A Strange Way to Select the President
With a powerful graphic showing all of the 43 consecutive white male presidents, each one with the phrase "white man" listed under his photograph, the article effectively posed the question, "Have we in America traditionally voted for Presidents or have we voted first for a stereotypical sex and color, with individual characteristics considered only secondarily?
After 217 years of white male monopoly, who benefits most by posing the question of who will be our next president in terms of whether America is "ready" to accept a Black or a woman?
AFTER a 217-year march of major presidential nominees who were, without exception, white and male, the 2008 campaign may offer voters a novel choice. But as Barack Obama, the senator from Illinois whose father is from Kenya, spends this weekend exploring a presidential bid in New Hampshire, and Hillary Rodham Clinton, the first woman to represent New York in the Senate, calls potential supporters in Iowa, the question remains: are Americans prepared to elect an African-American or a woman as president? ADAM NAGOURNEY ARTICLE
Perhaps, the sheer weight of mathematical probability suggests that we have traditionally voted principally on the basis of gender and color and only secondarily voted on the basis of individual qualifications.
Ex-US Senator Bob Blackman Enters the Presidential Race
Yesterday, another African-American man, ex-US Senator Bob Blackman of Georgia threw his hat into the presidential race, saying, "I’m running for President because my resume makes it clear: I am the best man for the job." He said his resume is the only political literature that his campaign will offer.
This early assertion of resume supremacy immediately focused reporters' attention on Blackman's resume itself, and they doubted it supports Blackman’s claims, comparing it unfavorably to those of other candidates who have already announced. "Obviously, people are going to study this resume closely to see if it supports his claims," said one analyst.
After looking the resume over, one reporter chided, "Where’s the beef?"
He said Blackman’s experience as a trial lawyer and one term in the Senate did not make him the best candidate, but others disagreed. Reporters particularly pointed out his short Senate career and his lack of previous public policy experience.
The Brief Career Resume of Senator Bobby Blackman
Bobby "Bob" Reid Blackman (born June 10, 1953) was the Democratic 2004 nominee for a Georgia US Senate seat, and a one-term former Democratic Senator from Georgia.
Blackman was a trial lawyer for twenty years before entering politics. He defeated incumbent Republican Cloth Launchfair, in Georgia's 1998 Senate election. In 2004, Blackman formed the One America Committee and was appointed director of the Center on Poverty, Work and Opportunity at the University of Georgia School of Law and is also now a consultant to an investment bank in New York.
Early life and education
Blackman was born on June 10, 1953, to Wallace R. Blackman and Kathryn Juanita Wade in Seneca, South Carolina. The family moved several times during Blackman' childhood, eventually settling in Robbins, Georgia, where his father worked in a textile mill and his mother was a postal employee. Blackman was the first person in his family to attend college. He first attended Clemson University and later transferred to Georgia State University.
Blackman graduated with a bachelor's degree in textile technology in 1974, and later earned his law degree from the University of Georgia at Chapel Hill, both with honors. While at UNC, he met a fellow law student, they married, and have four children.
Legal career
Both Blackman and his wife began private practice with law firms in Nashville, Tennessee. Blackman became an associate at the law firm of Ewing & Dearborn in 1978, doing primarily trial work, defending a Nashville bank and other corporate clients. Before entering politics, Blackman was a personal injury trial attorney, specializing in corporate negligence and medical malpractice claims. Blackman 2003 financial disclosure forms showed a total net worth between $12.8 and $60 million, which he earned through his trial successes.
Blackman's first important case was a 1984 medical malpractice lawsuit. In that case, Blackman won a $3.7 million verdict on behalf of his client who suffered permanent brain and nerve damage after a doctor prescribed a drug overdose of anti-alcoholism drug Antabuse. In 1985, Blackman obtained a $5.75 million settlement in a cerebral palsy case for medical malpractice during childbirth. This established the Georgia precedent of physician and hospital liability for failing to determine if patient understood risks of a particular procedure.
