America's Historic Election

The election of Barack Obama as 44th President of the United States was the fulfillment of the drream of Abraham Lincoln and Fredrick Douglas, who himself ran for the Republican nomination for President. Obama kicked off his campaing in Springfield, Illinois Lincolns home. His politics of unity, his sweep in the polls showing America is neither Blue nor Red but purple; his politics as I have pointed out here before are those of classic 19th century liberalism. He appeals to the old Republican party, the progressive, labour party of Lincoln not the later nativist, neo-con party of Reagan. And he made that clear in his victory speech....


Let us resist the temptation to fall back on the same partisanship and pettiness and immaturity that has poisoned our politics for so long. Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House – a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends…though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection." And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn – I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.


While McCain supporters chanted USA, USA, Barack appealed not to a narrow jingoist nationalism but to a greater vision of Americans by their own merit and pulling together in a collective effort to meet the historic challenges facing them with his call; Yes We Can.

He is a Lincoln Republican and a FDR Democrat, remembering the the latters success was based on the progressive movement that pushed not for his election but for the third party candidate; Robert La Follette. A party and movement often overlooked for its impact on American politics, after it got Teddy Roosevelt elected president.

Obama was that third party candidate who used the Democratic party to win election, while appealing to both Republicans and Independents to join him in a bi-partisan campaign to make history. He swept red states and those he didn't win he got more votes in than any other Democrat ever has. He vindicated Howard Dean's fifty state strategy, and he did it by using the grassroots organizing of Saul Alinsky and the Civil Rights movement.

Lincoln and Douglas would be proud as would both Kennedy brothers, and LBJ who in their own way paved the way for Obama's historic election. Today is the fulfillment of the dreams of Martin Luther King, A. Phillip Randolph and Malcolm X. And it is the redemption of the Democratic party forty years after the debacle in Chicago in 1968.

The tears of Afro-Americans from the young students on campuses shown on TV to the celeberities in the crowd in Chicago; Jesse Jackson and Oprah Winfrey, were the geniune mass weltashung of the realization that finally the ugly history of slavery and segregation were ended last night. And a man was elected on the merit of his belief's not his skin colour.

It's a new dawn in America.



SEE:

America's Real Conservative Choice For President



Lincoln Obama



Black Like Me

Winds of Change

The Blue Origin of the Red States



The Era Of The Common Man

A NEW AMERICAN REVOLUTION



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Winds of Change

The Iowa Caucuses last night showed that the 2008 U.S. Presidential campaign will break the mold of establishment politics. It is after all the fortieth anniversary of the winds of change that blew the establishment apart in 1968. And this Presidential campaign has all the makings of the grass roots rebellion that saw demonstrators take to the streets and activists support Bobby Kennedy in a Power to the People campaign.

Barack Obama has the Kennedy charisma and has captured the new Power to the People campaign. This showed in Iowa, with a massive increase in registered Democratic voters and their showing up at the caucuses, many for the first time. The Democratic Establishment is shaken to its core, for they back Hillary and she came in third. Even her feminist base could not be counted on, for the vast majority of those new voters were older women who supported Obama.

John Edwards whom I predicted would take Iowa, came in second, far ahead of Clinton. His populist message of bashing Wall Street, corporations and the party establishment echoed grass roots sentiments not only in the Democratic Party but in the Republican grass roots. That is why Huckabee won so overwhelmingly. Which I did predict several months ago.

Huckabee gives Kudlow and Co. on CNBC heartburn, they decry his anti-Wall Street message, ironically so does the Conservative establishment Rush Limbaugh was on Fox denouncing Huckabee, as did members of the Christian Coalition leadership. The reason is they are out of touch with their base. The days of the Moral Majority are gone, the vocal power brokers are either discredited like Ralph Reed who was caught up in scandal, or dead like Moral Majority boss Jerry Falwell.

What both Edwards and Huckabee appeal too is blue collar America, main-street. What the establishment appeals to is Wall Street. Sure the investors and bankers and movers and shakers in the marketplace are making money, but to the average American they are facing rising inflation, loss of their homes, increasing debt, lost jobs, frozen wages, lack of medicare, Huckabee and Edwards appealed to these real issues.

