May 2008 Archives

A few months ago a casual acquaintance told me that reheated soup never taste as good as when you first make it. At the time I completely dismissed her opinion, however, after a recent helping, I am starting to come around to her way of thinking.

As Senator Kennedy battles malignant brain tumor, I'll say a prayer for he and family. I served as an Intern in his Boston office almost 20 years ago and as a result, he will always have a special place in my heart for being a man of great conviction and courage -- especially on issues related to imroving the lives of those less fortunate. Thus, as there definitely is a change coming, I hope he'll be around for many more years to see it played out.

I completely agree with Andrew Sullivan's analysis of the Clintons campaign to recapture the White House -- in the process they are completely destroying themselves and their legacy. So sad!

From The Sunday Times
May 11, 2008
Hillary Clinton’s suicidal gamble with race poison
Andrew Sullivan

From the very beginning, the premise and the promise of Barack Obama’s campaign was that it would transcend race. And last autumn the Obama team also knew this was the only way it could win.

The Clinton brand among black voters was so strong, so unbreakable, so resilient a force that even the first credible black candidate for the presidency remained stuck 20-30% behind Hillary Clinton among African-American voters. She was, after all, the wife of the “first black president”, as the author Toni Morrison called Bill.

She had almost all the black political establishment behind her. Her husband, from his days in Arkansas during the civil rights movement, had forged a deep, durable bond with black America. And Obama’s only hope as a young insurgent was in winning a surprise victory in Iowa or New Hampshire, where black votes were close to nonexistent.

A biracial man reared by one white mother and two white grandparents knew that his ability to touch and inspire white voters was his greatest strength. Especially among younger voters, it was critical. And this appeal wasn’t geared only to white audiences. I will not forget a rally over a year ago, filled with predominantly black donors and activists, when Obama recounted how a supporter greeted him at the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s march on Selma.

“That was a great celebration of African-American history,” the supporter said, to which Obama immediately responded: “No, no, no, no, no. That was not a great celebration of African-American history. That was a celebration of American history.” The postracial appeal wasn’t just about necessity. It was also Obama’s core conviction about his own political message.

And after the primaries in Iowa and New Hampshire, where Obama scored extensive white support, the Clintons realised this as well. Flummoxed by this young, charismatic pretender to their dynastic throne, they made a fateful decision: not to compete aggressively for black votes, but to push Obama into the “black candidate” box and leverage white ethnic and Hispanic support instead. And as the Clintons’ losses mounted, the hints became harder and harder to miss.

Before Super Tuesday, Clinton campaign operatives aired rumours that Obama had been a drug dealer – hint, hint – in his younger days. When Obama scored a landslide in South Carolina, Bill Clinton reminded the media that Jesse Jackson had won the state as well. He called Obama a “kid”, perilously close to calling him a “boy”, prompting the former Clinton operative Donna Brazile to say: “I tell you, as an African-American, I find his words and his tone to be very depressing.” The black civil rights icon John Lewis switched from Clinton to Obama. When Clinton told white rural voters that Obama didn’t care about “people like you”, it stung.

In the last months, the Clintons pushed the story about Jeremiah Wright (Obama’s fiery pastor) hard, but the media did all the heavy lifting. The Clintons shrewdly focused their efforts on older, white Democrats in Ohio, Pennsylvania and Indiana (the kind who had once voted for Ronald Reagan) and refused to shoot down categorically rumours that Obama was a closet Muslim, and stopped even addressing predominantly black audiences in North Carolina.

Last Thursday, Senator Clinton – dazed from a brutal setback in last Tuesday’s primaries – went even further. She told USA Today to consult an Associated Press story “that found how Senator Obama’s support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me”.

Yes: a candidate was explicitly arguing that she was the candidate of white Americans. No Republican would be so crude, certainly not John McCain. And that became her primary rationale for carrying on. After North Carolina, the short-term electoral costs have evaporated: West Virginia has a black population of just 3.3%, Kentucky has 7.5%, Oregon has 1.9%, Montana and South Dakota both have less than 1%. There are no black superdelegates willing to switch from Obama to Clinton at this point.

And so a strategy that was essentially telling superdelegates that a black man could not win the general election became Hillary’s last resort. In this, the Clintons were egged on by the less principled members of the Republican right.

Ken Livingstone was defeated by approximately 140,000 votes. Londoners have gone mad!

Boris Johnson CON 1,168,738
Ken Livingstone LAB 1,028,966

Seriously! What were they thinking? Ken Livingstone was a bit arrogant at times, but he was a damn good Mayor these last 8 years and played a key role in helping London to become one of the "greatest cities of the 21st Century." He willed be missed.

British Prime Minister Gordon Brown's Labour Party lost an astonishing 331 council seats in local elections across England and Wales yesterday. In addition, the incumbent London Mayor Ken Livingstone looks set to be defeated by gaffe-prone conservative politican Boris Johnson. God help us! The next four years are going to be very interesting if not entertaining.

Peter Brookes cartoon via The Times.