Los Angeles MayDay March 2006
Dear sirs:
In a recent post, Booman outlined his take on how Barack Obama should approach the rest of this campaign. (My Advice) It is a fairly mainstream political prescription, one that I am sure would not alarm the many mainstream political hacks and lampreys that have attached themselves to the Obama campaign, and I believe that it is dead wrong.
The addition of Palin to the Ratpub ticket has changed everything, and it is now time…almost past time, I fear…for Obama to go for broke.
Whole hog plus postage.
Go to his real base.
The so-called “”minorities” of this country.
All of them.
Racial, sexual, age-related, income-related…the works.
A coalition consisting of a sufficient number of minorities equals a majority.
It’s the democratic way.
It USED to be the Democratic Party way as well.
Read on for my argument regarding this idea.
Booman wrote:
I firmly believe that Barack Obama is going to turn out his base without a lot of additional effort. I mean that Obama will get huge urban turnout, he’ll crush in college towns, he’ll get the Jewish vote in places like southeast Florida, Northern Virginia, and the Philly suburbs, and he’ll do very well with all core Democratic groups except lower class, low-education whites.
Oh.
You mean that he will get basically the same “base” that did not succeed in electing Gore and Small K kerry. I am simply thrilled by this idea.
So are the McCain people. Bet on it.
Obama should not worry about making campaign stops in places like St. Louis and Cleveland.
Bullshit.
He ought to be in every city that has a good-sized black and Hispanic population every day of the week and twice on Sundays, and he ought to be raising holy hell in those cities. Large cities AND small. There has been a demographic shift in the U.S. regarding where minorities live over the past decade as the inner cities have become “gentrified”. (Read “whitified” to all intents and purposes. Monified.) This has forced a HUGE segment of the minority populations out into the smaller cities…places like White Plains and other small cities and towns along the Hudson in New York State, for example. It’s the same everywhere else in the country as well. Been there; played for them. Obama needs to be preaching to a choir that is not all that hot about his act. He needs a massive minority vote to win. An historically significant minority vote. And I do not think that he is going to get it if he continues along his present campaign path. He has spent enormous amounts of energy trying to diminish the public consciousness of his race in an effort to attract the white voters to whom Booman so disdainfully refers as “lower class” and it is not working. (Your own prejudices are showing there with that “lower class” shit, suburban-bred Booman. Try “working class” next time. You be bettah off.) To expand upon the apparent gaffe riff of the week, you can put lipstick on a black man but in major parts of this society it will only emphasize his otherness. There it is; live with it. Obama should learn to live with it as well. The canny addition of Palin to the Rat team has ended all hope that he might have had of capturing the working class white vote that Hillary Clinton so handily took away from him in the primaries once she realized the necessity of doing so. Number one, it is largely a racist vote…do not doubt that for a second…and number two, half of that vote is female and at least another half of it of it is Sunday go t’meetin’ Christian. Votes travel on societal lines, and the Rats have (brilliantly) put up a candidate who is the very picture of the swing voter in this country.
YOU know…the ones who identified with and/or lusted after Bill Clinton in the ’90s?
White, 30-ish/40-ish, avowedly Protestant Christian, and a woman to boot. That’s a win/win/win/win proposition in Politics 101, in case you missed that class over the last 50 years or so. Identity politics. Other women of her social class will identify with her and their men will wish their old lady was as successful as has been Palin so that they could buy a boat and go fishing instead of driving a fucking fork lift six days a week.
BRILLIANT!!!
UH OH!!!
All Obama has left is the college-educated middle and upper middle class, some part of the historically Democratic unionized white working class (Also racist to the core. Bet on it. In the privacy of the voting booth? For a large percentage of those working class white Dems? “I CAIN’T DO IT!!! I CAIN’T VOTE FER NO NIGRAH!!!” Bet on it.), the flaky “youth vote” (“What day is it? Wednesday? Oh shit. I missed vote day. Oh well…” and back to their jive little iPods and text messaging.), and something to which Booman coyly refers as a “huge urban turnout”.
