Will Barack Obama be our next President?

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<p><em>People just want to build good lives for themselves.</em></p>

<p>And when they fail to do that, for whatever reason, they want someone to blame.</p>

<p>Let's be clear, the people that harbor racist attitudes or fears aren't usually going to be blatant about it. But they still vote and their fears can be manipulated by slick politicians. Just because the people you know aren't openly racist doesn't mean that racists don't exist or that your friends don't secretly harbor some form of prejudice. What you believe can clearly be disproven by any number of incidents in recent elections, including the one Eva pointed out. People may not "wallow" in those feelings, but it only needs to show up in the privacy of the voting booth to have an effect.</p>

<p>More importantly, you missed the point of the cartoon and that is: some people have grown attached to their views on race, rational or not. One doesn't have to be full of anger, fear, resentment, or prejudice to have a bias, racial or otherwise. </p>
 
I agree 4 wall, people are basically good-- they just tend to vote their fears rather than their hopes. Personally, I'm impressed by Obama, and I think he would be the best of the 3. Great speakers, as one political commentator said, tend to make great presidents. I think Bush has done so much to damage the policies and image of America abroad, that someone like Obama would represent something fresh and new, and that could do a lot in the world perception and build new bridges.





That being said though, we have to remember that connections really, really matter in terms of getting legislations and policies through. Compare Lyndon Johnson to Carter. LBJ was crazy connected and he could get all of his legislation though. Carter billed himself as this outsider, and he didn't get much though. This will be a major point for Clinton or McCain over Obama.





Soul Brother still goes Obama though. Fixing the perception abroad, that Bush has screwed up should be a huge priority. The economy is going to be terrible no matter who gets elected.
 
I still disagree with you Nude. I think people are generally very reasonable and care mostly about who will enact policies to improve their lives. I think the idea that Obama's race is a big deal that will override concern about how his presidency would affect people's daily lives is way off. Maybe older people who grew up in different times, but I don't think most people give a crap. If people honestly believe he will enact policies that will make their lives better, they'll vote for him. If they don't, they won't. I really don't think that many care about his race when it comes down to it. I think its whacky to think people who embrace Obama's idealogy will not embrace him b/c of race...they are a lot more afraid of the opposite idealogy than pigment (just as I am a lot more afraid of Obama's ideas than McCain's age).



Irvine Soul Brother, I do think people vote their fears, but I don't see that as bad. For example, I'm afraid of a tax hike if Obama gets elected. I will not be voting for Obama. Hope/fear are just two sides of the same coin and highly correlated. It's human nature to protect yourself from threats. It's a good, necessary thing.

I think the cartoon would be more representative of what most people actually are concerned about if the people in the cartoon were worried about tax hikes, illegal immigration, terrorism, and the economy and Obama's was saying "folks, let your concerns go, "change" is here."



PS Nude, I find that when people fail and need someone to blame, they blame their parents and/or 7th grade history teacher :-) People don't just say "well, my life is a mess, let me spin the wheel and find a subgroup of people and start hating them." Some do, but in my opinion the majority of people are much more reasonable than you're giving them credit for. But I think you and I probably will end up agreeing to disagree on the cartoon.



PPS I will grant you, that if you had two people, completely identical except for race or gender, people will tend to vote for the person most like themselves. But I think that gets overridden very easily as soon as differences on issues, etc. come into play. People want someone who thinks like them a lot more than they want someone who looks like them.
 
<p>Umm, Obama's race was neither the point of the cartoon nor my point in posting it. The cartoon was a very concise summary of his speech and a representation of the people he was describing in that speech. As I am not as optimistic as you, I agree with his assessment of race relations and the cartoon.</p>

<p> </p>
 
I'm willing to bet that most posters here who think America has moved past racism are whites who have never lived in the South or poor neighborhoods.





It's hard for people to fathom that racism is alive and well in America if they never experienced it firsthand.