Obama does to, in a very personal way, and his message last night was a variation on the old Rastafarian slogan One Love, his statement was about running to unify One People, One America, this goes beyond the two America's Edwards denounces, in providing a more hopeful message. And Huckabee also uses that same language, talking about an inclusive Presidency, one that will not be bi-partisan perse, but anti-partisan. His is a message of hope as well.

The pundits and hacks are scratching their heads this morning, and the powers that be are cringing in their corners wondering how they can rally support behind the establishment candidates; Clinton and Romney. They are out of touch with their base. They are aloof from blue collar/white collar workers in America. This is a working class revolt in both parties.

Sure Republicans are concerned about abortion and gay marriage, but they are also concerned, as Huckabee tells the party bosses, loss of jobs due to globalization, rising interest rates, lack of health care, eduction. Just like their Democratic counterparts do. One listens to Johnny Cash the other listens to Steve Earle, what happened in Ohio last election, where the working class vote, the union vote was mobilized around values issues, abortion and gay marriage, has given way to mobilization around economic bread and butter issues. Fair Trade instead of Free Trade. This is what scares the bejesuzz out of the establishment. It is Pat Buchanan's message eight years later, but delivered by both Democrat and Republican contenders without the jingoistic nativism and isolationist rhetoric.

The pundits were claiming last night that McCain would rise from the dead but in Iowa he ended up tied with a movie star for third place. Sure McCain is a challenger in New Hampshire, but in this he is the establishments fall back candidate. By far the real challenger is Ron Paul. Yes Ron Paul.

His is the under reported story from last night. Until the caucuses his campaign appeared to be internet driven. For instance in a Myspace poll he won overwhelmingly. His messaging and fund raising has all be done on the net. And he showed, as Howard Dean did last round, that the internet is an authentic alternative to corporate fund raising. Paul did what no other Presidential candidate ever did, raise record funds off the internet in one day. Not just once but three times. This is not a mere footnote folks, this is an authentic challenge to the traditional fund raising that has relied on lobbyists and tit for tat promises that Edwards has complained about and McCain tried to change through legislation.

Ron Paul has not been given the credit he is due by the pundit and media establishment. But by coming in fourth with 10% in Iowa he has translated his internet base to a real political force. Now watch him gain even more support as a viable alternative in New Hampshire. Paul appeals directly to the libertarian base that is the New Hampshire voter. Despite the state going Democrat, there is a strong independent base that Paul can and will appeal to. Expect him to come in third there. His libertarian message is appealing to the left and the right, just as a New Left Alliance arose between anarchists of the left and Republican libertarians forty years ago

Winds of change. Expect the unexpected. And look forward to an amazing set of Presidential conventions where the grass-roots will be out in force as delegates, and they will be challenging the party establishments. Democracy never had it so good in the good old U.S.A.

This is after all the Year of the Rat.


SEE:

Huckabee: Paul is Dead.

Lieberman Endorses McCain

Huckabee A Red Tory

Republican Presidential Paul-itics

Gravel and Paul on PBS

Republican Presidential Paul-itics

Ron Paul

Ron Paul and Barry Goldwater

Liberal Republicans

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Black Like Me

When Senator Biden made his gaff about Barack Obama he hit on the unsettling subtext in the American psyche; was Barack Obama really 'black'.

“I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man.”

Well of course he is. But what is really being said is that Obama is not the N word.

African Americans are openly asking whether the first-term Illinois senator is "black enough."

But in order to court the black vote he will need to win the Democratic nomination, he must be careful not to raise any flags among a white electorate, which so far feels unthreatened by him.

"When you hear about his background, you hear Hawaii, Kenya (where his father was born), or Kansas (his mother's home state). You don't hear Alabama," says Ronald Walters, president of the African American Leadership Institute at the University of Maryland. "It's not strange at all that blacks would view him with a little suspicion. When somebody presents themselves, you want to look them over and if they don't share your background you might withhold judgment."

Debra J. Dickerson, a black author and essayist, broke the "not black enough" debate into the open in salon.com, last month, arguing Obama would be the great black hope for president, except he isn't black.

She argues that "black" in U.S. culture means those descended from West African slaves.

Biden's choice of words clean, ( a slip of the tongue he probably meant to say clean cut) articulate, knowledgeable, mainstream etc. all could be referenced back to Americas popular culture of racism.

