The Race Is On

Since New Hampshire we’ve been hearing a lot about race in the democratic primaries. It really blew up when Hillary made her now famous statement: "Dr. King's dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act," she said, adding that "it took a president to get it done." A lot of people took offense to it including myself. When she made this statement and other statements concerning Barack Obama, she was trying to paint him as a fancy talker who couldn’t get things done while she was a doer who got things done. It seemed by her statement that Dr. King was a fancy talker who needed a doer like President Johnson to fulfill his dream. It downplays the part Dr. King and other citizens played to get Johnson to the point of signing the Civil Rights Act.

Of course when she started backtracking she attached Obama’s camp for making something out of it. Too take some of the heat off her she had some of her black supporters start attacking Obama, like Robert Johnson, founder of BET who attacked Obama by saying: the Clinton’s "have been deeply and emotionally involved in black issues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood -- and I won't say what he was doing, but he said it in his book." Everyone took it to mean using drugs while Johnson said he was talking about Obama’s days as a community organizer. I’d take this attack more seriously if it didn’t come from the man who took off every community enriching show off of BET to show more videos and then sold it to Viacom who’ve made it a complete embarrassment, just like MTV. (Now I guess I’m showing my age).

Obama has called for a truce from both sides on these racial issues and the Clintons have agreed. Why did it start in the first place? One thing I’m certain of, Hillary and Bill aren’t racist and they do have a genuine concern for black people and our issues. Yet Hillary is not the type of person just to say some off the top of her head. Aside from attacking Obama, I think there were other factors at play. Eugene Robinson from the Washington Post thought so to giving several reasons why this is happening in his column. Now Richard Cohen also of the Washington Post wrote an opinion piece on Obama’s Farrakhan Test. So it appears the issue of race is really on.

Hope

One week ago, I was celebrating Barack Obama’s victory in Iowa and listening to the pundits gleefully burying Hillary Clinton. I’m no world weary expect on politics but it seemed too early. But listening to those so called experts for nearly five day straight and watching the poles I too began to believe we’d have it wrapped up before January was over. So on Tuesday in New Hampshire when Senator Clinton jumped off to an early lead I thought it was a quirk that would correct itself once the vote total got higher. Well as the night dragged on it became clearer that the pundits didn’t know what the hell they were talking about. The women of New Hampshire rallied behind their sister and gave her the victory. So instead of being on her death bed, she’s getting ready to run the marathon. All of us who support Senator Obama have to prepare ourselves for a long and hard run. Common sense would have told us that if we were listening to it instead of listening to the Chris Matthews of the world.

This is my first post since April. I told myself I stopped posting because I was busy at work and didn’t feel like doing it once I got home. It was more than that though. After becoming so excited after the Democrats regained the House and Senate, I thought we were getting ready to see significant changes in the country. I thought our troops would be withdrawing from Iraq by now and we would see some of the criminals in the Bush administration be brought to justice. Instead we got the surge and some of the criminals resigning from the administration, their punishment, probably getting big advances for future book deals and huge speaking fees. The Democratic leadership couldn’t bend over fast enough for Bush. Where I was excited at the beginning of 2007 thinking it was the beginning of the end for this administration, it was just the beginning of nothing.

I wasn’t too excited by the beginning of the political season, I figured I’d vote for Senator Clinton if she got the nomination, but I didn’t feel any real passion for it. She’d make a good President, but with the chaos Bush has created in his term, good wasn’t good enough to get this country back on track, we need great. That’s where Senator Obama comes in. He’s reignited a passion in politics I haven’t felt since I was a political science major in college. He speaks to the hopes and dreams I have for this country; the wish to turn the page. We are in the 21st century but Bush has dragged this country back to the dark ages. Obama can truly lead us into the 21st century and to a future I once thought we’d have. That’s important, no matter what Hillary and Bill think. So I’m back blogging because I feel excited and hopeful. So I’ll be checking in with more of my thoughts before the South Carolina primary.