There was a interesting program called "American Skinheads" that aired on Nat Geo HD yesterday. One of the skinheads interviewed who was part of the Orange County Skins talked about the evolution of the skinhead movement. Before, they were conspicuous White Power parade marching demonstrators who would take part in occasional brutal beatings/killings of minorities. Now, they lay low and operate like terrorist sleeper cells who in their words, work to get a good education, get a college degree, get into positions of power in society, fake that they are "race mixing left-winger", and wait (for the signal to unleash "a whole lot of killing" of minorities). They are also getting more sophisticated in disguising and spreading their hate message - in California and Arizona, they use the illegal immigration issue as a way of funneling their message to the white mainstream in a more palatable manner. Truly frightening stuff.





Here's the first part of the documentary (you can find the other parts on youtube also). The interview with the Huntington Beach skinhead starts at 4:35.


<embed width="425" height="350" src="http://www.youtube.com/v/dX4mPRv77QQ" wmode="transparent" pluginspage="http://macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer" quality="high" id="VideoPlayback" type="application/x-shockwave-flash"></embed>
 
<em>>>Way to go Eva, you managed to completely ignore the point which was that sarcasm and mocking aren't helping to resolve anything.</em>





No, no, you said that much earlier. And I said that I disagree. For some reason, you kept going, so I responded to what you said (why, I don't know). I'm exhausted from flogging deceased equine. The last word is yours.
 
I think that one of the problems that Obama has preached such a high standard of inclusiveness in his rhetoric.



Yet, his actions seem to bely a different standard for himself. He renounces politics of division, yet he attends a church for 20 years where the senior pastor (on what I hear is a regular basis) preaches divisiveness.



Quite frankly, I think that he needed this church in order to further his political career in Chicago. He came in as an outsider, and needed institutional support (remember, we're talking about Chicago Democratic Party politics here).



Also,as to the comment above that people know where he stands, I don't think that is the case. If you had asked a majority of Obama supporters if there was someone like Rev. Wright in Obama's campaign, they would have said "No way".



I do not belive that Obama has truly been tested in a general election by the voters. He ran for State Senate in a safe Democratic district, where the chief test was convincing the Democratic Central Party for the district that he was the man for the job. After that, his State Senate general elections were a foregone conclusion. When he ran for US Senate, his two Republican opponents were to busy self destructing to run against him. If he is the nominee, this will be his first true general election challenge. As such, I expect some more interesting information about him to surface, and the electorate will adjust their opinions accordingly.
 
<p><em>I think that one of the problems that Obama has preached such a high standard of inclusiveness in his rhetoric.





Yet, his actions seem to bely a different standard for himself. He renounces politics of division, yet he attends a church for 20 years where the senior pastor (on what I hear is a regular basis) preaches divisiveness</em></p>

<p>1) What Rev. Wright say does not equate what Obama believes in.</p>

<p>2) What is your source about what Wright is or is not for? I have heard the opposite view being expressed.</p>

<p>3) Tolerance and inclusion is not about accepting things and people that you like or agree with, it is about accepting thing and people that you do not agree and/or even like.</p>

<p><em> Also,as to the comment above that people know where he stands, I don't think that is the case. If you had asked a majority of Obama supporters if there was someone like Rev. Wright in Obama's campaign, they would have said "No way".</em>


</p>

<p>I disagree. . . I believe that most of Obama's supporters (me being one of them) understand the difference between the opinions of Wright and the opinions of Obama. In fact, the CBS news poll showed that the Wright issue had no effect on 70 percent of the people, a positive effect on 14 percent of the people, and a negative effect on 14 percent of the people. Basically a wash. </p>

<p><em>As such, I expect some more interesting information about him to surface, and the electorate will adjust their opinions accordingly.</em> </p>

<p>Personally, I have not found anything that has been "revealed" about him so controversial. In fact, the reaction to Wright's comment makes me feel that Americans are suffering from an inferiority complex and low self-esteem.</p>
 
<p><em>When he ran for US Senate, his two Republican opponents were to busy self destructing to run against him.</em></p>

