Obama has always been a kind of a Rorschach test — an undefined image in which people find meaning. And people are very suggestible when it comes to the test — if you talk about sex before the test is given, the “pictures” in the inkblots tend to have sexual content, and if you talk about love and puppies and flowers the “pictures” have a far more positive meaning than if you talk about anger, violence and death.

Up until now, the Obama campaign has pretty much had its way in terms of controlling the “suggestion” (hope, unity, change) and as a result people have only been “seeing” positive things in the Obama Rorschach.

What is now happening to Obama is the downside of being a political Rorshach test — the fact that people remain susceptible to suggestion on the meaning of the “pictures”, and negative suggestions have much more staying power than positive ones.

So while I agree that its unfair that Obama’s candidacy might be mortally wounded by questions about his patriotism, his integrity, and his racial agenda, at the same time I recognize that it was “unfair” when the very same dynamic that is damaging him is what has lead to his success.

Objectively, Obama is neither the Magical Unity Pony nor a corrupt, unpatriotic, black nationalist. He’s just a typical politician with a great gift for making speeches but very little real relevant experience or qualifications for the job as President. Had Obama run as what he really is, he would have gotten nowhere.

A lot can go wrong when you try to talk about emotionally charged subjects to emotionally charged listeners. It was a very good speech. After a year or two, I’ll be able to guess whether it was a great speech, but he took the time and made the effort to grapple with issues that matter and that won’t be solved with hope or even the biggest, baddest pony in the world. Good for him, and good for the country, if it listens and pauses for a little self-reflection.

The Democrats (and those who pretend to be helping) are in the process of choosing between a woman who is white (and who acts and believes as a member of the wider community) and a man who is of mixed descent (who acts and believes as a member of the black community, as well as the larger community). This is America. Of course race and gender were going to affect the political competition, and people of ill will would be eager to exploit their wedge potential.

Clinton and Obama each contend that they are the best candidates for the presidency. Rejection of Clinton on any basis will be redolent of sexism. Rejection of Obama on any basis will be redolent of racism. Rejection of either will be redolent of paternalism. It’s ugly, but it’s built into the fundamental hypocrisy of U.S. society and politics.

I believe that Obama crafted a speech to try to take the country a step forward. Those who concentrate on the contest will read it as an effort to defend his candidacy, but they need to recognize that his candidacy is what put him in the position to address our national nastiness in a constructive manner.

Hypnot writes:

I believe that Obama crafted a speech to try to take the country a step forward. Those who concentrate on the contest will read it as an effort to defend his candidacy, but and they need to recognize that his candidacy is what put him in the position to address our national nastiness in a constructive manner.

That’s true. It’s also true that this is a “Honey, I’ve changed” speech insofar as it’s the Obama campaign that smeared the Clinton’s for being racist. It’s a good speech, and maybe ten or twenty years from now nobody will remember how Obama tried to have it both ways.

Also, racism is surely not our only national nastiness. When Hillary can give the same speech on sexism, then we’ll have made yet more progress. Eh?

[x] Any (D) in the general. [ ] Any mullah-sucking billionaire-teabagging torture-loving pus-encrusted spawn of Cthulhu, bless his (R) heart.

Lambert asks: “When Hillary can give the same speech on sexism, then we’ll have made yet more progress. Eh?”

Yes indeed. If Obama’s speech gets the ball rolling again, I’m all for thoughtful, measured, informed, committed, challenging discourse—and right in the middle of the media’s cartoon election! It will definitely raise the discourse to a level of honesty, empathy, and nuance that would flummox the Republicans and those who admire their pale, manly obtuseness.

And it has effectively wiped the Rezko story, which is, if the MSM were paying attention, suddenly big news - because Obama has been claiming for months that he was in Rezko’s pocket to the tune of five figures, then slightly over $100K, and then last Friday, $250K.

That $250K hasn’t been mentioned much since Friday, let alone after this week’s panty-wetting speech. Do South-Side first-termers all typically enjoy such largesse?

