There are any number of events that stand out as turning points in the
2008 Democratic campaign.

We could go back long before 2008 if we liked, to August, 2004, and
note the millions of people who saw and heard Barack Obama for the
first time giving his now-famous keynote speech at the Democratic
convention.

We could point to his Iowa victory speech ("They said this day would
never come!", or his New Hampshire concession speech ("Yes. We.
Can!").  Or we could suggest the Edward and Caroline Kennedy
endorsements, reaching out as they did to an older generation with
memories of past glory and heartbreak.

But it all might have been for naught but for a single sentence.  That
sentence was not uttered by Barack Obama, despite his rhetorical skill
-- it was uttered by his most formidable opponent, Senator Hillary
Rodham Clinton.  

The day Obama gives his acceptance speech as the Democratic nominee for the President of the United States at the Democratic Convention on August 28, 2008 will be the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King's "I Have A Dream" speech.

A few weeks after Obama takes the oath of office as our next President, we will be celebrating the 200th birthday of Abraham Lincoln.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/...

The symbolism of these historic events coinciding is too momentous to ignore.

"Wisdom is a gift; you can't train for it, inherit it, learn it in a class, or earn it in the workplace--that access can foster the acquisition of knowledge, but not wisdom." - Toni Morrison

Shouldn't Dr. Maya Angelou be part of Hillary's dialog on race?

Some have wondered why there are blacks who consider Dr. Maya Angelou a 'traitor' to her black race. I don't know if I put her there just yet. But her past words create questions as to why she has not spoken up about her friend Hillary Clinton's need to inject racism and Reverend Jeremiah Wright into this campaign in the many ways Hillary has.

Here, she is speaking to the American Academy of Achievement in January, 1997. She covers many topics still relevant to today, so as you read through this interview, remember it's eleven years old.

It's as if she's predicting an Obama candidacy.

McCarthyism has made an unexpected comeback in the guise of repeated questions ad nauseum about Barrack Obama’s “patriotism” and related accusations of “guilt by association” involving various figures such as his ex-pastor Reverend Jeremiah Wright and former Weather Underground member, William Ayers.  For weeks, we’ve heard this kind of paranoid chauvinistic drivel especially from the conservative media – Sean Hannity of Fox News in particular.  But at the last debate, sponsored by ABC News, such neo-McCarthy-style tactics reached a new low in the guise of moderators Charley Gibson and George Stephanopoulos.    

Religiously speaking, 2008 may seem like an upside-down political season.  John McCain doesn’t do God talk, Barack Obama does.  And the general consensus seems to be that even though Obama acknowledged that he went searching for a church only after he began organizing in Chicago, he genuinely means it.

That may seem upside-down because for seventeen years the U.S. has grown steadily more secular – and democrats pander to secularism, don't they?  The data comes from the American Religious Identification Survey (ARIS) from CUNY, first conducted in 1990 and repeated in 2001.  The study asked thousands of Americans "What is your religion?"  "No religion" came in third after "Catholic" and "Baptist" – and the number jumped from 14.3 million in 1990 to 29.5 million in 2001.

So where’s the evidence of rising secularism since 2001?  Well, I interviewed one of researchers behind the survey – and he heartily believed that the trend had continued.  But I can’t really cite that with links here.

There is some citable evidence, however, in modern politics.

 Today, i went and coached a 9-10 year old ball game.  Today, i went to work and put in 8 hours.  Today, when i got home i kissed my 3 year old son on the forehead and told him i loved him.  Today was a good day for me.

 Today, the News Media coverage was all about politics.  Today, more Americans probably died in Iraq in a needless war.  Today, Osama Bin Laden probably ate well, while some families will never eat together again because of his actions.  Today, American Axle employees are still on strike, drawing $150 dollars a week, and gas to get to the picket lines is $3.50 a gallon.  Today, more of the polar ice caps melted and somewhere a republican probably called it "junk Science".  Today, somewhere in a country with friendly ties to the United States someone was probably renditioned there to be tortured, with the approval of the top officials in this Administration. Today was not so good a day for America.

I had an experience yesterday that left me with the realization that one consequence of this election may be to bring all the closet racists out of the woodwork.