<p>I must dispute this point. Obama started out that race ahead of the Republican opponent, but it was the domestic abuse allegations against Blair Hull that gave Obama the Dem nomination in the first place. Hull was the presumptive nominee until those allegations surfaced a month before the primary. Obama then faced Jack Ryan, who was forced to withdraw from the election because it was revealed that he tried to get his wife to go to sex clubs with him. Ryan was replaced by Alan Keyes, a Maryland resident and crack-pot conservative, less than 3 months before the election. Obama won, obviously, but it's not fair to imply that it was only due to Republican stupidity... there was plenty of stupidity to go around.</p>
 
<p>"inferiority complex and low self-esteem" </p>

<p>You have got to be kidding me. </p>

<p>Of course there is a difference between Wrights beliefs and Obamas - problem is we do not really know what Obama's beliefs are - he can make speeches all he wants and he can sound sincere but when it comes right down to it we all know that all politicians are working behind the scenes to present themselves in a way to get elected - so we certainly cannot be sure that everything Obama says is exactly what he in his heart believes - that would be naive.</p>

<p> </p>
 
<strong>Skek:</strong> <em>"So you are citing the views of a HB skinhead as ... as what, exactly? An example of Republican politics? There is no one on this board who is going to tell you that the United States of America doesn't have a single racist left in it. But that's a pretty extreme straw man to set up. I'm not sure what you think you are accomplishing there."





</em>Let's review what a straw man argument is:


<em>To "set up a straw man" or "set up a straw man argument" is to describe a position that superficially resembles an opponent's actual view but is easier to refute, then attribute that position to the opponent (for example, <strong>deliberately overstating the opponent's position</strong>).</em>





In your own words, you weren't even sure what my purpose was to post up the link to the Nat Geo documentary. So you threw up your own idea of a dumb argument (<em>"There is no one on this board who is going to tell you that the United States of America doesn't have a single racist left in it.</em>") and attacked that as a straw man. Then you repeated that you were unsure of what my intentions were. Did you just realize that you committed a straw man yourself and lazily appended that last sentence -reiterating your confusion- to mitigate that error? Are you trying to be ironic? Well played, sir. Well played.


<em>


</em>I wanted to illustrate that even in the humdrum cultural bubble of Orange County you can still find racist extremists such as that particular skinhead who is not afraid to say that he hates the government and he's waiting for the right moment to kill all minorities. Shouldn't that be as frightening as if it was reported that an Al Qaeda sleeper cell was opening spouting their "death to America" chants in the middle of Mission Viejo?





Anyone remember the Oklahoma City bombing and Timothy McVeigh? Up until 9/11 it was the single most deadly act of terrorism on U.S. soil and it was perpetrated by those who harbored white supremacist and anti-government sentiments. The response to 9/11 was the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars and thousands of American lives starting and fighting two wars including an unjustified one in Iraq. Not to mention the tens of thousands of Iraqi and Afghan civilian lives as "collateral damage." What was the response to OKC? Well, McVeigh was executed, Terry McNichols was sentenced to life, and the third accomplice Michael Fortier was sentenced to 12 years in exchange for a deal to testify against McVeigh. Fortier was released 2 years ago on good behavior into the Witness Protection Program (he served about 8 years).





I guarantee you that if McVeigh was a Muslim, more systematic campaigns would be taken to search and destroy parties that shared his attitudes. In fact, Orange County's own Tool/Representative Dana Rohrabacher recently chaired an investigation into whether McVeigh received funding from Middle Eastern sources. I guess we want to retroactively blame OKC on Al Qaeda too.





I'm not assuming that anyone who opposes Obama is a racist. (What, another straw man? You are good.) I'm saying that there are a lot of racist attitudes that still persist in America today that will be a big factor against Obama. I mean, even some independent (or slightly right of center) posters on the board suggest that having a white Democratic VP would be a death wish for Obama if he were to become president. Do you even have to think about that for McCain? Or even Hillary?





