Yes, this is another Bob Kerrey diary. Sort of.
At first glance, Kerrey's remarks seem to be just another example of an ugly pattern. Given the forwarding of the Muslim smear e-mails by Clinton volunteers in Iowa and Billy Shaheen's remarks in New Hampshire, it's easy to lump Kerrey into the bigot camp.
But I think a closer, more sympathetic, reading of Kerrey shows that his message is the opposite of those smears. His message is one of hope, of progress, of what we can become. I think Kerrey's underlying point is that a President Obama would fundamentally change the way America is viewed--both at home and abroad.
While I think it's unfortunate that Kerrey is being dragged over the coals for a well meaning statement, I think the more depressing part is that Obama supporters seem to have lost touch with that hope.
A few months ago, someone posted a diary quoting Mark Ambinder:
In private, Obama likens himself to Reagan, according to some of his friends. He believes that the very act of Americans choosing to elect him would amount to the biggest foreign policy advance of the past 20 years, would immediately change the way, say, a young boy in Lahore views this country, would crush the propaganda gains of radical Islam since the end of the first Gulf War, would heal the scar that serves as a reminder of America's original sin (slavery), would directly engage the mass Muslim world in a way that no one who voted for oil or empire could, and ... you get the idea.
The diary was titled "The Audacity of Ego," and it was mostly mocking Obama for overstating his prowess. But some of the most prominent Obama supporters spoke up. They argued Obama would mark a sea change in America's image. And they were right.
An unfortunate diary. (14+ / 0-)
The point of his comment is that the world would be a different place the day he gets elected.
Not because he is brilliant or just so awesome.
Rather, because he allows the world to see something of itself in the United States and its government. A son of Africa would be president of the United States.
No other single act could better communicate the complexity of the United States, its immigrant past and present, and most importantly its respect for people who don't look or talk like middle-aged white people.
Barack Obama would be the first non-white person elected leader of a majority white nation.
In the history of the planet Earth.
I feel sorry for those who are so bitter that they can't appreciate this.
Let's read this more carefully (10+ / 0-)
because I think you're drawing some unwarranted conclusions from it. We don't have Obama's own words here, just a composite paraphrase from unnamed friends/associates.
They seem to be paraphrasing Obama as stating the election of Reagan was a sea change in US politics-- which it was, for better or worse (in my view, for worse). Reagan set a considerably more conservative course than any previous postwar president. Recognizing that it was a radical departure is NOT the same thing as endorsing that course, which I highly doubt Obama would do.
The rest of the statement suggests Obama is saying there could be considerable symbolic value in Americans electing an African-American President with Muslim first and middle names and some Muslim education, that this could reassure Muslims abroad that a majority of Americans want to disavow the racism, xenophobia, and Christian crusading mentality that was so much on display under the Bush Administration. I don't think that's an outrageously arrogant assertion, even if it is over-optimistic.
I'm not an Obama supporter, but I think this diary is intellectually sloppy and grasps at straws to bash a candidate for things he hasn't said.
Indeed (4+ / 0-)
Electing the son of an African goat herder to the most powerful office in the world does, I hope, say something good about the promise and possibility of America.
One of those commenters wrote a diary just a few weeks ago contrasting Clinton and Obama's perspectives on foreign policy. In that diary, he proudly quote Seymour Hersh:
Barack Obama represents "the only hope for the US in the Muslim world," according to Pulitzer-prize winning investigative reporter Seymour Hersh. Because Obama's father was a Muslim, he "could lead a reconciliation between the Muslim countries and the US." With any of the other candidates as president, Hersh said, "we're facing two or three decades of problems in the Mideast, with 1.2 billion Muslims."
I'd hate to think the people who wrote these comments and diaries, or other people who believed this about Obama, are now afraid to say so because it fits into a smear campaign. I'd hate to think that negative messaging coming from people associated with the Clinton campaign would make people afraid to express this hope. I'd hate to see them attacking Hersh for making those same comments.
This is one of the things I really like about Obama. It's the entire package of experiences, background, and overall symbolism that would make his presidency unique in so many great ways.
In another article praised by Obama supporters just a month ago, the New York Times wrote:
The deep sense of hopefulness that Obama inspires in his supporters has much to do with a life trajectory unique in the history of major presidential candidates. Obama has always been acutely conscious about the relationship between his personal arc and that of his country. In "Dreams From My Father," published in 1995, before he ran for anything, Obama offered a vivid and strikingly introspective account of his knockabout childhood in Hawaii and Indonesia, as well as of a journey he made as an adult to Kenya, the homeland of his absent father. He presents himself in all his cultural hybridity — African and American and Asian, black and white, infused with all-American hopefulness and with the reserve that comes of living on the receiving end of power.
One recurrent theme of the book is how very little the world, at least the world in which most people live, responds to our wishes or our ideals. Obama’s Indonesian stepfather, Lolo, explains the rule of the jungle to the young boy: "Men take advantage of weakness in other men." Obama’s mother, an innocent abroad, is shocked to learn that Lolo was conscripted into that country’s brutal repression of an insurgency and sent to the jungles of New Guinea, where he saw and did unspeakable things. In America, Obama writes, power was muted; in a place like Indonesia, it was "undisguised, indiscriminate, naked, always fresh in the memory. Power had taken Lolo and yanked him back into line just when he thought he’d escaped. . . . That’s how things were; you couldn’t change it, you could just live by the rules, so simple once you learned them."
The next time someone refers to Obama's "cultural hybridity," or however they phrase it, as an asset, can we remember that we used to applaud such statements? No one would have batted an eye seeing Kerrey say the exact same thing in May.
I'd hate to think we've lost that hope.
He'd been asked by a reporter from the Omaha World-Herald about the fact that the Clinton folks are hammering home the idea that Obama has little experience, while both Obama today and Kerrey in 1992 ran for president in their first Senate term.
"My answer was yes, but I finished third in the primary. Obama's smarter and more talented than I ever was, and he has two things which are connected to his life experience that give him special capacity," Kerrey recalled. "First, he is African American and can speak to underperforming Black youth in a way that no other candidate can. He gave a speech in Selma that was incredible, that no white person could ever give. No government program could ever do what Barack Obama can do.
"Second," Kerrey continued, "his name is Barack Hussein Obama. I know that middle name is seen as a weakness by Republicans, but I don't think it is. I think it enables him to speak to a billion Muslims around the world."
Kerrey said he's spoken to Obama and his staffers and told them to "lead with it as a strength. There's this nonsense out there about him being a Muslim Manchurian candidate. He should do a commercial, look the camera straight in the eye, and say, 'My wife Michelle and I are Christians, but my father was a Muslim and my paternal grandfather was a Muslim, and that fact and my name means I can speak to a billion people around the world" who need to hear from the United States.