I work in downtown Miami in marketing and public relations. Yesterday I decided to join a coworker and my boss, a 50-ish white Cuban male, to lunch. The subject of the presidential race came up. My boss, who is gay and socially liberal, has spent the last several years disparaging Bush, including commenting that he believes the Iraq War is worse than Vietnam. But over lunch he asserted that he would never vote for Obama after "the Rev. Wright thing," referring to Wright's racial remarks.  

In a certain twisted way, it makes sense that Sen Hillary Clinton is taking an excruciatingly long time to acknowledge what polls and voters have ratified since February: she cannot win the Democratic nomination in 2008 and therefore will never be president.

As befits a sideways kind of New Yorker, if she does not make it here, she cannot make it anywhere. Obama is not going to fail renomination as incumbent president in 2012, and she will be too old in 2016 as well as having an incumbent vice-president to contend with. This horrid and implacable truth must haunt her.

Hers is a common problem in other lines of very public work. What we have here is the reluctant, resisted farewell tour of that once-hot rock band, The Clintons; and after this, they have to hang it up because -- despite all their practice -- their pipes are shot, they just can’t hit the notes anymore, and the public taste has moved beyond their smooth but superannuated act.

More Yet Below

Today marks an important anniversary, a date that reminds us that out of struggle comes progress.  On April 16, 1968, the city of Memphis relented and recognized the Memphis sanitation workers' right to organize a union.  We know all too well the costs of that struggle; today let us remember it achieved an important victory.

This is called stereotyping.

In the event that anyone requires further evidence of Bill O'Reilly's overt prejudice, he was kind enough to oblige last week with yet another example.

On the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, O'Reilly distills the legacy of King down to one question. The question O'Reilly considers the key to understanding King's life-long work is whether or not King despised America. And how does O'Reilly's respond?

"...that question is very difficult to answer precisely."

Brought to you by...
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The Internet's Chronicle Of Media Decay.

In April, 1968, I was 16 years old and living in a small town in Maryland that did not have a significant black population.  I think the town was about 80-90% white.  That said, it was Maryland.   There were segregated schools and the movie theater had separate sections for blacks and whites.  The schools were finally desegregated in 1963 and the black school was closed.

Father Michael Pfleger, a Catholic priest with an inner city black congregation, invited Reverend Wright to visit, as he had done many times before. This time, he was confronted by Fox News producer Porter Berry.

What follows after the jump is the whole interview. It's about 12 minutes long - longer than most people have patience for these days - but I don't think you'll regret taking the time.

My dear friend Cornel West, I can appreciate your disapproval of Barack Obama's absence at the MLK's event in Memphis but I emphatically disagree with you because your position as noble as it may sound is pathetically wrong.

To rebuke Obama for not making a symbolic visit to Memphis is to ignore the enormous responsibility he has for successfully conducting his campaign for the most important political office in the land, the president of the United States.  Is there any priority greater than that at this time for Obama?

As hard as Obama has tried to convince people that he isn't doing things the same old way, some folks like you my friend still don't get it.  Obama is hunting for an elephant and can't afford to stop and throw stones at small animals.  This is an old African adage and you sir Cornel West may want to add this to your wisdom pouch.  It's important to note that my comment by no means diminishes the event.

Jeff Cohen writes at Alternet:

^{In his last year of life King condemned American militarism. But we don't see that in retrospectives.}

While noting in passing that King spoke out against the Vietnam War, mainstream reports today rarely acknowledge that he went way beyond Vietnam to decry U.S. militarism in general: "I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos," said King in 1967 speeches on foreign policy, "without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today -- my own government."

In response to these speeches, Newsweek said King was "over his head" and wanted a "race-conscious minority" to dictate U.S. foreign policy. Life magazine described the Nobel Peace Prize winner as a communist pawn who advocated "abject surrender in Vietnam." The Washington Post couldn't have been more patronizing: "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, to his country, and to his people."

When King's moral voice moved beyond racial discrimination to international issues, the New York Times attacked his efforts to link the civil rights and antiwar movements.

King's sermons on Vietnam could get as angry as those of Barack Obama's ex-pastor: "God didn't call America to engage in a senseless, unjust war ... We've committed more war crimes almost than any nation in the world." In 1967, King was also criticizing the economic underpinnings of U.S. foreign policy, railing against "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries." Today, capitalists of the West reap huge profits from their domination of media -- in the U.S. and abroad.