Finally, as "militant" as Rev. Wright's attitudes are, I don't think that Rev. Wright is the equivalent of a black skinhead. For all of Rev. Wright's hateful speech, I don't think he ever sounded the clarion call to kill all the white people. Has anyone read about Rev. Wright's background on wikipedia?


<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jeremiah_Wright_as_a_Marine_Medic_Tending_to_Pres_Lyndon_Johnson.jpg">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Jeremiah_Wright_as_a_Marine_Medic_Tending_to_Pres_Lyndon_Johnson.jpg</a>
 
The fundamental point of disagreement boils down to simply:





You think racism will be a minor factor in affecting whether or not Obama gets elected president assuming he is the Democratic nominee.





I think racism will be a major factor in affecting whether or not Obama gets elected president assuming he is the Democratic nominee.





<em>"Or that Republican politics at the highest level are motivated by ... racism."


</em>Tell that to John McCain's "illegitimate black baby."
 
I didn't vote for Obama, but this Rev. Wright thing is driving me nuts. He's one guy who preaches to - what? - 1,000 people max a week. His influence is small.





Compare that to Pat Buchanan, who is more well known, has a job at CNN, MSNBC, and a syndicated column. Looking back at his resume, he was a senior advisor to Nixon, Ford, and Reagan. <a href="http://www.humanevents.com/article.php?id=25634">Are you aware of what he wrote last week?</a> I would like to be charitable and say he lacks a command of history, but that just isn't the case.








Doesn't the opinion of one them strike you as more influential (and mainstreamed) than the other? And isn't that a big differentiator between the two?
 
<p>Eva,</p>

<p>That is why I wrote that that the whole thing makes me feel that Americans are insecure and have low self esteem. Wright is a nobody and yet people are making him out to be the anti-Christ. While I do not agree with what he said, Wright does represent the sentiment of certain factions in the African American community. It is no different than the people who believe that Obama is a Muslim and that his middle name somehow makes him a terrorist. We have gotten to a point in our society where people cannot express differing and unpopular sentiments without becoming unpatrotic. Not to mention, I have never seen the term "United States of America" anywhere in my Bible.</p>

<p>IR</p>

<p>While I do believe that Obama is charismatic, the biggest reason why I am voting for him is that he has a different view of both the world and of government than Hillary and McCain. I am eager to give "hope" a chance and see what happens. As for policy, I do support many of his views including pulling troops out of Iraq, universal health care, right to choose etc. . . .</p>
 
<p>Eva,</p>

<p><em>Doesn't the opinion of one them strike you as more influential (and mainstreamed) than the other? And isn't that a big differentiator between the two?</em></p>

<p>The difference between Buchanan and Wright is one of perspective; they are both promoting a view that inspires anger and hate in those that hear it. Some people hear Wright/Buchanan and identify with what he says while other people get defensive. Where you fit in that description largely depends on who you are. Personally, I think they both need to shut up.</p>

<p>Buchanan's influence is negligible, he has failed time and time again to get elected because no one really agrees with him, yet his rhetoric and analysis makes for entertaining TV. That is an excellent indictment of everything wrong with modern programming, but let's save that for another time.</p>

<p>Wright's influence is an unknown and therein lies the problem. If he were just limited to the people in his church, and was one of hundreds across the country, I would say they both had equal influence. But prior to the speeches being made known to the world, Obama pointed to his relationship with Wright as a reference to his own character, background, and beliefs. The man had a position within the campaign and was lauded by Obama for his work in the community. So his influence on "President" Obama could be considerable, both directly and cumulatively over the 20 years that he sat and listened to him. The question is a valid one, which is why Obama adressed it with a speech.</p>

<p>Personally, I don't think Obama feels as strongly as Wright does and, in any case, it is impossible to judge what Obama believes by what Wright says. But on the question of influence, the scales clearly tip in Wright's favor in comparison to Buchanan's influence on his audience.</p>

<p> </p>
 
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