Obama is middle class he represents those class values regardless of race. Or because of it, since race politics in the United States has been dominated by the grievances of the ghetto.

The N word is the new iconography of pride of current hip-hop black gangsta rap culture which currently dominates the cultural self-image of blacks in the United States.

It is the same issue with Tiger Woods, who is Thai and Black. His blackness was questioned like Obama's is. But it wasn't really about his mixed race it was because he was light skinned he was not N enough. Until his father started making his presence seen.

You never saw his Thai mother of course, ostensibly because she was the little woman at home and not a golfer. You saw his father who was a golfer, but one who didn't make it in the white segregated golf world because he was 'black' an African-American, despite also being of mixed race.

Tigers dominance and race breakthrough in golf was his fathers goal and victory, and it was a victory for all black's whether grandchildren of slaves or newly arrived from the Caribbean. But his race was still used against him no matter how light his skin.

Like Tiger, Obama is also mixed race, so he is lighter skinned, and he was brought up in Hawaii and abroad. He is not N enough, for some American blacks. He has not suffered their ghetto life is the subtext of their comments.

Well neither has Rev. Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. But they speak for those folks, you see. That's their politics, the politics of the disposed, the politics of the ghetto. And the resentment of slavery deeply underlies that politics.

Like Quebec's Nationalism, the resentments run deep, and the old grievances of reparation underlie pre-Obama politics of blackness.

In reality Tiger and Obama are the beneficiaries of the Great Society, they are part of the rising black middle class that has benefited from affirmative action, equal rights, voting rights, civil rights.

They represent the new generation of middle class blacks seeking to assimilate into American culture. They are the post Colin Powell, Condi Rice generation, just as they are the post Jackson/Sharpton generation.

It was Oprah, the black multimillionaire media mogul and voice of the black middle class that pushed Obama to run. He speaks for her generation and class.For a different kind of blackness in America, one that leaves behind the grievances of the ghetto and looks towards integration into the American melting pot.

Tiger and Obama cannot say they fought to get where they are. But they can appreciate the fight that got them where they are. Hence Obama's announcement today from the hometown of Abraham Lincoln.

Republican Lincoln, emancipator of the slaves, in one fell swoop Obama takes out the Republicans, who no longer are the party of Lincoln, in Democrat country, felling the Dixiecrats and Tammany Hall Democrats, and uses the great iconography of the Great emancipator and the emancipation to launch his campaign.

Lincoln was not a conservative or a neo-con, he too was a an anti war activist and pro labour, a social democrat. This is often forgotten by the current crop of Republicans that refer to him as if their party is His party. It isn't.

And Obama can appeal to both Democrats and Republicans as he can independents with his message of a politics of hope. That is why the Democratic establishment is wary of him. As they are of his populist base and politics.

His campaign will coincide with the fortieth anniversary of Robert Kennedy's run for the presidency. His campaign is grassroots, being driven by a popular push to have him run just as Kennedy's was.

The younger Kennedy's presidential bid in 1968 was a wild, people-driven ride, and it is not surprising that reporters who cut their teeth on it now look back on that summer with awe.

On the surface, Obama's embryonic campaign has some qualities that Kennedy's had. He too has hesitated publicly before subjecting himself to the fray. He too attracts vast audiences, full of hope, because he promises the future not the past. He has an ease with the language that sets him apart. And, merely by joining the race, he is rewriting the odds.

The race echoes 1968 too. Then, as now, a failed war dominated an anguished national campaign. Then, as now, the war compelled candidates, not least Kennedy, to get off the fence and adapt to anti-war concerns. Back then, though, it was the Republicans who had the last laugh. The hopes of the Kennedy and Eugene McCarthy campaigns ended with the election of Richard Nixon.

As for his blackness, it has nothing to do with skin colour or race but more to do with how Democrat black politics has played out in the United States. No major black American candidate for the party's leadership has had such a broad base of public support.

To some it is disconcerting that he appeals to white voters, to women, to other ethnic minorities and yes to blacks.He appeals to the fictional self-identified American middle class and their myth of the American Dream. So did Robert Kennedy. The similarities are striking.

He truly is a black man running for President, as the cheering crowds in Kenya attested to. He is more African, than those who criticize him as an Uncle Tom.

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