In a survey by Opinion Research Corp. for CNN and Essence magazine:  

...78 per cent of non-Hispanic white adults, and 69 per cent of black adults, believe the U.S. is ready for an African American president.

In addition, 63 per cent of respondents think America is ready for a woman president, including 65 per cent of non-Hispanic white adults, and 59 per cent of black adults.

Do you think America is ready for a black president or not?
 
              Yes      No      Unsure
All         76%      22%     3%
Whites  78%      20%     2%
Blacks   69%      29%     2%

Do you think America is ready for a woman president or not?

              Yes      No      Unsure
All          63%      35%     2%
Whites   65%      33%     1%
Blacks    59%      39%     2%

^{Telephone interviews with 2,184 American adults, including 1,001 non-Hispanic white adults, and, with an oversample, 1,014 black adults, conducted from Mar. 26 to Apr. 2, 2008. Margins of error are 2 per cent, 3 per cent, and 3 per cent.}.

The Overnight News Digest is posted.

When we were growing up, there was television and it was, it seemed, always on.  Television was not always uplifting and often failed to meet the expectations of the best of those who appeared on it or those who valiantly tried to use the organs of government as instruments for the public interest.  

But, yet, amidst the "I Dream of Jeannie"'s, and "Mr. Ed" and "My Mother, the Car" there was some sense of responsibility among the networks:  some sense that they, too, had obligations as citizens.  And, sometimes, often when they had to because of tragedy, but often because the best among them demanded it, they rose to the challenge to either inform a dubious public or commemorate events of importance, and the history of our nation and world.

(Cross posted from Docudharma)

I was born at the tail end of 1951.  My father was a soldier who served in WWII and Korea.  His brother came back from Korea so psychologically devastated that he never recovered.  He lived nearly fifty of his seventy years haunted by the horror of what he witnessed in the Korean War.  He was not alone.  Every war produces more casualties than are accounted for in the body counts.  My uncle died just a few years ago but it was the Korean War that killed him.  

A few years ago I listened to an NPR special on the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr.  As I listened to clips from numerous speeches given over many years, I was struck by how  often he challenged the listeners.  He used difficult words.  He used extended and complex arguments.  Literary allusions.  References to Plato and Shakespeare.  And he spoke of difficult matters without pretending the changes he sought would be easy or without conflict.  

Reverend King gave his last speech 40 years ago this past Thursday night; 40 years ago this past Friday he was assassinated in Memphis.  40 is a very symbolic number, and it recurs throughout the Bible.  Rain deluged the earth for 40 days and 40 nights.  The city of Nineveh repented for 40 days, and God spared it his wrath.  Moses waited on Mount Sinai for 40 days and 40 nights, and when he came down from the mountain he brought with him the tablets.  Jesus fasted in the desert for 40 days and 40 nights.  And of course, the Israelites, led by Moses, wandered in the wilderness for 40 years.  At the end of his life, aware that God would not allow him to lead the Israelites in to the promised land, Moses named Joshua his successor, climbed to the top of a mountain and peered over, gazed upon the promised land and died.  

In that final speech, King invoked Moses and the promised land (which for Christians can also symbolize Heaven):

Well, I don't know what will happen now. We've got some difficult days ahead. But it really doesn't matter with me now. Because I've been to the mountaintop. And I don't mind. Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I'm not concerned about that now. I just want to do God's will. And He's allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I've looked over. And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight, that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! So I'm happy, tonight. I'm not worried about anything. I'm not fearing any man. Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!

