Of all the columns I wade through everyday, this one expressed my views on the Democratic primaries better than any. Whether it be gay conservative Andrew Sullivan or Barack Obama making the call to give in to the conservative ideology that has not done one good, nice, kind, or beneficial thing for anyone other than wealthy Republicans since the Sixties. Anyone who thinks the Republican hegemony of religious intolerance, bigotry, selfishness, guns, violence and war is going to roll over and drop dead is living in La La Land.
What? We want a Democratic candidate who gives us half Jim Crow, half a draft for a stupid war, half a Social Security check, women with just one bare foot and half pregnant? After 30 years of this crap Democrats finally have them on the run and should keep them running until they fall off the edge of the Earth – which not a few of them believe is still out in the Atlantic somewhere.
Come February I do not want some wishy washy yes man up against the dirtiest political machine in American History. For whoever gets the Democratic nomination is not only going to have to deal effectively with the rancid personal attacks and Swift Boating that will come, but if Black come out of it alive.
If you have been following the Joe Horn story on this blog – which is just one of many similar stories in Texas – you know a fair share of Texans think shooting unarmed Black and Hispanic Men in the back is the stuff of heroes. As a Texan myself, I must defend my state by stating that no matter how much we may despise uppity witches, we don’t shoot them in the back.
Post-polarization? Not so fast
By Ellen Goodman | December 7, 2007I 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 one another.
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, Barack 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 television, he described Hillary Clinton and others as people who have "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 US 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 Obama’s 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.Maybe I am suffering from too little "audacity of hope." Or an excess
of experience. But the Democratic nominee will not 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.