Presidential Hopeful ...

[cats_meow]

Indeed emptysuit, Obama is nothing but a pawn, a very funny pawn.

Well, to say the truth, I feel sorry for him, I mean, he understands it full well he is a pawn, yet he can't help being a pawn ... look at they way he speaks, it's just like "you know, I know what this is all about, but I have to play the game" ...

[Smartie]

Go Obama Baby!! Check out clever Res Ipsa Boxers for Valentine's Day at www.smartanddirty.com !

[tuitreimb]

Indeed emptysuit, Obama is nothing but a pawn, a very funny pawn.

Well, to say the truth, I feel sorry for him, I mean, he understands it full well he is a pawn, yet he can't help being a pawn ... look at they way he speaks, it's just like "you know, I know what this is all about, but I have to play the game" ...

While Obama has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own — nor has he lived the life of a black American. If we then end up with him as our first black president, he will have come into the White House through a side oor — which might, at this point, be the only one that's open.

Obama is a black whom many whites find reassuring, with his Harvard pedigree and law degree rounding out his half-European ancestry. If you take this in almost anthropological terms, there's a sense in which whites are more comfortable with blacks who they believe reaffirm them. Other whites apparently view Obama not so much as a black trailblazer but as a
multicultural figure, with his racially-mixed parentage and childhood spent in Hawaii and
Indonesia.

African-Americans however, who are are accustomed to leaders who emerge from the civil rights movement, sometimes appear to struggle to relate to Obama. For some African-Americans, he has not really affirmed their identity. He has affirmed his own mixed identity, but he has not strongly affirmed the right and the claim of African-Americans in this society to equal treatment. Others said Obama is simply an unknown figure to many African-Americans who are almost reflexively suspicious. There's a feeling that if white folks like him so much he must not be good for us. For some blacks it's a turn-off.

[latenight]

Every time I am ready to accept the inevitability of Barack Obama's candidacy for President and swallow the artificial talking points concocted by the Media, I have to pull back and assess what I am about to do and why it is wrong for him and us now. The attraction that the corporate media generated flood of enthusiasm has engendered was brought home to me in the Mall just before Christmas when a European woman with a mild accent waiting on Dad piped up and said she supported Barack Obama for President.

I wanted to ask her why, but her face told her the story: he evokes hope. It is rather puzzling to me being the skeptical brotha that I am. I've written many times and many ways that I ain't buying this corporate media creation. I must respectfully stand up and resist their attempts to program us like robots.  I am not a d**mn robot; I have a mind of my own Thank You very much. The hype surrounding the brotha is Orwellian and it's creepy.

There seems to be a longing in the white electorate to move beyond race.  That would be great if people like me were also ready to do the same but, as usual, I didn't get the memo. Sean Bell and his boys were shot at 50 times and the NYPD can't tell anybody why. Before I get on the whitefolks bandwagon to "move beyond race" can we/y'all fix that  B.S. first?

Before I get on the whitefolks bandwagon to "move beyond race" can we get a consensus from them to support voluntary affirmative action in the public schools and stop calling it "reverse discrimination?" I find it fascinating that after the workplace was opened up for women to compete on a level playing field with a man, that was O.K. But any leveling of the playing field for people of color is challenged as unpatriotic, anti-democratic, and racist against whites. Whitefolks seem to be engaged in an undeclared racial combat with colored folks and all hands are needed on deck. Can we come to a consensus on the necessity for Affirmative Action before I consent to jump on the bandwagon to "move beyond race." Can we acknowledge the power race has to racially and economically stratify and oppress people before we punch our tickets on the racial amnesia express?

Can we acknowledge the racist genocide that was behind Slavery and the removal of Native Americans from their land and pay some reparations before we all hold hands and sing Cumbaya at Obama's Inauguration as HNIC? I find it ironic that Obama has made his home and forged a successful political career in Chicago, a city that is among the most racially segregated and racist of any in America. A majority-minority city dominated and controlled  by the same white machine headed by the same white family that controlled Chicago at the time of the Senator's Immaculate Conception Forty-five years ago. Obama has done absolutely nothing to combat the machine's efforts to concentrate as much power in the hands of white ethnics as possible and deny the renaissance of the transformative power of the Harold Washington years.

