Re: the race card



Interesting, this primary race started out more generational than
about race or gender. Obama was the "cool" "post-baby boom generation"
candidate verses Hillary's "hot" "baby boomer." Obama's whole campaign
was a reflection of this shift - online contributions, mass rallies,
viral videos, and a non-confrontational campaign style.
It was "hot" Hillary who dredged up her 60s generation's Sturm und
Drang about Race and War. Only Hillary shamefully appealed to the
worst aspects of the 60s exposing the Democrat's racist and pro-war
past.

Here's a really interesting article by Ellen Goodman

The Post-Polarization Candidate
12/ 6/ 2007
http://www.postwritersgroup.com/archives/good071206.htm

BOSTON -- I bow to no one in my distaste for food-fight politics. I
don't want to dine with absolutists and ideologues hurling red meat at
each other.

For that matter, I have long amused myself with visions of baby
boomers carrying the same old conflicts into old age, dividing into
pro- and anti-Vietnam nursing homes.

So I am drawn to the brand known as Generation Obama. This
presidential candidate has repeatedly offered himself as the post-
boomer, the one person in the race who can take us past the great
divides of the last 40 years.

In announcing his candidacy, Obama used the word "generation" 13
times. In "The Audacity of Hope," he described boomer politics with
something close to disdain as a psychodrama "rooted in old grudges and
revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago." On
TV, he described Hillary Clinton and others as people who've "been
fighting some of the same fights since the '60s."

This post-boomer theme is spun out in Andrew Sullivan's recent piece
in The Atlantic, where he writes that "if you are an American who
yearns to finally get beyond the symbolic battles of the boomer
generation and face today's actual problems, Obama may be your man."
It can be found as well in the label that Ross Baker, a Rutgers
political scientist, put on Obama: "the post-polarization candidate."

But slowly, all this generation talk has forced me to revisit not just
boomer politics, but the nature of polarization in a country that may
be poles apart.

To begin with, if Obama represents the "post-polarization" generation,
what was the "pre-polarization" generation? The idea of some tranquil
1950s America is surely exaggerated. There were great struggles over
McCarthyism and nuclear testing, to name just two issues.

As for the consensus that existed in the 1950s? Columbia's Todd Gitlin
says, "There was a consensus that nothing much ought to be done to
yank the former Confederacy out of the age of Jim Crow. There was
complacency about the position of women. Complacency about the
belligerence with which the U.S. occasionally overthrew uncongenial
foreign governments." Are we nostalgic for that?

The '60s opened up huge and important conflicts. It was not all about
boxers or briefs, inhaling or not. Issues surfaced around black and
white relationships, male and female relationships, gay and straight
relationships, all kinds of authority and our place in the world.

These still go on. Not because they are relics of old college dorm
fights but because they are still important and unresolved. Did
Democrats go down in the last two presidential elections because they
were locked in a stale old fight, or because they lost that fight?

Now we come to the 2008 primary season. Barack Obama is an appealing
icon of change. In reading "Dreams From My Father," I was engaged by a
description of his half-sister's dilemma -- torn between the Western
values of individual success and the African values of community. He
has the capacity to turn a problem around, roaming across its many
surfaces. He gets it.

His philosophical frame of mind appeals to the educated elite of the
Democratic Party. His largest group of supporters are college-
educated. But I am forced to ask, against my own grain, whether
Democrats need a philosopher or a combatant.

In his stump speech, Obama says, "I don't want to spend the next year
or the next four years refighting the same fights. ... I don't want to
pit red America against blue America." Neither do I.

Sometimes, I approach politics like a parent watching her children: "I
don't care who's right and who's wrong; just stop fighting." But of
course I do care who's right, who's wrong, who'll win. What if red
America is pitted against blue America?

Obama is a notoriously uneven performer. Alone on a stage, he is often
eloquent and inspirational, if I may use an Oprah word. But on the
debate platform with his opponents, he is, well, less impressive.
Temperamentally he prefers to be above the fray. But the campaign
against any Republican will take place in the fray.

Gitlin, author of "The Bulldozer and the Big Tent," says, "In a family
situation, we need a healer." But in an era of ugly politics? "We
don't need healing but resounding defeat. ... The bulldozer can't be
kissed into submission."

Maybe I am suffering from too little "audacity of hope." Or an excess
of experience. The Democratic nominee won't have the luxury of a do-
good campaign. Even a post-polarization candidate would face a
polarized politics.

There's still a difference between being an icon of change and an
agent of change. And there is a difference as well between being a
fine philosopher king and a strong presidential challenger.

------------

namaste;
bodhi


.

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