AIN’T no huge urban turnout without a huge minority turnout. And Obama is in the process of losing…or has already lost… large parts of the minority vote in this country. Bet on that as well. It’s not that blacks and Hispanics are going to vote for McCain. No person of color who is not a totally corrupt hustler and/or a complete fool could possibly have missed the racist signs so prominently displayed by the Ratpublicans over the past 40+ years. Many of them are simply not motivated to vote for Obama AND WILL THUS EQUALLY SIMPLY STAY THE FUCK HOME. And why? Because they feel that he is just another “more of the same” candidate (The Dems have been only a little bit better in this regard than the Rats. Check out Nancy Pelosi for more on this idea if you have sufficient raydar…like gaydar only regarding race…to pick up the signals.), the only real difference being that this time the candidate has a pretty good tan.
Sorry, but there it is, and Obama DID THIS HIMSELF.
Quite consciously and with good political reasons as well.
He really had little choice in the matter if he was going to beat Clinton in the primaries. He barely beat her as it was, and had he run blacker…shit, it would be a Clinton/Obama ticket now, and the whole (no pun intended) complexion of the race would be different. For one thing Palin would be back in Alaska where she belongs, baking cookies and speaking in tongues, and McCain would probably have had to take yet another dull, middle aged/middle manager white man as his running mate. YUM!!! If you doubt this, imagine what would have happened if Obama had said “Yeah, I heard Rev. Wright’s statements about race in America and I have also heard…often heard… Michelle’s statements about not feeling very proud to be an American. What’s it to ya? What kind of black person would feel otherwise given the rampant racism that has existed here for 300+ years? I am here to CHANGE that state of affairs, to end it once and for all!” The racist white media would have ripped him seventeen new assholes. They almost took him down as he tapdanced away from that trap.
However…so it goes; so it has gone and here we jolly well are, aren’t we.
I believe that it is time for Obama to go all in with his remaining chips while he still has some chips. Time to stand up and PROCLAIM his blackness. I think that the United States stands balanced on a societal precipice between its racist past and an inclusive future, and that if we do not manage to tilt towards that future we are going to fall into the past once again and go the way of all things past.
Into oblivion.
I really believe this. I see it everywhere that I go here. Here AND in the rest of the world. (See my recent post regarding My Excellent South African Adventure for more on that subject.) The power of social evolution now lies with the peoples of the Third World, and we either ally ourselves with that power…a power that exists right here in America as well…or we will go down like the dinosaurs that we are rapidly beginning to resemble.
If Obama taps into this future, he will win and we will remain a nation.
If he does not?
This time I think that it will be all over. Another 8 years of Rat rule will finish us.
Booman says:
Trust your own base and go after McCain’s base.
I say:
Find your real base, appeal to it and FUCK McCain’s base.
McCain’s “base” is ignorant, racist and SO over.
Go with the future?
Why?
Because the future ALWAYS wins eventually.
That’s the way it works. Duh.
Martin Luther King Jr. knew.
The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.
Ally yourself with that arc, Barack. Go whole hog plus postage. It’s your only chance now.
It is OUR only chance.
Stop parsing. It ain’t working.
VAYA!!!
Later…
AG
P.S. What’s that?
Y’say that by following my advice Obama will undoubtedly lose enough white voters to ensure a loss?
Au contraire, Dogsbreath!
I beg to differ.
Not if he does it right. Not if he APPEALS TO THEIR OWN SELF-INTEREST.
How?
By making the social ecology argument.
Long story short?
Provide equal opportunities for all the people in this country…equal educational opportunities, equal employment opportunities…and within one generation the incredibly wasteful so-called social and justice systems that have grown up here to administer to the needs (Read “Keep ’em alive but just barely.”) of those who are most directly affected by endemic and racially enforced poverty would be as good as gone. Take that drag off of the economy; add a new, highly capable and optimistic segment to the workforce; reduce the further economic drag of the ongoing bloated military system that is needed to enforce our obviously outdated and overmatched economic imperialist policies abroad; reduce our reliance on foreign fuel by a massive, WPA/WW II-style national effort and what do you have?
A RENAISSANCE, baby.
A renaissance.
Quite literally…a rebirth of America.
Now’s the time, Barack.
YOU know that Bird tune, don’tcha? Now’s The Time? You listen to some serious jazz, right? LEARN FROM IT.
It’s just a simple blues. But what he does with it!!!
Bird knew. It’s as serious as death.
You should know too. And fer chrissake…ACT upon what you know.
Bet on it.
It’s now or never.
Bet on it.
