Ta-Nehisi Coates

Hillary Clinton--The Sensitive Thug

Channeling Hova here. But my point continues from the earlier one I made. Here she talks to ABC News about the difficulties of being a candidate:

"And I think women just sort of shake their head," Clinton continued. "My friends do.  They say, 'Oh, my gosh, this is so hard.' Well, it's supposed to be hard.  I'm running for the hardest job in the world.  No one has ever done this.  No woman has ever won a presidential primary before I won New Hampshire.  This is hard. And I don't expect any sympathy, I don't expect any kind of, you know, allowances or special privileges, because I knew what I was getting myself into.

"Every so often I just wish that it were a little more of an even playing field," she said, "but, you know, I play on whatever field is out there."

Nothing that she says is untrue. But if I, as an Obama supporter, read that he was complaining about how difficult it is being a black candidate, it would really piss me. What I see in the statement, and in how Hillary has conducted her entire campaign, is a profound weakness, cowardice and passive-aggressiveness. She's not hard enough to directly come out and call the process skewed, so she calls it skewed and then claims that it doesn't really bother her. Whatever. Whereas a true competitor would relish getting the first question and think only of socking it out the park, Hillary complains about it, and then claims that she's still happy to have at it.

The level of deceit which drips off her answers is nauseating. Here is a candidate so hamfistedly arrogant that she once claimed in a debate that her biggest problem is that she cares too much. Give me a break. The fact of the matter is that there may not have been a worse candidate in the entire field, short of Mike Gravel. Hillary was armed with entire machinery of the Democratic Party, and yet she's going to loose. Everywhere she campaigns her poll numbers sink and her opponent's numbers rise. And her only answer to that is to simply declare that the state doesn't matter. It's OK. One way or the other this is ending, and she's going to loose. If not next Tuesday, if not in the primary, I'm convinced, in the general.

Race v. Gender again...

Katrina vanden Heuvel on Morning Joe. Got a little hot in there weighing race against sex. Pretty interesting.

I really think, at the end of the day, she's just a bad candidate. The question isn't "Will the country elect a woman for president?" as much as its "Which woman will the country elect for president?" There is an implicit sexism in that query, when you note the fact that George Bush got elected to two terms. No woman as incurious and inarticulate as George Bush could even be elected class president. The game is rigged, no doubt. But if you want to win, you've gotta find ways around.

As I said before, Branch Rickey couldn't just snatch any old baseball player out of the Negro Leagues--even if he was a great player. He had to get the perfect one. It was not enough for Martin Luther King to demand equal rights from white America, he had to use nonviolence to demonstrate a level of moral superiority to his oppressors. Obama would be well within his rights to say, "Why do I have to answer for bigots who have no affiliation to my campaign, but John McCain doesn't have to answer for the bigots who are featured on his campaign's website?" But if wants to win, that would be stupid.

At some point, you have to decide whether you're trying to win, or whether you're just trying to even the score. Sexism is a given in any campaign in which a woman is running for president. But are you running to highlight and point out that sexism? Or are you running to overcome it and win? Any candidate who would choose the former would get destroyed in the general election. Thank God this will be over soon. McCain would run over Hillary with a truck.

Especially the blacks and the Jews Cont.

Hopefully the Obama campaign will end the lie that if you somehow are critical of black people, you'll be criticized as an Uncle Tom. This was always a laughable theory proffered by jokers like Shelby Steele. Jesse, for all his foibles, was one of the loudest voices campaigning against blaxploitation in the 70s. The only people Malcolm X excoriated more than white people, were other black people.  I make this point in a piece I just finished for The Atlantic on Cosby. Will obviously link when it's up.

Back to Obama. Check out this piece in the Washington Post in which Obama's relationship with the Jewish community is addressed. One of the great things that Obama has discovered is that you can say the same thing and both white and black people will hear two different things. So when Obama went to Ebeneezer and used all of 10-15 seconds to speak on anti-semitism and homophobia in the black community, white pundits--who tend to believe that before Obama, blacks just sat around patting each other on the back and blaming white people--see a courageous stand. And quite frankly, Obama plays it as such. But black folks just hear a dude expressing his opinion, in much the same way that black folks in private settings tend to generally do. It doesn't sound alien to them. Thus Obama is able to secure white support by appearing to give some ground, when in fact he actually is giving very little ground. Witness the following from none other than the ADL:

To some Jewish leaders, even ones who have remained neutral in the presidential campaign, Obama's struggles are exasperating. Abraham H. Foxman, national director of the Anti-Defamation League, said yesterday from Jerusalem that Obama has gone much further than other black leaders in his denunciation of Farrakhan and has recently expressed stalwartly pro-Israel views.