And speaking as a gay atheist who has looked askance at Obama the bamboozler since that famous Convention speech in 2004 - I literally went “Ew.” watching it live - I say he’s been hoisted by his own petard. Live by the Cross, die by the Cross, so to speak. BO’s obvious plan all along was gonna be to “transcend” the Democrat’s traditional handicaps by being a Democrat loaded up on *faith*, and with an arm’s length kept between him and gays, between him and the “excesses of the 60s and 70s” - you name it.

He has blown it, big time. No one takes McCain’s religious alliances seriously. Everyone knows JMcC’s an ugly guy desperately looking for a prom date. Hillary fondly recalled the inspiration by her spiritual mentors and left it at that. Obama was all “Faith, Faith, Faith.” He couldn’t talk about GLBT issues without a Jesus asbestos suit.

He’s made his bed, he needs to lie in it. And I say this as someone who isn’t all that far removed from a lot of what Wright says politically. But a truly transformational politics would have been something which left the pastors and the pulpits where they belong, at an appropriate distance. He chose not to do that, because he thought he could cynically surf through some small crack in this hellish universe built by the GOP and the rabid right, while leaving it sturdily standing in place.

Like so many, so MANY things he does: Good for Obama, bad for the party and future of our politics.

I’ve used that phrase about Obama mostly as a poke at his more obnoxious supporters - those who claim he lost badly in Florida because, despite numerous national debates and tons of national press coverage, nobody there “knew” him because he didn’t campaign. As if you ever really get to know a politician, any politician, through a campaign.

But I think for politicians who are women and people of color, there’s another truth about many in this country needing to “know” them to love them and it goes to what Paul was saying. A fresh new face is a projection screen and on “others” the media, Village, and white male establishment (which is often one and the same I realize) are able to project even more negative crap than normal. Think of the caricatures Al Gore and John Kerry became, now imagine John Kerry as a black man or Al Gore as a woman.

The only defense against this is for the American people to know the politician, the good and the bad, so that they are less likely to believe the truly horrific and outrageous stuff. This to me is why Hillary is still alive, still with relatively high positives (53%) after being savaged by the media for the past six months. People, especially democrats, feel like they know her and so, while there are things they don’t like about her, it makes it more difficult to sell some outrageous smear to a broader audience. Granted, she’s hurt by the fifteen years of misogynistic smears, some easily repeated by Obama and his supporters (she’ll do anything to win, what is that but an indictment of an ambitious, scheming woman? that wouldn’t have nearly the negative tones used against a man). But still, after all those years and all those smears, she’s by and large immune to the normal smears of the national media by now - nobody listens to them anymore about Hillary Clinton. It’s also why Obama is so dependent on the media and its good graces, because people don’t necessarily have an impression of him separate from whatever the media tells us about him. Even I, who follow politics rather closely, don’t really feel like I know who Obama is. And I don’t mean what he’s like to have a beer with, I mean I have no idea of what kind of political leader he is. What he truly believes or how he would govern. I hadn’t seen much of him until he started campaigning and that’s an artificial narrative by design.

Hillary is also helped by two things: 1) the majority of voters are women, so even if some of them are sexist dolts (Maureen Dowd), there’s a limit to being able to paint her as “other” and 2) if she’s the president, she’ll still be sharing the White House with a white man, one who has been there before. Indeed, while the media is obsessed with the “damage” Bill Clinton has inflicted on her campaign, she wouldn’t be where she was without him. Not just because her own “experience” argument hangs on work she did with and for him, but because he reassures so many men and even women about her. She can always ask Bill. There’s a reason why so many women who break glass ceilings are related in one way or another to powerful men (and why so many who oppose powerful women try to label them as lesbians or frigid castrating bitches, trying to separate them from their male “anchors.”)

But back to Obama, while I think a lot of his problems right now are of his own making and are earlier campaign decisions coming home to roost (running after only two years in the Senate, leveling dubious racism charges at the Clintons, sexist dog whistling, and distancing/portraying himself as an above-it-all nonpartisan pol trying to fit into the right-wing frame instead of using his oratory skills to change the frame ), I don’t want to see him lose because white voters see in him some sort of scary, black guy out to destroy white America.