I thought of King's speeches the other night when I read this, by the New Yorker's George Packer, about Barack Obama's Philadelphia speech:

The speech seemed to have been composed in intense solitude, and it has the personal drama, the encompassing structure, the moral and intellectual intricacy, of a great essay. In particular, it evokes James Baldwin’s "Notes of a Native Son," which is also about the distorting power of rage, the charge to acknowledge the inheritance of racism without being defined by it. The older man whose bitterness cast a shadow across Baldwin’s life was his father, and Baldwin wrote of his effort to understand and also transcend him: "One is absolutely forced to make perpetual qualifications and one’s own reactions are always canceling each other out. It is this, really, which has driven so many people mad, both white and black." In the same key, Obama said last week of Trinity, "The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and, yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America." Obama’s ability to contemplate the contradictions in Americans of all colors without going mad—to be made stronger by them—accounts for his power as a politician. He also pays the electorate the supreme compliment of assuming that it, too, can appreciate complexity. [emphasis added]

In his most famous speech, given in Washington DC in 1963, King spoke of the danger of bitterness and the necessity of solidarity:

But there is something that I must say to my people, who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice: In the process of gaining our rightful place, we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred. We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again, we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny.  And they have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom.

We cannot walk alone.

And as we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead.

We cannot turn back.

In his speech in Philadelphia, Barack Obama used one of King's metaphors when he spoke of continuing the march:

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign - to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together - unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction - towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

King envisioned a story of American reconciliation, in which the wounds of racism healed:

Let us not wallow in the valley of despair, I say to you today, my friends.

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal."

[...]

And when this happens, when we allow freedom ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual:

               Free at last! Free at last!
               Thank God Almighty, we are free at last!

40 years after King told the crowd in Memphis he had glimpsed the promised land, we have a black man on the verge of becoming our nominee for President of the United States.  The progress we've made as a nation is inspiring, but our task isn't finished.  And as Obama discussed, the nature of our racial problems is complex, and that complexity is embodied in Barack Obama himself:

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts - that out of many, we are truly one.

Obama could have discussed his multi-racial, multi-cultural heritage and self-identity as some wonderful conclusion, as something to trumpet, something that will eventually knock down the walls of hatred and racial division.  One could cite Obama's candidacy as proof that Americans had transcended race, that 40 years after the death of Reverend King, Senator Obama, like Joshua with the Israelites, is leading African-Americans in to their promised land where all Americans are equal, White and Blacks sit at the table of brotherhood, where a fetid state where blacks lived under the sweltering heat of injustice and oppression has been transformed in to a state that cast its primary votes for Obama, and where, to quote Reverend King, "every valley shall be exalted, and every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight; 'and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed and all flesh shall see it together.'"

Instead,  Obama discussed the complexities embodied in our racial and national memories, complexities that are in fact embodied in himself:

I can no more disown [Reverend Jeremiah Wright] than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother - a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

In the 40 years since the assassination of Martin Luther King, the right has pushed the idea that liberals aren't truly patriotic.  The right's idea of America is backward looking.  As Obama explained, many of Jeremiah Wright's generation (and many who've come later) wrongly believe that America is static, that America has made little or no progress toward overcoming our most serious faults.  Obama's speech was extraordinary for his candor in discussing why fully overcoming our imperfections is hampered by the apprehensions of White Americans anxious about change, and why our tragic history obscures the vision of so many African-Americans bitter about America's imperfections and who are incapable of fully recognizing how profoundly we've changed.  We all know deeply flawed and imperfect people whom we nevertheless love passionately and with deep commitment.  Just as we all love imperfect people, we also love our imperfect country.    

The other great feature of Obama's speech—indeed, of his candidacy—is the emphasis on progress, and on hope.  On his website, the speech is titled A More Perfect Union.  The idea—the challenge—of "perfecting" recurs throughout the speech.  He opened with the first words of the US Constitution: "We the people, in order to form a more perfect union."  The recent racial tensions of the campaign "reflect the complexities of race in this country that we've never really worked through - a part of our union that we have yet to perfect."  

But I have asserted a firm conviction - a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people - that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

I would not be running for President if I didn't believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected.

There is no single promised land awaiting our nation.  As liberals and progressives, we inherently believe that there will always be work to be done, that the job of "perfecting" is unending, that we must never be content, that there will always be struggles to overcome as we seek entry in to the next promised land.  Obama's speech is one of the rare times when a politician discussed a volatile and highly emotional issues, acknowledged difficulties, explained complexities, and inspired Americans to strive to overcome, to improve, to do what is necessary to create a more perfect union, to continue to climb to the mountain top, to look over in to the promised land...and to keep on striving for the next promised land, without fear.