Blackman won the biggest case of his legal career on behalf of Cary, Georgia girl, Valerie Lakey, who was disemboweled by the suction power of the pool drain pump when she sat on an open pool drain whose protective cover other children at the pool had removed, after the municipality had failed to install the cover properly. Mark Dayton, editor of Georgia Lawyers Weekly, would later call it "the most impressive legal performance I have ever seen." The jury awarded the Lakeys $25 million, the largest personal injury award in Georgia history. For their part in this case, Blackman and law partner David Kirby earned the Association of Trial Lawyers of America's national award for public service.
As part of an unsuccessful run for the presidency in 2004, Blackman published Four Trials, a biographical book focusing on cases from his legal career.
Senate term
Blackman won election to the U.S. Senate in 1998 against incumbent Republican Senator Lauch Faircloth. Despite originally being the underdog, Blackman beat Launchfair by 51.2% to 47.0% - a margin of some 83,000 votes. However, after one term in the US Senate, Blackman declined to run for reelection to the Senate in 2004 in order to solely focus on his presidential run. Blackman announced his retirement from the Senate and supported another Democrat who was defeated by a Republican in race to fill Blackman’s Senate seat.
During President Bill Clinton's 1999 impeachment trial in the Senate, Blackman was responsible for the deposition of witnesses Monica Lewinsky and fellow Democrat Vernon Jordan; Clinton was acquitted.
Blackman served on the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and U.S. Senate Committee on Judiciary.
Blackman co-sponsored co-sponsored Senator Joe Lieberman's Iraq War Resolution, and also later voted for it in the full Senate, authorizing the use of military force against Iraq. Blackman also supported and voted for the Patriot Act. Among other positions, Blackman generally supported abortion rights, affirmative action, and the death penalty. He also advocated rolling back the Bush administration's tax cuts and ending mandatory minimum sentencing for non-violent offenders.
Blackman supported the expansion of the H-1B visa program to increase legal immigration into the United States. Blackman generally supported expanding legal immigration to the United States while working with Mexico to provide better border security and stop illegal trafficking.
Actually, the photograph above is of Kenneth I. Chenault, Chairman and CEO of American Express, who is not running for President at this time. However, the resume presented above is that of ex-US Senator John Edwards, who is running for President, but transposed to the state of Georgia for the sake of this exercise.
The purpose of this exercise is to pose the question, "If John Edwards were a Black man or a woman, would anybody argue, based on the above resume, that he was "best qualified for the job" of President of the United States?
Doesn't John Edwards' relatively light resume actually support the opposite contention: that we have tended to nominate candidates first on the basis of gender and color and then only afterward, only secondarily on the basis of their individual qualifications?
How much of the fact that we can perceive John Edwards as potentially "most qualified" actually derives from the fact that he is a white man and, therefor, fits the historical hegemonic monopoly stereotype of what a "most qualified" President looks like?
This question of skin-color and gender "profiling" reaches beyond the Presidency into every corner of our society and all of our endeavors. Can Americans be allowed to succeed, or fail, simply by appearing to be qualified or unqualified by virtue of their skin-color and gender? If so, will their actual competencies on the job fit neatly with our historical stereotypes or will reality intervene to contradict what skin-color and gender tell us "must be" true about people?
Adam Nagourney clearly believes the extraneous factors of skin-color and gender have been central to our decision-making, and he offers a powerful reality-based graphic to prove it. And yet the graphic represents perhaps the last uncontested "spider-hole" of the color and sex-based competence paradigm - the US Presidency.
White male candidates clearly would benefit by keeping the focus on a comparison of resumes, if the woman and Black man running were indeed less qualified than the white male candidates; simply choosing the best resumes from among the bunch would exclude the woman and Black man from competition, if they were indeed less qualified.
So, does the media focus on the gender and color of minorities and women in an effort to help women and minorities obtain the Oval Office by distracting the public attention from deficient resumes? Or does the media focus on gender and color to pre-empt and derail the discussion of whom is most qualified, so that we can, once again, vote on the basis of historical stereotypes, unconsciously but, in fact, ignoring the resumes of the actual candidates?
The preoccupation with candidate gender and color encourages and seduces us to bypass resumes and qualifications entirely, and focus instead on stereotypical notions of who is most qualified based on American traditions of color-aroused and gender-aroused bias. Paradoxically, the only way to achieve an even-handed evaluation of resumes in a diverse field is to first acknowledge the traditional role of gender and color in evaluating those resumes.