"As far as I'm concerned, this issue is behind us," said Foxman, who has not endorsed a candidate. "But with the Internet, as all Jews should know, these things have a half-life. They just keep going."

Remember that Obama has done this while running at near 90 percent in the black community, so this idea that only jokers like Sharpton and Farrakhan have a claim on black folks is stupid. It's amazing that it took a dude running for president to make this clear to media.

The Halfrican Takes An Axe to Sean Wilentz's New Republic Agitprop

Wow. Not for the faint of heart. Anyway Sean Wilentz gets taken to the woodshed for the backwards claptrap he spewed between the pages of The New Republic. 

John McCain--Do You Denounce AND Reject Your Supporter Who Blames Katrina On The Gays?

Folks I could do it all day--or just link to other people who can it all day. Witness John Hagee, supporter of John McCain. This is not semantic--McCain has is plugging this dude's support on his site. Hagee is the dude who told Terry Gross that Muslims "have a scriptural mandate to kill Christian's and Jews." Hagee is the dude who said of Hurricane Katrina, "All hurricanes are acts of God, because God controls the heavens. I believe that New Orleans had a level of sin that was offensive to God, and they were recipients of the judgment of God for that."

Black bigots just slide into irrelevancy all the while hanging like albatrosses from the necks of legitimate black public figures. But white bigots? They take meetings in the White House and get to endorse leaders of the free world. Like I say. Good work, if you can get it.

Tim Russert--Will You Reject AND Condemn Don Imus?

Haha. Courtesy of TPM. Only blacks are required to denounce the bigots among them. For white public figures, bigotry is apparently the default setting, so it's fine I guess. The funny thing is that where as Farrakhan is simply a friend of a friend of Barack's, Russert and Imus actually are boys.

Hillary Declines to Denounce OR Reject Racist Supporter

You know I don't much care about this. But I have no problem judging her by the very standard she set. The Essence:

A day after lecturing her presidential rival for not rejecting a controversial minister's support, Hillary Rodham Clinton declined Wednesday to reject one of her Texas backers who commented on Barack Obama's race.

During a series of satellite television interviews, Clinton was questioned by Dallas station KTVT about comments by Adelfa Callejo, a local activist who supports Clinton candidacy. The interviewer quoted Callejo as saying "Obama's problem is he happens to be black" and asked Clinton to respond.

And then:

The interviewer asked Clinton whether she rejected or denounced Callejo's comment.

"People have every reason to express their opinions, I just don't agree with that," she said, adding "You know, this is a free country. People get to express their opinions."

Uhm, pot...Calling pot...

Hillary v. Obama; Gender v. Race

OK, so I was groaning even as I wrote that blog title. Feels like its '94 and I just finished a Bell Hooks polemic. One thing I want to note is that, a few days ago, I wrote that Hillary's problem wasn't that she was a woman, it was that she wasn't funny. As my partner of ten years and baby-mamma Kenyatta, pointed out, that's only half true. It is a problem that she's funny, but it's also a problem that she's a woman--and those two issues are kind of related.

The fact is that frankly, for a woman, it's always going to be harder. And in cases where it may not be harder, you're haunted by the possibility of it being harder. I think it's difficult to miss the fact that Chris Matthews rants against Hillary are tainted by a sort of blockhead view of gender, and I suspect he isn't the only one out there like that. Hillary Clinton has to--or at least thinks she has to--worry about toughness in a way that a man never would. Hillary Clinton has to worry about being taken seriously--or at least she thinks she has to worry about it--and thus is not free to be joke in the way that Obama is.

