“Don’t Let This Fester”: Hillary Clinton Needs To Address The Racist Undertones Of Her 2008 Campaign
Black Lives Matter, the advocacy group for black interests, has gotten the attention of the Democratic presidential candidates, who are reportedly scrambling to reach out to the movement. Even heavy favorite Hillary Clinton is getting in on it, addressing the movement in a Q&A session on Facebook, where she checked most of the right boxes.
DeRay McKesson, one of the movement’s leaders, wrote on Twitter that the post was “solid.” But he also noted that she had two days to work on it, and did not attend the liberal forum Netroots Nation, unlike her challengers Bernie Sanders and Martin O’Malley, who flailed in front of activists from Black Lives Matter.
McKesson is right to be suspicious. Hillary Clinton’s record on race is not great. If she wishes to earn some trust on issues of racial justice, a good place to start would be with the distinctly racist undertones of her 2008 campaign against Barack Obama.
As the first primaries got underway in 2008, and Obama began to slowly pull ahead, the Clinton camp resorted to increasingly blatant race- and Muslim-baiting. It started in February, when Louis Farrakhan, the head of the Nation of Islam, endorsed Obama in a sermon. In a debate a couple days later, moderator Tim Russert repeatedly pressed Obama on the issue, who responded with repeated reassurances that he did not ask for the endorsement, did not accept it, and in fact was not a deranged anti-Semite. That wasn’t enough for Clinton, who demanded that Obama “denounce” Farrakhan, which he did.
About the same time, a picture of Obama in traditional Somali garb (from an official trip) then appeared on the Drudge Report, and Matt Drudge claimed he got it from the Clinton campaign. After stonewalling on the origin question, the campaign later claimed it had nothing to do with it. A Clinton flack then went on MSNBC and argued that Obama should not be ashamed to appear in “his native clothing, in the clothing of his country.”
Later, a media firestorm blew up when it was discovered that Obama’s Chicago pastor Jeremiah Wright once delivered a sermon containing the words “God damn America.” In response, Obama gave a deft, nuanced speech on racial issues, but Clinton kept the issue alive by insisting she would have long ago denounced the man.
The late Michael Hastings, who covered Clinton’s campaign, described one instance of this strategy on the ground:
[Clinton supporter] Buffenbarger launched into a rant in which he compared Obama to Muhammad Ali, the best-known black American convert to Islam after Malcolm X. “But brothers and sisters,” he said, “I’ve seen Ali in action. He could rope-a-dope with Foreman inside the ring. He could go toe-to-toe with Liston inside the ring. He could get his jaw broken by Norton and keep fighting inside the ring. But Barack Obama is no Muhammad Ali.” The cunning racism of the attack actually made my heart start to beat fast and my ears start to ring. For the first time on the campaign trail, I felt completely outraged. I kept thinking, “Am I misreading this?” But there was no way, if you were in that room, to think it was anything other than what it was. [GQ]
Then there was Bill Clinton comparing Obama’s campaign to that of Jesse Jackson’s unsuccessful run in 1988. The capstone came in May, when Hillary Clinton started openly boasting about her superior support from white voters.
The effort was not so blatant as George H.W. Bush’s Willie Horton ad, but the attempt to play on racist attitudes through constant repetition and association was unmistakable — in addition to playing into right-wing conspiracy theories that Obama is a secret Muslim who was born in Africa. It’s likely why in West Virginia — a state so racist that some guy in a Texas prison got 40 percent of the Democratic primary vote in 2012 — Clinton won a smashing victory.
This brings us back to today’s presidential race. Many of the demands posed by activists focus on rhetorical gestures of support and solidarity (a notable feature of the Netroots confrontation last weekend). But this raises this issue of trust: A very charming, cynical person could simply promise support using the right words, win the election, then forget all about it.
Does the Hillary Clinton of 2008 sound like someone who’s genuinely committed to the cause of racial justice? If she has changed her views, now would be a good time to explain.
