Just got this kind e-mail today:
Dear Brad:
My name is Whitney and I’m an American black woman (I don’t fuss with that title "African-American, hell, I’m an AMERICAN first!!!!)
Anyway, I was at the South Carolina victory rally held for Barack Obama and I’ve been meaning to send you a thank you email for your wonderful blog dated Jan. 27, 2008 (that I have shared with other blacks who agree with you 110 percent) that it’s time to end these overly divisive and counterproductive tactics that use the false veil of racism to keep this country further divided.
Yes, there will always be those who strive for division, and they come in all colors, but your blog, along with the dynamic crowd at the event, and sound-minded voters across America agree that race doesn’t matter. There are some of us who are more interested in the character of an individual than with other superficial and artificial designations.
Kudos to you Brad, you have inspired me to start calling these so called "civil rights leaders" to tell them that enough is enough and to put their money where their mouth is….we need to acknowledge when progress has been made, instead of wallowing in some kind of "sorrow"…which sells books, fills auditoriums and subsequently polarizes those of us who may have otherwise worked together.
Thanks, Brad for your courage to speak the truth.
Whitney Larkins
To which I can only say, Thank you so much. I was sorry I couldn’t be there, and I enjoy hearing from folks who were.
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I agree with Whitney. Race could die a natural death if the media and the politicians would allow it to. In case you forgot I voted for Obama. Full disclosure my main reason was to stop Hillary, but I could have voted for Edwards. Of the three I thought Obama was the better PERSON.
I was there, too, and I had no sense of his campaign being a ‘racial’ thing. We all responded to his call to “go out and change the world!” He wasn’t calling on black people, or white people (of for that matter, green people with pink polka-dots); he was calling on Americans who want to be just that. We want a country we can live in together.
Before someone comes along and spoils it, let me say this looks like the beginning of a very positive and hopeful thread.
Can we have a dialogue that makes us more hopeful for the future of our country? Yes, we can.
Changing America would require cutting spending, abolishing most taxes, and the leader telling his followers to take some personal responsibility instead of looking for handouts and get-evens.
All I see from Obama is the same old divisive, blame-the-rich swill.
South Carolina’s overwhelming support of Obama should be a point of pride for everyone who cares about our state. His candidacy proves that we’ve come a long way.
At the same time, if race truly doesn’t matter, we also should be free to challenge Obama the candidate, with a blind eye to his race, as we would any other. That means Obama must substantiate his policy proposals, explain how he expects to accomplish these goals in real-world Washington, and demonstrate that he can perform without taxing us to death. So far, I haven’t seen him answer those questions in specific terms. To the contrary, his social spending proposals and foreign policy positions border on pandering.
We should all wish colorblindness would wash over us.
Can we have a dialogue that makes us more hopeful for the future of our country? Yes, we could have, if Brad hadn’t routed the conversation back to the trappings of Obama’s campaign, thus stimulating Lee’s fingers.
Obama’s preaching getting beyond race, Brad, but getting beyond race is about us, not him.
I guess it was just a matter of time before a bigot like VG posted. … proving once again that nothing good comes from inbreeding.
The shallow end of the gene pool is always pretty scruffy, but look at how many have gotten past that point to the freedom of the open waters!
VG?
I hope that means a post has been deleted.
thankyou, VG. You honor me with the persons you group me with.
This is a great article. Take the time to read.
Monday, Feb 18, 2008
Posted on Mon, Feb. 18, 2008
Barack Obama casts his magic spell
By CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER
Washington Post
There’s no better path to success than getting people to buy a free commodity. Like the genius who figured out how to get people to pay for water: bottle it (Aquafina was revealed to be nothing more than reprocessed tap water) and charge more than they pay for gasoline. Or consider how Google found a way to sell dictionary nouns – boat, shoe, clock – by charging advertisers zillions to be listed whenever the word is searched.
And now, in the most amazing trick of all, a silver-tongued freshman senator has found a way to sell hope. To get it, you need only give him your vote. Barack Obama is getting millions.
This kind of sale is hardly new. Organized religion has been offering a similar commodity – salvation – for millennia. Which is why the Obama campaign has the feel of a religious revival with, as writer James Wolcott observed, a “salvational fervor” and “idealistic zeal divorced from any particular policy or cause and chariot-driven by pure euphoria.”
“We are the hope of the future,” sayeth Obama. We can “remake this world as it should be.” Believe in me and I shall redeem not just you but your country – nay, we can become “a hymn that will heal this nation, repair this world, and make this time different than all the rest.”
And believe they do. After eight straight victories – and two more (Hawaii and Wisconsin) almost certain to follow – Obama is near to rendering moot all the post-Super Tuesday fretting about a deadlocked convention with unelected superdelegates deciding the nominee. Unless Hillary Clinton can somehow do in Ohio and Texas on March 4 what Rudy Giuliani proved is almost impossible to do – maintain a big-state firewall after an unrelenting string of smaller defeats – the superdelegates will flock to Obama. Hope will have carried the day.
Interestingly, Obama has been able to win these electoral victories and dazzle crowds in one new jurisdiction after another, even as his mesmeric power has begun to arouse skepticism and misgivings among the mainstream media.
ABC’s Jake Tapper notes the “Helter-Skelter cultish qualities” of “Obama worshipers,” what Joel Stein of the Los Angeles Times calls “the Cult of Obama.” Obama’s Super Tuesday victory speech was a classic of the genre. Its effect was electric, eliciting a rhythmic fervor in the audience – to such rhetorical nonsense as “We are the ones we’ve been waiting for. (Cheers, applause.) We are the change that we seek.”
That was too much for Time’s Joe Klein. “There was something just a wee bit creepy about the mass messianism…,” he wrote. “The message is becoming dangerously self-referential. The Obama campaign all too often is about how wonderful the Obama campaign is.”
You might dismiss The New York Times’ Paul Krugman’s complaint that “the Obama campaign seems dangerously close to becoming a cult of personality” as hyperbole. Until you hear Chris Matthews, who no longer has the excuse of youth, react to Obama’s Potomac primary victory speech with “My, I felt this thrill going up my leg.” When his MSNBC co-hosts tried to bail him out, he refused to recant. Not surprising for an acolyte who said that Obama “comes along, and he seems to have the answers. This is the New Testament.”
I’ve seen only one similar national swoon. As a teenager growing up in Canada, I witnessed a charismatic law professor go from obscurity to justice minister to prime minister, carried on a wave of what was called Trudeaumania.
But even there the object of his countrymen’s unrestrained affections was no blank slate. Pierre Trudeau was already a serious intellectual who had written and thought and lectured long about the nature and future of his country.
Obama has an astonishingly empty paper trail. He’s going around issuing promissory notes on the future that he can’t possibly redeem. Promises to heal the world with negotiations with the likes of Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Promises to transcend the conundrums of entitlement reform that require real and painful trade-offs and that have eluded solution for a generation. Promises to fund his other promises by a rapid withdrawal from an unpopular war – with the hope, I suppose, that the (presumed) resulting increase in American prestige would compensate for the chaos to follow.
Democrats are worried that the Obama spell will break between the time of his nomination and the time of the election, and deny them the White House. My guess is that he can maintain the spell just past Inauguration Day. After which will come the awakening. It will be rude.
If race does not matter, then why are Obama’s strategists playing the card in election strategy..seems hypocritical to me!
Not being a racist,,NO NO,,just a realistic observer. Whomever gets the presidency will be a puppet of the out of control American empire…race will not matter..the globalist agenda will.
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