Barack Obama is not a kid. Barack Obama’s win in South Carolina is not the same as Jesse’s Jackson’s, and I worked for Jesse Jackson as his communications director in 1988. I worked for the Reverend not only because I agreed with his positions; but I also believed it was the time in our country’s history that a Black American be a viable candidate as the leader of the free world.
Is it Barack Obama’s time to be the first Black nominee of one of America’s major parties, I hope so. I hope despite the Clintons strategy to divide and polarize that we see through color and find the soul of an individual.
This is a fight. It is a fight between the Kennedy wing and the Clintonista wing of the Democratic Party.
The Clintonista wing showed its cards in South Carolina last week with their racist innuendos against Barack Obama. The Clintons have shown us they do not care about the future of our country. They do not care about the future of our Democratic Party. All they care about are the Clintons. President Clinton will further tarnish an already tarnished reputation if he persists in his comments.
I recollect a fall day in 1964; LBJ came to my neighborhood, Greenwich Village, NY with Robert Kennedy. I heard Bobby, who was running for the United States Senate, as he spoke through a large microphone connected to a sound truck through scratchy speakers. He spoke about his brother’s dream and memory. He spoke about hope in the future. He spoke to the voiceless and gave them speech. He spoke to the victims and gave them rights.
Later he went to Appalachia and the Deep South and he showed us that Michael Harrington’s book "The Other America" was not just a title but a reality for millions of Americans.
Now there are 45 million Americans living in poverty and tens of millions more potentially in its grip—people who live from pay check to pay check. They demand and should receive economic justice—their share of the American Dream.
Health care, education, a clean and safe environment, and retirement with dignity are not privileges they are rights. They spring forth from our inalienable liberties to life, freedom and the pursuit of our happiness. They spring from the unalterable fact that all men and women are created equal. These are the tenets—the holy writ—of our democracy. This is the rubric of our social contract.
There can be no veil of ignorance when 97-percent of our country’s wealth is concentrated in the hands of just 3-percent of the people. This is not justice or fairness. It is enslavement. It is injustice and unfairness.
My parents were Roosevelt Democrats. They canvassed door-to-door for Aldai Stevenson as a young married couple. They worked hard for John Kennedy and eight years later at 15-years old I went to work as a volunteer for his brother.
It will be forty years since the death of RFK in June of this year. My heart has grown cold as a political consultant, maybe this is part of the job. I don’t think so. I long for the days of Camelot, for the days when Bobby would visit a lower or middle class New York neighborhood and be swarmed by people who shared his hope in America.
On that night forty years ago, I went to an election night party at a local bar, the Lion’s Head Pub, but I had to leave before the results became official. I had to go home. Being out until 2am was sure to bring a shellacking from my father.
I went home. Where I put on the television, sitting on the couch until 5am when the earth stopped. Bobby had won the California primary. He would most likely be the Democratic candidate for President and then it happened: shots, blood, and death. He was dead and so went the dream.
It’s possible that dream is coming back. It is the young people, as Caroline Kennedy said today, who have brought it to our attention. And perhaps they are right. Perhaps there is a new spirit in America true to the vision of her father and Uncle Bobby.
I hope so my friends. We have lived in cynically pessimistic times for too long. We have suffered through terrorist attacks, a war that has killed 3,000 American servicemen and women. We are watching an economy in shambles with housing foreclosures growing more numerous each day. We see predatory lenders making the poor, those who live from paycheck to paycheck, fall deeper into poverty, and, it may be a gratuitous shot, but we did watch a president be impeached for aberrant behavior and another who should be impeached for violations of our fundamental freedom.
This is not my America. It is not Jack, Bobby, Martin and John’s America. It is another America a declining America; but we must seize it back from those who wish to steal our ideals through polarization and division. Is Barack Obama the remedy we crave? I don’t know. But I think I’ll follow Teddy, Caroline and Patrick’s lead.
This is Joe Garcia for reform.squarespace.com. Goodnight.