Wednesday, July 16th, 2008

Why The Papers Are Getting The Race Polls Wrong

So many race polls, so little insight.

Today’s sober NY Times poll on the presidential election and race relations comes to the very same conclusions that the wacky Washington Post poll—which turned into a game of “White People: So You Think You’re Not Racist?”—found last month: Blacks really love Obama and whites kinda like McCain.

Good work, fellas!

The Obama campaign hit back hard this morning, saying basically, “Hey! A lot of whites other than his grandma actually like him. And Michelle, too.”

White liberals like Bill Scher back them up. Scher notes that although Obama trails McCain by 9 points, he is running much better among whites than John Kerry did in 2004, especially among working-class whites.

The Times headline—”Obama’s Run Isn’t Closing Divide On Race”—is only half-right. In fact, the race polls on the race show that he may be running well enough among whites to secure enough votes to win. Why is the press not getting this?

Partly because, again big surprise, it’s stuck in the past. Since the pivotal 1968 election, when Richard Nixon and George C. Wallace turned racial backlash into a Republican majority, the partisan divide has largely been a reflection of racial divide. Just as demagoguery on civil rights put African Americans in the blue column, demagoguery on immigration has put Latinos and Asian Americans there for decades to come.

In 2008, another demographic shift is on. Obama’s coalition could forge a new majority, one rooted in large part by racially progressive, not reactionary, politics. The MSM is still very late to the game here.

Instead they have conflated two huge stories in these polls. The first story is whether or not Obama is leading in the race for the presidency. Here the evidence points solidly to a new majority.

The second is what does the race for the presidency say about race? This is an aspirational story. News editors are making the same leap that many people of color are making. (Which is not, in my opinion, a bad decision, even from the business/publishing side.)

They are jumping to this question: Would the election of Barack Obama improve race relations?

In both polls, whites are loudly saying, “No”. Very few in the MSM have yet thought to ask, “Why?”

But there’s where your real story is.

posted by @ 9:16 am | 3 Comments

Tuesday, July 15th, 2008

Kevin Powell :: It’s Time For New Leadership

Vibe contributor Kevin Powell drops what he has said may be his last essay on the need for new Black leadership in today’s Huffington Post.

It’s a bomb. Not the kind of turn-the-other-cheek thing we have come to expect from Barack Obama every time he’s dissed by an elder Black leader. He writes:

I certainly acknowledge and appreciate what the Civil Righters have done, but we younger African Americans are saying now, loudly, the jig is up and it is time for you to go, especially if you have not created hope and plans of action for our communities. The days of marching and protesting without a clear purpose are over. The days of voting for someone just because they are Black are over. Indeed, the multicultural legion of young Americans who’ve flocked to Obama’s campaign suggest that we want leadership that builds bridges, not be stuck in the rhetoric and realities of the past.

Powell, of course, is in a battle to unseat Brooklyn Congressman Edolphus Towns. He’s raised the kind of money and has the staff and machine that may make this September 9th primary competitive. Politicos predict Powell will run a close race in this changing district, a largely African American district with a sizable orthodox Jewish community that has also become more Latino and Afro-Caribbean in recent years.

Towns, a Baptist minister who has been in the position for 15 years, barely fought off a 3-way challenge in 2006 from Roger Green and City Councilman Charles Barron, who has endorsed Powell and who lost that race by only 4000 votes.

Powell’s list of supporters is no joke. RZA, Chris Rock, ?uestlove, and Fab Five Freddy all made appearances at his big fundraiser last week. Gloria Steinem and Afeni Shakur have offered endorsements.

Although the blogosphere was abuzz with the news that the headliner, Dave Chappelle, didn’t show, that will matter little on September 9th.

The intergenerational struggle that played out in 2002’s Newark mayoral election between Corey Booker and Sharpe James, and again in this year’s presidential election, most certainly will.

posted by @ 12:43 pm | 1 Comment

Monday, July 14th, 2008

New Yorker Goes Imus On Obamas

The New Yorker is having an Imus moment.

Today, it was slammed by the Obama campaign, Muslim Americans and African Americans for its July 21st cover of Barack and Michelle Obama dressed as Islamic terrorists doing a fist bump. See it here.

Bill Burton, spokesman for the Obama campaign, stated today, “The New Yorker may think, as one of their staff explained to us, that their cover is a satirical lampoon of the caricature Sen. Obama’s right-wing critics have tried to create. But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree.”

(McCain’s staff was like, “Ditto.”)

A coalition of organizations, including hip-hop media justice organization Industry Ears, Muslim American media watch group Project Islamic Hope and the Los Angeles chapter of Reverend Al Sharpton’s National Action Network, are calling for newsstands and stores to pull their magazines from its sales racks, and for advertisers to pull their ads immediately.