I only hedge on this point, because I think a significant part of Clinton's view on what she can or can't say has to do with her age. She comes from a generation of women where these were legitimate concerns, and thus has been formed by that. Whether that's true today is beside the point. This is the crucible in which she was forged. It's worth noting that the same thing has taken place among blacks. Older African-Americans, of the civil rights generation, have always been obsessed with how they come across to whites (it's no mistake that the ceremony is called the NAACP Image Awards). But Barack Obama is younger and of an age where these issues were more complicated, and didn't require such a defensive crouch, as Andrew Sullivan put it.

That said, once you decide to run for President, all of this is unimportant. You play the game as it is. You know when you take the field your playing in an away stadium, and you've got to take that into account. Here is where the color and race thing differ. Barack Obama's campaign hails back to the old black mantra of "twice as good." You can't sit around complaining about racism if you want to win. You have to accept it, and win despite it. That's an attitude born of of constituting only 13 percent of the population--you simply can't change the rules from the outset with those sorts of numbers.

But Hillary's base--women--constituite a majority of the electorate, and to her mind, that allows her to question the rules. From her perspective, she should be able to function on the same level as a man because the numbers favor her. All of that works fine, until you face a dude like Barack who actually is "twice as good." The fact is that, in a perverse way, racism and sexism can you make you better, because it means you have to work harder to get ahead. Jackie Robinson wasn't just the first black ballplayer, he was a GREAT ballplayer. Jim Brown isn't just one of the great football players of all-time--he is also considered to be one greatest lacrosse players of all time. Martin Luther King wasn't just a civil rights leader, he was child prodigy.

Racism has made Barack a better, tougher candidate. It's taught him the futility, as an individual, of expecting--as Clinton expects--that the media is going to be fair to you. It's taught him that even when people are slighting him, he has to be gracious in a way that John McCain just doesn't have to. It's taught him that running as a black guy is suicide, while running as a white guy is just, well, it just is. Hillary is at a disadvantage because she's fighting a dude who has basically learned to kick ass (sorry Pops) while fighting with one hand tied behind his back. While she's off complaining about the rules, he's steady putting together combinations. Last night she whined about media coverage. But when Barack was asked about her shrill impression of him, he just laughed it off and kept moving. When she tried to press him on Farrakhan and score points, Barack not only dodged the haymaker, but exposed an opening and popped her with a quick jab. Hillary is in a street-fight. There are no rules here--at least none that will help her.

The biggest mistake she made in this campaign was expecting that she would have a fair fight. As Maureen Downd pointed out today, Obama could easily complain that he lost eleven straight elections he'd be written off. But why should he? Hillary seems to be running to expose the hypocrisy and sexism inherent in the process. She's hoping that on the way to becoming the first female president she can actually expose some of the biases. Fair enough and point taken. But Barack isn't running a campaign to call out the hypocrisy and racism of media. Dude is running to win. Who's being naive now?

How We On The Darker Side Will Remember Buckley

We live in era when Barack Obama must lead a lynch-mob to the home of Louis Farrakhan in order to allay the suspicions of certain white pundits. Meanwhile, these fools are tripping over each other to praise a dude who,if it were up to him, would have kept black folk in the grips of homeland terrorists. Witness the mindless bigotry of the now departed William F. Buckley:

The central question that emerges…is whether the white community in the South is entitled to take such measures as are necessary to prevail politically and culturally, in areas in which it does not predominate numerically. The sobering answer is YES — the white community is entitled because, for the time being, it is the advanced race.

That's from the National Review in 1957. I want to get really clear on something. For a lot of folks in the commentariat the Civil Rights movement, Jim Crow, segregation is essentially theory. It is an abstract notion to them, because for the most part they don't know any black people outside the ones working in their mailrooms (this is less true at newspapers, by the way). But for people like me Buckley's words are not hypothetical. We understand  what "such measures as are necessary" has always meant. I am never happy to see someone die. But when Farrakhan's time comes, I don't expect his death to be a waiver against all the hate he's spewed in his lifetime. I don't expect the Million March to indemnify him against denunciation. But Buckley, of course, is from the other side of the tracks. Man, I tell you, it's good to be the king.

Oh well, I need cheering up. Here's how you handle death. Talk to 'em Hitch:

The Value of 19 Debates

The fact is that Obama has just gotten better and better. It's either that or he just performs better in the one on ones. Two things: I want Obama to get that Jeremiah Wright defense down pat, and then I want him to do the right thing on public financing. If you're gonna be about it, be about it.