But I’m also not convinced that’s why he will lose, if he loses at all. If he loses, it will probably be blamed on white racism (it already has been, see New Hampshire and Ohio) but I think Wright is more of a drip, drip, drip that goes to voter unease with someone they don’t really know. Don’t get me wrong, it will hurt him because of racism, too, but I think what makes it so deadly is that Wright raises doubts, much like Rezko or the NAFTA fiasco, about who Obama is and what he believes. Fucking so fundamentally with a campaign narrative is dangerous for any politician, but it’s definitely more dangerous for women and people of color. And that’s what Wright does.

Fucking so fundamentally with a campaign narrative is dangerous for any politician, but it’s definitely more dangerous for women and people of color. And that’s what Wright does.

everything that BDB says, plus….

Watching the Obama campaign is much like reading a book that is narrated by various characters in the book itself. Unless you know the narrative structure beforehand, there is a genuine sense of shock (and resentment) when the narrator switches, and you start seeing all the characters from a different perspective.

And that is what I think is happening with the Obama campaign. The first chapters have been dominated by Obama as the narrator of the story. Those of us who understood that going in are not the least but surprised to see what is going on now. But for those who thought that the book was simply a single first person narrative (i.e. the Obots) the sudden shift in perspectives in the last few chapters has been especially disconcerting — and they breath a sign of relief each time “Obama” resumes the narrator duties.

…that biblical enough for ya?

Me?

I think people who believe in ’God’ are nuts….sue me.

I also think much of what the good Reverend, seriously, was right on target. He has spoken a lot of truth.

I object, quite a bit, to the emphasis on a candidate’s religion, his church the whole stupid, yes stupid, ball of wax as something by which we ’know’ the candidate. It’s all Kabuki…all of it. And it, like it’s vile cousin ID politics, serves the forces of repression and fascism. The monkeys, when divided into little groups, are much easier to handle than when they are united to fight a predator, fascist capitalism, or find food or community. By my views the Reverend has every right, indeed by his moral code he is required, to speak out.

Obama, for all his dumb talk about uniting, monkeys and leopards do not unite except in the leopard’s stomach, doesn’t seem to grasp the fact that his pious churchiness is divisive in and of self. And, in act that really indicates his hubris or stupidity you pick it, has taken no step to define himself in ways that would have insulated him from the wave of shit that’s gonna hit him if he is the nominee, an unlikely prospect at this point…think SuperDelegates, he’s painted himself into a box by engaging with the nattering negaters of the Reich on their terms. Religious ones which, last I looked, are not to be part of governing in this nation except to keep religion and government separate.

Rather than the long tendentious speech he gave yesterday I would’ve he’d said:

’My religion, since it does not bear on my policies or seeking office, is my business. The rest of you can butt out.’

By moving the discussion onto religious terrain he exposes himself to the endless memes created by the evangelical right about how wrong he, a liberal, is for America. How his strange and weird religion will be a danger to the good, fat burgers asleep in their Laz-E-Boys while NFL Football drones on the TeeBee in the ’family room’. Until we start to talk about reality not make-believe we will not escape the tentacles of the religiously deluded.

I’d say now would be a good time to revisit the Founders concepts regarding church and state.

I concur with you strictly in your opinion of the comparative merits of atheism and demonism, and really see nothing but the latter in the being worshipped by many who think themselves Christians.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Richard Price, Jan. 8, 1789 (Richard Price had written to TJ on Oct. 26. about the harm done by religion and wrote “Would not Society be better without Such religions? Is Atheism less pernicious than Demonism?”)

and…..

Believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man and his God, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legislative powers of government reach actions only, and not opinions, I contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole American people which declared that their legislature should ’make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof,’ thus building a wall of separation between church and State.

-Thomas Jefferson, letter to Danbury Baptist Association, CT., Jan. 1, 1802

That last one…

Good enough for me.

A. Citizen

Peace, Health and Prosperity for Everyone.