Daley is good at peopling his Administration with well-educated Uncle Tom's and Aunt Jemima's of various hues, but has done nothing to combat the systemic poverty and crumbling schools which plague and doom the life chances of the urban poor. Mayor Daley's endorsement of Obama for President, unsolicited and transparently self-serving, fools nobody because he sits on the precipice of being indicted by the justice department or removed by voters of color.

I attended a HBCU, not Harvard, so I don't have the elite of America raining down job offers, campaign contributions, book deals, and sweetheart loans on me like brotha Barack. White women tense up when they see me, they don't swoon like they do for Barack. Nobody lines up to hear me speak or touch the hem of my garment. Not that I'm hatin'. I just don't feel the need to line up and drink the Kool-aid like a good little n-word.

At a time when the mainstream media was incapable of raising any alarm against Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito, two men whose demonstrable hostility to Affirmative Action and equal opportunity  threaten to destroy the flimsy fabric of racial reconciliation and reverse the gains of the last 50 years, why is Barack Obama necessary to heal the wounds and absolve the sins of a deeply racist and imperialist nation like America?

Does anybody really believe that he has the power to do that if elected, or is the role of the President of the United States to be a guardian of a imperialist and racist form of capitalism? Most people with the luxury of free time to think are not deluded by what the power of the presidency represents. They see its destructive power everyday and in every way it manifests itself. The fact that a black man is in serious contention for that awesome power is not at all uplifting given the pernicious record of Colin and Condi, the Bush Administration's doublemint twins of Imperial deception. They and their white benefactors have turned a collective blind eye to the depredations of war, disease, and poverty.

The Media seem to be putting the cart before the horse with Obama's candidacy. The racial reconciliation and racial justice that needs to be present to nurture and support a serious black candidacy for President does not exist and never will if we accept the fantasy candidacy they are attempting to foist on us now. The Presidency can be more than a throne of Imperial tyranny but it can never be more than that until we set things right regarding race in the public psyche. 

Entry Filed under: Politics, Race, racism, 2008, Chicago Politics, Hillary, Barack Obama, Obama for President, n-word

http://skepticalbrotha.wordpress.com/2007/01/01/obama-for-president

[a b c]

Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn't been about me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bull and cheap moralism.

"I had learned not to care," he wrote. "I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.  Not smack, though ..."

-- From "Dreams from My Father," by Barack Obama, p. 87 Aug 1, 1996
 

Obama is too thin and looks very much like an Ivy League graduate student .. dresses casually prep with his tie loosened and his top shirt button unfastened .. not too serious for someone running for prez

[TDJD84]

 
[/quote]

Obama is too thin and looks very much like an Ivy League graduate student .. dresses casually prep with his tie loosened and his top shirt button unfastened .. not too serious for someone running for prez
[/quote]

What difference does his attire make?  Plenty of presidents have dressed up and messed our country up in style.  Kudos to them.  He shouldn't be criticized for going for that business casual look from time to time.  I don't know about the presidency (at this point in time), but I do know that Obama has the democratic party down pack.  Anyone who says other wise is in denial.   

[judit]

While Obama has experienced some light versions of typical racial stereotypes, he cannot claim those problems as his own — nor has he lived the life of a black American. If we then end up with him as our first black president, he will have come into the White House through a side oor — which might, at this point, be the only one that's open.

[...]

African-Americans however, who are are accustomed to leaders who emerge from the civil rights movement, sometimes appear to struggle to relate to Obama. For some African-Americans, he has not really affirmed their identity. He has affirmed his own mixed identity, but he has not strongly affirmed the right and the claim of African-Americans in this society to equal treatment. Others said Obama is simply an unknown figure to many African-Americans who are almost reflexively suspicious. There's a feeling that if white folks like him so much he must not be good for us. For some blacks it's a turn-off.

During college, Obama disapproved of what he called other "half-breeds" who gravitated toward whites instead of blacks. And yet after college, he once fell in love with a white woman, only to push her away when he concluded he would have to assimilate into her world, not the other way around. He later married a black woman.

Such candid racial revelations abound in "Dreams," which was first published in 1995, when Obama was 34 and not yet in politics. By the time he ran for his Senate seat in 2004, he observed of that first memoir:

"Certain passages have proven to be inconvenient politically."

