Have the sheets come off? Did some chickens find their way back to their roost? Even though both the damage-control-mode Sen. Hillary Clinton campaign and the laid-back Senator Barack Obama crew have called what they decided must be a race-issue-free truce, a lot of Black New Yorkers beg to differ.
Never ones to hold back on opinion, from radio talk shows to street corner conversations, the community is giving up its two cents.
Offended, insulted and patronized are some of the printable responses.
“As was said in one phone call to a Sunday AM Black radio talk show, it was Martin Luther King’s Southern Leadership Conference (SLC), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Congress of Racial Equality (CORE), Adam Clayton Powell and the tens of thousands of Black folk demonstrating and rebelling that forced [President] Johnson’s hand to sign ‘civil rights’ bills,” activist Sam Anderson told the AmNews. “Hillary Clinton is trying to convey to Black America that it takes a white person to make a civil rights bill. Her implications also say that King may dream, but white presidents act.”
After his win in Iowa, last week, the New Hampshire primary was thought by pundits and cable news talking heads, gathered as far as the eye could see, to be a win for Sen. Barack Obama. After seeing news anchors and current affairs show hosts become perplexed and then scramble as they learned that Senator Hillary Clinton would take New Hampshire, many questions were asked. Was race a factor? Did voters lie to those conducting the exit polls? Or did Clinton’s rare show of emotion two days prior, seemingly responding to a question about the strain of campaigning, turn the undecided her way? Was it genuine introspection or was it a cold, calculated move? The question became the new political football.
A stunned Obama took to the podium that night and, sure, he was “on fire,” as he declared loudly, but stunned regardless of the polished front. In the wake of her win came Clinton’s comment in response to Obama’s inference that her categorizing hope as false goes against the outlook employed by Dr. Martin Luther King and even President John F. Kennedy.
“Dr. King’s dream began to be realized when President Johnson passed the Civil Rights Act,” said Clinton. “It took a president to get it done.”
The outcry was immediate. People said that she was disrespecting King’s legacy and all those who died, got beaten and jailed fighting for civil rights.
“It sounds as if this southern belle is warning, perhaps even threatening, that any Black man who tries to advance any aspect of a Black agenda without an intermediary such as herself will end up just like M.L.K.,” said Dr. James McIntosh, co-founder of the Committee to Eliminate Media Offensive to African People.
The spinmeisters from Clinton’s campaign went into overdrive, and she denied the charges, claiming instead that the Obama campaign was distorting and misrepresenting her words.
While some queried how Clinton could be upset by a situation of her own making, deciding that there should be no race in the race, her stance remained, “This is an unfortunate story line the Obama campaign has pushed very successfully. I don’t think this campaign is about gender, and I sure hope it’s not about race.”
AmNews reader Rupert Green stated, “In a throwback to scenes in the movie, ‘The Birth of a Nation,’ prior to the New Hampshire elections, Senator Clinton cried and white folks mobilized to protect her honor by lynching the presidential aspiration of the Black man – Senator Obama – who caused her to cry.
“In the movie ‘Birth of a Nation,’ we see examples of how the tears of white women mobilized the KKK and other whites to come to their rescue. Ironically, in this movie, we have a carpetbagger from the North, we have a [mixed race] politician, we have a white woman who cried and a Black man who died. There is also a misleading scene where Blacks became an elective majority by defrauding whites of their votes.”
Green concluded, “Thankfully, it was not in the times of the movie or, like the fate of many Black men, Senator Obama would have been lynched. Perhaps Senator Clinton’s tears also stemmed from the fact that like in the movie, she saw herself being forced to become a running mate to a powerful [mixed-race] politician. Whatever it was, it was deliberate and appealed to racial stereotypes of the lowest common demeanor.”
The Clinton campaign did not respond to an AmNews request for comment, but kept firing off press statements about Obama’s “false claims” about his record on troop withdrawal.”
They noted, “In 2004, Sen. Obama said he was willing to support more troops in Iraq, said withdrawal from Iraq would be ‘a slap in the face’ to the troops fighting there.”
Speaking on television, Obama advisor Susan Rice declared, “He’s been a consistent critic of the war in Iraq, pushing every year since 2002 for a withdrawal of our forces. He’s been absolutely consistent, and for many years, Senator Clinton resisted any sort of timetable for the withdrawal of American forces. So the record speaks for itself.”
Others argue that while former president Bill Clinton has spent the last week trying to distance himself from the outrage to his remarks about the “fairytale” of Obama’s record (not presidential run, he now insists), the intended effect was achieved; Obama did not win New Hampshire.
Speaking at a rally, Clinton said that he opposed Obama’s “trumpeting his superior judgment” about his opposing the Iraq War from the beginning because, Clinton claimed, in the beginning he was with Pres. Bush. “Give me a break. This whole thing is the biggest fairytale I’ve ever seen,” he said. Now he claims he was talking about the “sanitizing” of Obama’s record.
Calling in to Al Sharpton’s radio show on Monday, Bill Clinton claimed that he didn’t mean that Barack Obama’s campaign is a “fairytale“ because “It’s not a fairytale. He might win. I think he’s a very impressive man and he’s run a great campaign. I was addressing a specific argument that had never been brought up in the debate.”
“I understand why he’s frustrated, but since we’ve corrected him repeatedly on this,” said Obama in response, it says to him that he’s (Clinton) more interested in trying to “muddy the waters than try and talk thoroughly about my record.”
On Monday, stunning many with his remarks at a Clinton rally in Columbia, South Carolina, former BET Networks owner Bob Johnson tried to impugn Obama, saying; “As an African American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaign would imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary and Bill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in Black issues, when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood – that I won’t say what he was doing in the neighborhood but he said it in his book – to say these two people would denigrate the accomplishments of civil rights marchers.”
The same day after the much-played clip created an uproar, and folk speculated whether Johnson was making a reference to Obama’s self-confessed drug use as a teen (written about in his 1995 book, “Dreams From My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance”), Johnson rectified his position with, “My comments today were referring to Barack Obama’s time spent as a community organizer, and nothing else. Any other suggestion is simply irresponsible and incorrect.”
Speak. Scramble. Speak. Scramble – seems to be the game plan in the Decide 2008 presidential campaign.
Obama dismissed all the drama as a distraction, and other irritated observers note that during all of this tumultuous back-and-forth, real issues like: institutionalized racism, housing, unemployment, education, police brutality and the recession are being ignored.
Next week, the 50 percent Black voting block of South Carolina will go to the polls; expect some hearty courting and denying by the Clinton camp, while Obama will try to appeal to what should be his “natural base.” He said race should not be a factor. Good luck with that project, some New York cynics respond.
The temerity of it all is palpable.
“Hillary Clinton arrogantly insults and negates the millions of Black people and our allies who participated in the struggle for human rights,” stated activist Amadi Ajamu. “It was the boycotts, the freedom rides, the sit-ins, the marches and the militancy of the Black Power Movement that forced Johnson to pass the Civil Rights Act, an act that has little substance today. Racism is alive and well in every sphere of our lives.”
Ajamu concluded, “Black people should pay close attention. The Clintons have taken our vote for granted and continue to try to patronize us. Obama’s campaign has shaken them to the core.''