By: Ryan Cooper, The Week, July 23, 2015
“Living In A House With No Mirrors”: Do Religious Conservatives Love Damned America?
Just read this brief passage and tell me if this sounds like someone who really “loves America:”
Our nation is ridiculed abroad and morally crumbling within. We are in trouble. We have turned our back on God.
This sentiment, expressed yesterday by the Rev. Franklin Graham, is very common among politicized conservative evangelicals. What makes it unusual is that he uttered it in the same breath as a defense of Rudy Guiliani for doubting that the president “loves America.”
If you’ve ever actually read Jeremiah Wright’s infamous “God Damn America!” sermon, it involves a judgement of this country no more striking than what people like Franklin Graham say every other day with their jeremiads about a baby-killing Holocaust and legitimized abominations to the Lord like same-sex marriage. They’re entitled to their opinion, and to the spiritually perilous and self-aggrandizing step of adopting the prophetic stance against their own country. But please, don’t tell me Franklin Graham is a “patriot.” Unless his words are meaningless, he’s telling us being “patriotic” in a wicked society represents disobedience to God.
So spare us the pieties about the president’s questionable “love for America,” Rev. Graham. You’re living in a house with no mirrors.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, February 25, 2015
“If Only They Knew”: Mitt Romney Buffeted By The Winds Of Extremism
Turns out the Romney camp isn’t all that different from other Republicans.
For a long time now, Mitt Romney and the people who work for him have seemed like the reasonable people in the Republican party. That isn’t to say that Romney’s policies or rhetoric were particularly reasonable, but we all accepted that when he started breathing fire, it was an act. Buffeted by the winds of extremism, he made a bargain with his party’s base: I’ll pretend to be as crazy as you, and you’ll learn to live with me as your nominee.
But now, Barack Obama has finally opened the can of whoop-ass on Romney that many of us had long been expecting, and as McKay Coppins reports, both Romney himself and his people don’t like it one bit. Their reaction indicates that maybe they were never that different from the Republican base after all.
“[Romney] has said Obama’s a nice fellow, he’s just in over his head,” the adviser said. “But I think the governor himself believes this latest round of attacks that have impugned his integrity and accused him of being a felon go so far beyond that pale that he’s really disappointed. He believes it’s time to vet the president. He really hasn’t been vetted; McCain didn’t do it.”
Indeed, facing what the candidate and his aides believe to be a series of surprisingly ruthless, unfounded, and unfair attacks from the Obama campaign on Romney’s finances and business record, the Republican’s campaign is now prepared to go eye for an eye in an intense, no-holds-barred act of political reprisal, said two Romney advisers who spoke on condition of anonymity. In the next chapter of Boston’s pushback — which began last week when they began labeling Obama a “liar” — very little will be off-limits, from the president’s youthful drug habit, to his ties to disgraced Chicago politicians.
“I mean, this is a guy who admitted to cocaine use, had a sweetheart deal with his house in Chicago, and was associated and worked with Rod Blagojevich to get Valerie Jarrett appointed to the Senate,” the adviser said. “The bottom line is there’ll be counterattacks.”
It might be just this one particular aide’s formulation, but the use of the word “vet” is the tell. One of the consuming fantasies on the right is that we never learned very much about Barack Obama, and if only the American people knew about Reverend Wright, or about Obama’s youthful drug use, or about his relationship with Bill Ayers, then they would as one recoil in horror and boot him from office. This is all summed up in the oft-repeated assertion, “He was never vetted.” The fact that all these things were, in fact, reported on extensively doesn’t penetrate with the people who believe this, because if the public actually knew then Obama could never have been elected in the first place, so that must mean they just don’t know. Could the voters have heard all this stuff and decided to elect Obama anyway? Impossible.
