Thursday, July 31, 2008
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Degrading His Brand
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Posted by:
Carol Platt Liebau at
9:51 PM
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Amanda blogged earlier today about Barack Obama's playing of the race card.
Maybe Barack did it because he's getting nervous. After all, he's still running neck-and-neck with John McCain, even after pulling out all the stops on his foreign "getting to know you" tour. Maybe he's just trying to find a way to change a press narrative that's focusing more and more on egObamamania, and hopes to win the press back over to his side by eliciting its indignation towad McCain.
But invoking does seem to be an emerging pattern for Barack when he feels under political pressure. As I pointed out at the time, when he was trying to get past the Jeremiah Wright debacle, he did so by making a speech designed to turn the conversation from Wright to race.
But just as that was a dumb strategic move at the time, it's a dumb strategic move now -- and for the same reason. The quality that made Barack Obama so uniquely appealing at the outset certainly wasn't his far-left policies. Nor his supposed rock star cool, or his wholesome family. Instead, it was the hope he offered of allowing our country to transcend the racial divisions that pain Americans of all colors.
Every time he plays the race card, it's not just that he sounds like a whiner. Worst of all, he degrades his brand, and undermines one of the most compelling rationales for the presidential candidacy of a first-term senator with few legislative achievements and little national experience. He ends up presenting himself as a candidate more in the mold of a Sharpton/Jackson than a Powell. And in doing so, he turns off precisely the moderates and independents he will need to win.
Almost exactly four years ago today, as Barack prepared to make his first national speech as a newcomer at the Democratic National Convention just a few months before his election to the US Senate, I wrote this about him:
Obama will resist the temptation to attract the kind of polarizing, Jesse Jackson-like attention that ultimately results in marginalization. Choosing a centrist course and defending it offers Obama the opportunity to become the Colin Powell of the Democratic Party – and with it, the chance to become the first African-American Democratic political leader who transcends race altogether.
It will be interesting to see whether some combination of political panic, bitterness or failed strategy prevents him from living up to that promise.
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I think it was on your own blog during the Jeremiah Wright explosion that I mentioned Obama had a unique chance to transcend the race issue once and for all in America. He stood in a unique position to move America past the Jackson/Sharpton/Wright brand of race baiting.
I said then he had an opportunity to call out these charlatans, expose them for what they are, point out the harm they have done, and lead us in a better direction. He could have barn-stormed the country with a diverse group of established black leaders who have avoided race baiting and have practiced harmony with all citizens. He could have forcefully and successfully made the case that America is ready, willing, and able to move beyond race.
I said then, and I meant it, that if he did that I would support his candidacy.
I would have still opposed his looney left policies. But I would have felt that his historic opportunity to finally put racism behind us would have been more important than health care or energy policy.
Sadly, he has chosen to join the race baiters rather than combat them.
What a wasted opportunity!
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Put your money where your spew is. What dirty tricks? You mean like Obama playing politricks with the race card? What? You mean like telling the Poor and downtrodden he speaks for them, all the while wearing Menolo Blanik shoes? Or perhaps it's dissing the troops in the theater of Iraq and the injured at Landstuhl? He is sinking his own fukking ship and all of you messiah followers will be claiming it was the dirty work of the RW...hahahahaha. He hasn't a leg of anything to stand on...Let me get my life preserver ready for you, Monkey Girl. Either that or get yourself two pairs of triple strength RCG's. You're gonna need em. |
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then he whines because he's part black, then he whines when Michelle is taken to task for her words, when will the whiner quit whining?
"In 2004 Obama riffed about his celebrity at the Gridiron, saying everything changed for him after he keynoted the Democratic convention earlier that year.
"It's like I was shot out of a cannon. I am so overexposed, I make Paris Hilton look like a recluse. "After all the attention -- People magazine, GQ, Vanity Fair, Letterman -- I figure there's nowhere to go from here but down. So tonight, I announce my retirement from the United States Senate. I had a good run."
"Of course, all the hype, said Obama, generates wacky tabloid coverage." And with that he hoisted a poster, a mock cover of the National Enquirer with the headline: Obama's shocking secret. He's Strom Thurmond's love child."
Obama said he was not letting all the attention go to his head. He joked that he was hanging out with Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson at a Los Angeles restaurant when Barbra Steisand called him on his cell phone. And he counseled her, you can't just get caught up in the hype."
http://blogs.suntimes.com/sweet/2008/07/who_said_this_i_am_ so_overexpo.html
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Your carping is wearing a bit thin, do you get paid by the word? You aren't impressing anyone, of making any points except perhaps your masters. |
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