2008 Election and Race

Today's NY Times poll -- which has turned into a game of "White People: So You Think You're Not Racist?"-- found that Blacks really love Obama and whites kinda like McCain. Good work, fellas!

For all the advantages that Barack Obama has this year, the same problems that nearly led to Kennedy losing to Nixon are lurking just below the surface of the 2008 political landscape.

Poverty trumps ethnicity as a factor determining voter preference: if the dollar continues to sink, voters will vote their pocketbooks rather than their prejudices and Obama will glide into the Oval Office.

Karl Rove says Barack Obama is arrogant. Arrogant, of course, is a euphemism. In the monochromatic bunkers from which old-schoolers cling to power the true word they use is "uppity" when hurled at blacks.

Michelle Obama is no "baby mama". I still am dumbfounded by what an offensive, insensitive, racially charged reference Fox News made.

Michelle Bernard, with her supremely irresponsible, reckless, race-baiting comment, was abruptly cut-off by an incredulous Chris Matthews as he closed last night's show.

Senator Obama, you have made a wise choice. You may be in a fight with Rev. Wright for the duration of your campaign, but you will be seen as being on the right side... the progressive side

The Democratic presidential nomination bears some startling similarities to the 1860 Republican race between Abraham Lincoln of Illinois and William Henry Seward of New York.

Those who continue to pretend race is not a major factor in this campaign are deliberately averting their eyes from a very powerful force in the Democratic primary.

Even though the cool, urbane, extremely rational Obama is the antithesis of the hate-spewing radical, that is the image that the Republicans will surely use if he is the nominee.

The pressure to vote for gender rather than policy and personal substance reminds me once again of the Scottsboro case which turned sexual politics on its head for half the twentieth century.

Earlier this week, I published a piece about what I called the Race Chasm, and how it relates to Clinton campaign's strategy. I made some fairly bold assertions in the article, which some readers questioned.

The pundits would like to see (and, sadly, are now seeing) women tearing each other apart, in this election season, within variously productive and destructive discourses of identity politics.

I exited Obama's speech last week thinking that if I ultimately do not vote for Obama, it will be for reasons other than his minister.

The suggestion that women are monolithic and asleep and need to "wake up" is part of the problem endemic to Second Wave Feminism.

We can learn to disallow the indignities that result from abuses of the power signified by rank much as we are learning to disallow color as grounds for discrimination.

There may not be a place in this culture for a history-making speech anymore -- I mean literally, no room for something of lasting value to sit there and be itself, to sink in and define the moment.

There will be those who will attempt to pick apart Obama's speech, seeing not enough here or too much there. Those who do not want to heal the divide will inevitably find fault.

Race is still such a taboo subject that pricks so many fears and sensibilities, that the media and much of the public has given Obama a feather touch when it comes to a laser scrutiny of his past.

The central flaw in Ferraro's remarks is a conflation commonly made in talk about race: the difference between equality and symmetry.

Instead of asking when did the racism of Hillary Clinton's campaign against Obama begin, one is now forced to ask: has it ever been run without racism?

When you're up against a guy who spent five years getting his limbs broken in a pool of his own filth, running away from a point that you've made yourself in paperback isn't the best way to look tough.

Hillary started out with a lot of black support. After all, her husband had been called "The First Black President." It was up to her to keep that support alive.

This is the way Dems will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory in this election: allowing dunderheads like Ferraro to drive wedges between a coalition poised to unseat the Republicans in November.