I’m quite surprised to hear this stuff coming from the Romney camp, since they were supposed to be the cold-eyed pragmatists of the GOP. But they seem to have no idea how to actually defeat an incumbent president. If they want to run the rest of their campaign on the fact that Obama knew Rod Blagojevich and did coke when he was a teenager, I’m sure the Obama campaign would reply, be our guest.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, July 18, 2012
“A Conservative Neurosis”: The Right’s Fixation With “Vetting” President Obama
“The Vetting” represents a peculiar species of conservative neurosis, which I discussed last week in the context of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Many conservatives are convinced that somewhere hidden in Obama’s past is a magical key which will unmask him to American voters as the villain which heretofore only the fringe right has seen him to be.
This theory, while ostensibly an attack on the media for failing to do its civic duty is actually pretty insulting toward U.S. voters. Despite what conservatives seem to think, there hasn’t been a media conspiracy to avoid talking about Jeremiah Wright. I ran a Nexis-Lexis search for the phrase “Obama and Jeremiah Wright,” for both the period before the 2008 election and for all available dates. In each case, it returned more than 3,000 results—the limit at which Nexis requires you to cut down your search. Similarly I ran a Google News search for “Obama and Jeremiah Wright” and it returned 17,600 results, including 9,400 from before November 4, 2008. There was plenty of information available about Obama and Wright, the public just didn’t think it was all that important. That’s not a failing of the media or even of the public—it’s a failing of the unhinged right.
And as Friedersdorf persuasively argues, it’s an obsession that is holding back the right.
For Breitbart.com, the decision to commit substantial editorial resources to the president’s past had an immediate opportunity cost: there’d be fewer pieces on his first term in office and less opportunity to present arguments about why conservative policies would better serve the country. The decision seemed strange to me. Conservative media was around during the 2008 election. Was there really relevant information that they’d failed to uncover at the time? And while President Obama surprised civil libertarians with his governing choices, weren’t the things conservatives hated about him—the health-care bill, the Keynesian stimulus, the “green jobs” program—basically exactly what you’d expect from the campaign he ran, or from any liberal Democrat?
He then runs through the “The Vetting” series citing example after weak example of what Breitbart.com has, umm, found. I won’t recount the whole thing here—the piece is worth a full read—except to note that as he points out much of what they deduce about Obama is hardly secret or surprising. One example: “Charles C. Johnson broke the news that as a community organizer, President Obama worked with leftist Catholics to undermine conservative Catholics. This might’ve prepared us for Obama’s position on the Catholic Church and birth control … except his position itself was already clear!”
What’s the point after four years of Obama governing of trying to deduce from his distant past how he would govern? It’s a natural extension of this neurosis: If you’re convinced that the president is a secretive figure with a hidden past who must be unmasked before a duped public, it then becomes logical to think that he must be readying really, really, really sinister plans for his second term when he will no longer have to worry about facing voters.
And no doubt four years from now we’ll be treated to a raft of stories from the far right regions of the blogosphere frantically warning of how Obama’s hidden past foretells the ominous, secretive plans he has for his presidential library.
By: Robert Schlesinger, U. S. News and World Report, May 24, 2012
“Nauseating”: Cory Booker, Surrogate From Hell
If Cory Booker went on “Meet the Press” on Sunday with the intent of helping President Obama, then his appearance was an utter failure. But anyone who’s followed the enormously ambitious Newark mayor’s career closely knows he’s not one to pull a Joe Biden. He’s just too smart and too smooth to screw up so epically.
More likely, Booker went on the show to help himself and to advance his own long-term political prospects. And on that score, his appearance was a success.
You’ve probably seen or are now seeing the headlines Booker generated by calling the Obama campaign’s attacks on Mitt Romney’s private equity background “nauseating” and likening them to efforts by some on the right to inject Rev. Jeremiah Wright into the campaign.
“Enough is enough,” Booker said. “Stop attacking private equity. Stop attacking Jeremiah Wright.”
He added: “I have to just say from a very personal level, I’m not about to sit here and indict private equity. To me, it’s just we’re getting to a ridiculous point in America. Especially that I know I live in a state where pension funds, unions and other people invest in companies like Bain Capital. If you look at the totality of Bain Capital’s record, they’ve done a lot to support businesses, to grow businesses. And this, to me — I’m very uncomfortable with.”
