is as perverse and backwards as cannibalism. (Don’t get me wrong, the torturee bears the brunt of the injustice, but we should heed Orwell’s warning that “when the white man turns tyrant, it is his own freedom he destroys.”) Never forgive and never forget? That’s fine with me. New Yorkers love our city, and that smoke-filled day is indelibly marked in our memories. I’m definitely not into forgiving the Taliban, per se, though the bumper stickers reminding me not to, I think, are more likely to get a brick thrown through the window of some non-Taliban store owner than they are to make sure I really, really fucking hate bin Laden until the day I die. The joke in the Chris Rock movie where he runs for president pretty much sums up the nefarious sentiment behind this brand of patriotism, wherein his opponent punctuates every statement with: “God bless America—and nowhere else.”

But you know, I do feel pride in being American. Music locates the patriot in me. That guitar intro to “Tell me something good” could not have come from any place else, and, damn it, I wanna be from the same place as that song. As soon as the strings make their low, lush entrance in Gershwin’s “Summertime,” there is no doubt what country we are in.

I’m also proud of our Constitution, and the democratic experiment Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Payne et al attempted. America’s founding moment is a contradiction-ridden history, but it did give birth to some beautiful moments, such as Benjamin Franklin, one of twelve slave-owning founders, freeing his slaves and becoming a fervent abolitionist.

“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.”

When Jefferson wrote that piece of poetry, he and his colleagues were not ready to count black people and women as folks with unalienable rights. Yet there is something profound about setting a standard that even he did not meet. Was this the birth of American hypocrisy? I think that’s a valid way of interpreting it. But equally valid is the interpretation that America is first and foremost an idea, like justice or equality, and the project of government is to close the gap between the idea and the reality as efficiently and as fairly as possible.

I am grateful for having grown up in the biggest, longest running immigrant experiment since early man walked across the Bering Strait. So many of my friends have parents or grandparents who were born very far from here, and they all have a story about getting from there to here. The stories do not all belong on a plaque on the Statue of Liberty. Many of them are fraught with unrewarded risk, confusion, loneliness, disappointment and resentment. Remarkably, though, the children have proven their resilience every time. They have both inherited that legacy of homesickness and are not bound by it. Among the issues of family history we grapple with, one of them is not, generally, why the fuck am I this and what the fuck am I doing here? The this and the here are a given, the firm platform upon which we learn to juggle everything else.

It is the most American thing is to be of many things. If we occasionally trumpet our roots, more often we ignore them--if we're lucky enough to know enough about them to ignore. This condition begs us to be self-invented or else risk foregoing the comfort of an identity. It’s tough. It makes clanism tempting on the one hand, but on the other, just plain hard to pull off. We have no sense, unlike, say, some people in Austria, of having lived in the shadow of the same castle for seventeen generations. Our version of the castle is that we find ourselves side by side, on the subway, in a taxi, in our neighborhoods, in friendships and marriages, with people whose ancestors could not have fathomed the degree of our proximity. One friend of mine is the child of an interracial marriage of a couple whose lineages trace to the same plantation, where the mother’s family owned the father’s. King’s dream is a dream in many places, but it’s a reality often enough to stir within me a deep pride at our American capacity to master being more than one thing, and to be more humane for that mastery.

My neighborhood in Brooklyn makes me proud to be an American. (Brooklyn!!) Just about all of New York makes me proud to be an American. It’s a beautiful place to live, even when it’s not. I’ve lived here for ten years, and what goes on around me blows my mind constantly. This is a great place to be young and alive and awake. I lived the first 18 years of my life in the heart of Washington D.C., but truly, I feel like this city gave birth to me, and is still doing so.

So I’m almost ready turn to Obama here. There’s something off when your notion of patriotism has virtually nothing to do with the people leading your government. Yet, it has literally never occurred to me until now that the president should stir up those sentiments. I don’t just mean the man of the moment, I mean the office of the president since I’ve been aware of its existence. (I date that initial awareness to some time in 1985; I was six and my mother corrected my impression that Ronald Reagan was the president of Washington D.C.) Today, when my thoughts turn to our government, I feel so very unpatriotic. I’m embarrassed to go abroad and be mistaken for an envoy of that ideology, that war, and that stubborn arrogance. The W. Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld crew, however, is perhaps too easy an argument for the case I’m trying to make: which is that, even having grown up in northwest Washington D.C. where respect for the power on The Hill is a given, I never, even as an impressionable little kid, loved the president. Even Bill the charmer didn’t plant the idea: now here is someone to believe in. He did not plant the thought that I might love our country more because he was the one we gave the mandate to govern us, to represent us, to lead us, and to follow us.

Which brings me, finally, to Obama. As an adult, I am giddy about his candidacy the way I was giddy for Madonna in 1989. In his victory speech in South Carolina, among the many brilliant sound bites that brought tears to my eyes, was this one:

[W]e’re also up against forces that… feed the habits that prevent us from being who we want to be as a nation. It's the politics that uses religion as a wedge, and patriotism as a bludgeon.

And I now must wonder if, in fact, I make such a point to be areligious and unpatriotic because I so resent the forces Obama bemoans here. It humiliates us, profoundly, when leaders appeal to religious and patriotic loyalties that summon our most defensive, fearful, bigoted selves. And, fine, let’s entertain those tactics in the name of pragmatism; let’s say those tactics win the day, and we learn, once again, that the surest road to the White House is the divide and conquer superhighway. Could we really love the man or woman perched in the Oval Office who brought that out in us?

Barack Obama has attracted the crowds and campaign staff he has because he reminds people to have faith in their own generosity. I think many of us are shocked to discover how hungry we have been for that side of ourselves.

Dear America,

The Obama candidacy means nothing less than this: If we elect Barack to office, it means we may well love each other more than we knew. I, for one, will beam with patriotic pride at the display of love that his victory would make manifest.