Thus, in his second memoir, "The Audacity of Hope," which was published last year, Obama adopted a more conciliatory, even upbeat tone when discussing race. Noting his multiracial family, he wrote in the new book:

"I've never had the option of restricting my loyalties on the basis of race, or measuring my worth on the basis of tribe."

This appears to contradict certain passages in his first memoir, including a description of black student life at Occidental College in Los Angeles.

"There were enough of us on campus to constitute a tribe, and when it came to hanging out many of us chose to function like a tribe, staying close together, traveling in packs. It remained necessary to prove which side you were on, to show your loyalty to the black masses, to strike out and name names."

He adds:

"To avoid being mistaken for a sellout, I chose my friends carefully. The more politically active black students. The foreign students. The Chicanos. The Marxist professors and structural feminists."

Obama said he and other blacks were careful not to second-guess their own racial identity in front of whites.

"To admit our doubt and confusion to whites, to open up our psyches to general examination by those who had caused so much of the damage in the first place, seemed ludicrous, itself an expression of self-hatred"

His pessimism about race relations seems to pervade his worldview. "The emotion between the races could never be pure," he laments in "Dreams."

"Even love was tarnished by the desire to find in the other some element that was missing in ourselves. Whether we sought out our demons or salvation, the other race would always remain just that: menacing, alien, and apart."

After graduating from college, Obama eventually went to Chicago to interview for a job as a community organizer. His racial attitudes came into play as he sized up the man who would become his boss.

"There was something about him that made me wary. A little too sure of himself, maybe. And white."

Such expressions of distrust toward whites could well hurt Obama in the Democratic presidential primaries. Many white liberals folks would have some basis for suspicion after reading some of Obama's conclusions about the white race, which he once described as "that ghostly figure that haunted black dreams."

"That hate hadn't gone away, blaming white people — some cruel, some ignorant, sometimes a single face, sometimes just a faceless image of a system claiming power over our lives."

Obama's racial suspicions were not always limited to whites. For example, after making his first visit to Kenya, he wrote of being disappointed to learn that his paternal grandfather had been a servant to rich whites. He wrote in "Dreams" that the revelation caused,

"ugly words to flash across my mind. Uncle Tom. Collaborator. House n-word."

Such blunt and provocative observations about race are largely absent from Obama’s second memoir ...

An adolescent confrontation

He recalls an assistant basketball coach in high school referring to a group of black men as "niggers."

"I told him — with a fury that surprised even me — to shut up," Obama writes.

"There are black people, and there are niggers," the coach explained. "Those guys were niggers."

Obama answered with contempt. "'There are white folks and then there are ignorant motherf**ckers like you," I had finally told the coach before walking off the court."

[gayle]

I don't know about the presidency (at this point in time), but I do know that Obama has the democratic party down pack.

Don't you think it's Hillary Rotten Cliton that has the Dems down pack?!

[hono]

He left Chicago for three years to study law at Harvard University, where he was elected the first black president of the Harvard Law Review. He graduated magna cum laude.

At Punahou (high school) obama tried drugs and let his grades slip in his final years of high school. Teachers and fellow students at Punahou say that Obama wasn't a straight-A student, but they had high expectations for him. One of his teachers, Kusunoki, who has taught at Punahou for 33 years, adds that "[he] was very gifted, and I knew he'd do great things. But this well? On this stage? I never expected that."

[michellemybelle]

Junkie. Pothead. That's where I'd been headed: the final, fatal role of the young would-be black man. Except the highs hadn't been about me trying to prove what a down brother I was. Not by then, anyway. I got high for just the opposite effect, something that could push questions of who I was out of my mind, something that could flatten out the landscape of my heart, blur the edges of my memory. I had discovered that it didn't make any difference whether you smoked reefer in the white classmate's sparkling new van, or in the dorm room of some brother you'd met down at the gym, or on the beach with a couple of Hawaiian kids who had dropped out of school and now spent most of their time looking for an excuse to brawl. You might just be bored, or alone. Everybody was welcome into the club of disaffection. And if the high didn't solve whatever it was that was getting you down, it could at least help you laugh at the world's ongoing folly and see through all the hypocrisy and bull and cheap moralism.

"I had learned not to care," he wrote. "I blew a few smoke rings, remembering those years. Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it.  Not smack, though ..."

-- From "Dreams from My Father," by Barack Obama, p. 87 Aug 1, 1996

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK0GZmMhQos&mode=related&search=