Obama: Guilt-free Voting?

I wandered over to Skeptical Brotha and commented on his Obama thread. The brotha's still skeptical, thank God, but does he have the resolve to not drink Barack's Koolaid? Only time will tell. Meanwhile, for those of you lurking in the ether, this is what I posted:

I’m no fan of the Chicago Tribune’s Steve Chapman, but he gave a very clear, very simple assessment of the problem. He said Obama has

“the knack of appealing to whites without evoking the slightest twinge of guilt.”

And I think Chapman wrote that without the slightest sense of how problematic it is.

The real Rorshach test is NOT whether Americans will vote for the grandson of a Kenyan goat herder, but whether they’ll vote for the grandson of a black sharecropper. I’m thinking not so much.

Oscar-winner, Al Gore, Part II

Here's the best single sentence summary of Al Gore's Oscar win I've seen:

...it should be noted that Sunday night, Hollywood successfully Photoshopped Al Gore's foot into George W.'s ass.

The Case for Gore in 2008

The Oscars rarely satisfies and often fails to surprise. Nobody was surprised at Gore's win last night for An Inconvenient Truth, but watching Gore finally receive public homage for his years of service was in its own way deeply satisfying.

If you haven't seen An Inconvenient Truth yet, what you've missed isn't so much the message that global warming is a crisis and not merely a problem anymore--not to take away from that aspect of the movie-- rather it is a narrative of a public servant who throughout his career, has kept a rare sort of clarity about the environment and his role in preserving it. Rediscovering that clarity after the disappointment of 2000, is as much the story as is the story of global warming.

Watching Gore in the movie and thinking back to those awkwardly scripted public moments in 2000, one isn't struck so much by the difference in carriage as by the context. Gore may be more at ease with his Powerpoint presentation and his lecture notes than on the campaign trail; but he is still as wonky and nerdy as he ever was. The genius of the movie is that it manages to show this and show how this is what's good about Gore.

Gore has every reason to avoid throwing his hat in the race, and I don't blame him for his reluctance. But Gore offers us the tantalizing possibility of redemption. He's the same guy pundits scoffed at for being "the smartest kid in the classroom," but we've had the alternative and we're paying for it.

In this week's New Yorker, David Remnick speculates on the possible success of a Gore run.

In the view of former aides still close to him, Gore can’t lose by staying on the electoral sidelines. While Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama start competing––warily at first, and then, inevitably, taking direct aim at one another’s weaknesses––Gore can stand unbruised, nursing the lingering glamour of his popular margin in 2000 and, perhaps, demanding by quiet inference that we take stock of a distinguished public career that began three decades ago, when Gore was a twenty-eight-year-old Vietnam veteran freshly elected to Congress.

Remnick goes on to say that it is unlikely that Gore will enter the race, but one never knows. And I wonder what would happen if there was enough clamor around a Draft Gore campaign. Gore may truly love this country and public service, but to willingly reenter campaign politics, in his particular case, is to go back to the spouse that beat you up, stole your money, and ran off with your best friend. He's going to need to be courted. And we should think about courting him.

See Obama Run

I was wondering when someone else was going to bring this up.

They say Obama did not play the singular role in the asbestos episode that he portrays in the best-selling memoir "Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance." Credit for pushing officials to deal with the cancer-causing substance, according to interviews and news accounts from that period, also goes to a well-known preexisting group at Altgeld Gardens and to a local newspaper called the Chicago Reporter. Obama does not mention either one in his book.

..."Just because someone writes it doesn't make it true," said longtime Altgeld resident Hazel Johnson, who worked with Obama on the asbestos campaign and had been pushing for a variety of environmental cleanups years before he arrived.

A prominent political activist I know told me that community organizers he knew here in Chicago had never heard of Barack Obama before he ran for political office.

But "Dreams From My Father," the first of Obama's books, is not a historical account. In it, Obama uses literary techniques that are rarely found in political memoirs.

Dialogue in the memoir is an "approximation of what was actually said or relayed to me," Obama wrote in its introduction. For the sake of compression, he wrote, some characters are "composites of people I've known, and some events appear out of precise chronology." Most names in the book were changed for the sake of privacy, he wrote.

And though most memoirs place their authors at the center of events, critics of "Dreams From My Father" say the book unfairly omits others responsible for the successes of the asbestos campaign, an event that Obama portrays as central to his maturation as a political leader. For example, Johnson is not mentioned, and no character in the book appears to resemble her, even though she was already a prominent Altgeld activist and her presence in the anti-asbestos effort is confirmed by interviews and news accounts at the time.

Hmmmm...no wonder the details around his first political campaign against Alice Palmer are so fuzzy. The guy disremembers the folks that cloud the minty fresh image.

Last night at the University of Chicago, in a "conversation" with Henry Louis "Skip" Gates, political science professor, Michael Dawson, raised a little known fact that Obama displaced Alice Palmer, a sitting black state senator, who was farther to the left of Obama, politically. Dawson also reminded the audience that the DLC, with which Obama is closely associated, is one of the most conservative elements within the Democratic Party.

Alice Palmer was a popular and effective legislator, and would have retained her seat had Obama not challenged her nominating petitions. Most accounts of what took place claim that Palmer lost a special election for an open congressional seat and then changed her mind about running for reelection to the state senate. The fact is the special election was held December 12, 1995 and Alice Palmer had already announced to the Illinois Public Action Convention that she would run for reelection for her senate seat. The fact is the Hyde Parkers whom Obama was courting at the time would've remained loyal to Palmer and many told him as much at the home of Bernadine Dohrn and Bill Ayers in late November of 1995.

Why did Obama go after an office held by an effective, progressive, black incumbent, not once, but twice? (see Bobby Rush)

UPDATE: Sorry to say that my chronology is wrong in this post concerning Alice Palmer and the Second Congressional District primary in Chicago held in 1995. While the special election, which was won by Jesse Jackson, Jr., was held on Dec. 12, 1995, the primary election for that seat was held Nov. 28, 1995. So Alice Palmer did, in fact, lose that primary race and then, with a lot of urging from friends, colleagues, and party leaders, she decided to hold on to her seat and run for reelection.