Playing up Romney’s Bain record is, of course, central to Obama’s general election plan. Romney is running as a business-savvy “job creator” and relying on the public’s tendency to associate private sector success with economic competence. There is no overstating how vital it is for Obama and his campaign to break that link, and to establish that Romney’s real expertise is in making investors rich – not adding jobs and improving the quality of life for middle class workers.
In belittling this strategy, Booker isn’t just breaking with Obama, he’s breaking with just about everyone who’s ever run against Romney – including Ted Kennedy, who used criticisms of Bain’s treatment of workers to pull away from Romney in their 1994 Senate race. Essentially, Kennedy created the blueprint that Obama is now using. Booker is also providing Republicans with a dream talking point: A top Obama surrogate not only disapproves of Obama’s use of Bain, he finds it nauseating!
It wouldn’t be surprising if Booker has already heard from the White House, and surely he’s now in for a world of abuse from Obama supporters. But that hardly means he made a mistake, at least in terms of his own ambition. Financial support from Wall Street and, more broadly speaking, the investor class has been key to Booker’s rise, and remains key to his future dreams.
It’s easy to forget, but before the world met Barack Obama in 2004, many believed that the first black president would be Booker. Armed with Stanford, Yale and Oxford degrees and all of the invaluable personal connections he forged at those institutions, he set out in the mid-1990s to craft a uniquely appealing political biography, swearing off lucrative job offers to move to Newark’s Central Ward and take up residence in public housing. Within a few years, he won a seat on the City Council, where he showed an early and consistent knack for self-generated publicity, most notably with a ten-day hunger strike in the summer of 1999.
That set the stage for Booker’s 2002 race for mayor, an ugly contest against incumbent Sharpe James, an entrenched icon of the city’s civil rights generation of black politicians. James, as any self-respecting Newark mayor would do, leveraged his clout for campaign contributions from city workers, vendors and those who aspired to be city workers and vendors.
Booker, meanwhile, had hardly lost touch with his old classmates, keeping one foot in Newark and the other in Manhattan, where he built on the connections to elite donors that he already had. He called the millions of dollars he raised for the race “love money.” The press – and James’ campaign – took note that almost all of it was from outside Newark, nearly half of it was from outside New Jersey, and a quarter of it came directly from Wall Street.
This helped bolster James’ claim that Booker, who grew up in an affluent suburb, was not an authentic Newarker. That attack resonated just enough to save James, who won in a squeaker. It was a pyrrhic victory, though: Booker had captured national interest – there was a Time profile during the campaign, and an Academy Award-nominated documentary followed – and immediately started campaigning for the next race, while a federal investigation soon swallowed up James. In 2006, Booker was elected with ease, while James was on his way to jail.
Since then, the only question in New Jersey has been when – and not if – Booker will seek to run for statewide office. In 2009, the beleaguered Jon Corzine begged him to run for lieutenant governor on his ticket, an offer that Booker wisely refused. He’s often touted as a potential gubernatorial candidate for 2013, but those who know him say his eye is more on the Senate seat now held by 88-year-old Frank Lautenberg, which will be up in 2014.
This is why it’s not at all surprising to see Booker going to bat for private equity. The allies he’s cultivated on Wall Street and in the financial industry (think, for instance, of his chummy relationship with Michael Bloomberg) have made Booker a prolific fundraiser, and when he ventured into the ultra-expensive statewide game, he’ll need them more than ever. Many of them have turned fiercely against Obama over the past few years, convinced that he’s unfairly targeted them. Booker’s words on “Meet the Press” may have enraged the average Obama supporter, but to the Wall Street class they were probably close to heroic – finally, a big-name Democrat with the cojones to call out Obama on his class warfare!
The Booker calculation, in other words, is probably that the average Democratic voter’s memory of his outburst will fade long before 2014 – but that the average Wall Street donor’s won’t.
By: Steve Kornacki, Salon, May 20, 2012
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