Paul Porter of Industry Ears, said to Vibe.com, “Afro’s and AK 47’s are no way to portray Michelle Obama. Add the Arab garb to Barack Obama and you achieve a racist satire.”

He added, “We are just tired of the same old media bias game. It’s always ‘satire’ with people of color when you’re reaffirming fears and stereotypes. The New Yorker is just reinforcing and profiting from divisive media.”

What were they thinking? Editor David Remnick told the Huffington Post this morning:

I respect people’s reactions — I’m just trying to as calmly and as clearly as possible talk about what this image means and what it was intended to mean and what I think most people will see — when they think it through — that it means. The fact is, it’s not a satire about Obama – it’s a satire about the distortions and misconceptions and prejudices about Obama.

Writing in today’s Huffington Post, author and satirist Leonce Gaiter calls the image “red meat for Red States” and says,

There seem to be two possibilities. The first: they truly find the idea depicted in the image so ridiculous that they couldn’t conceive of anyone taking it seriously. However, if that were the case, there’d be no need for the satire in the first place. Attempting to satirize it acknowledges the idea’s prevalence.

The other possibility is that somewhere, deep in the recesses of their upper east and west side white minds, lurks a restive “fear of black.” To provide such an image without context is to accept its message to some degree. No similar cartoon would have ever appeared about a white candidate.

As I’ve noted in earlier blogs, polls show that up to 15% of the country believes Barack Obama is Muslim, roughly the same percentage that also tells pollsters they wouldn’t vote for him because he is Black.

posted by @ 9:39 am | 1 Comment

Thursday, July 10th, 2008

HKR Radio :: Rosa Clemente On Her VP Run

Here’s Rosa Clemente on yesterday’s Hard Knock Radio discussing her VP run. (Streaming audio)

posted by @ 10:22 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 9th, 2008

Green Party Taps Hip-Hop Activist Rosa Clemente For VP

Signaling it is serious about courting the hip-hop vote, Green Party presidential candidate Cynthia McKinney has tapped respected hip-hop activist Rosa Clemente as her Vice Presidential pick.

If the Green Party accepts McKinney’s nomination this weekend at its convention, Clemente will make history as the first hip-hop generation candidate on a presidential ticket, and together with McKinney make up the first all-female of color ticket in U.S. history. McKinney is African American. Clemente identifies herself as Puerto Rican of African descent.

Clemente joins Brooklyn Congressional candidate Brooklyn Congressional candidate Kevin Powell as another prominent hip-hop writer/activist competing in the 2008 elections. Maryland hip-hop activist and scholar Jared Ball also competed for the Green Party presidential nomination, ending his run this past January.

“This campaign is the opportunity the Hip-Hop generation has been working for,” Clemente wrote in an email to supporters this morning. “This is our time to address the issues affecting our communities – rising unemployment, the high cost of food and housing, a lack of quality public education and access to higher education, the prison-industrial complex, and unaccountable corporate media. These issues are not being addressed by either the Republican or Democratic nominee.”

Clemente has been one of the most prominent national hip-hop activists for nearly a decade. She was one of the co-founders of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention and of REACHip-Hop, a New York City-based coalition that launched a boycott of Hot 97 for greater accountability and balance on the airwaves. Affiliated with the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, Clemente has been a prominent national organizer around securing aid to Gulf Coast victims of Katrina, and against the verdicts in the Sean Bell case.

Clemente’s potential VP run was welcomed by many in the hip-hop community.

“I’ve never voted in the Presidential election; I’ve never felt strongly enough about a candidate to, said rapper M1 of Dead Prez. “I feel that now is the greatest opportunity for the Hip-Hop community to put our collective strength and power to the test and vote for someone who represents who we are and what we stand for.”

“It’s a good sign of political maturity for hip-hop,” Troy Nkrumah, 2008 Chair of the National Hip-Hop Political Convention, said of Clemente’s run. “There are issues we’ve been screaming about to the candidates and they’ve ignored them–whether police accountability, the prison system, or the war in Iraq. They touch the issues on the surface, they talk about change, but their policies are in line with Bush. A lot of us were turned off.”

“But Rosa is one of the people that knows we need systemic change, especially the youth community,” he added. “She has a history of speaking her mind, not holding her tongue, and telling the truth.”

posted by @ 9:26 am | 9 Comments

Tuesday, July 8th, 2008

McCain :: My Crew, My Dogs

Late-breaking polls show that Obama is deeply in trouble with one key demographic.

If the election were held today, the AP-Yahoo poll all but guarantees McCain would stomp Obama among–angry rednecks? white women? retired army generals?–no, dog-owners.

Said one voter, “I think a person who owns a pet is a more compassionate person – caring, giving, trustworthy. I like pet owners.”

McCain owns 2 dogs, an English springer spaniel and a mutt.

While currently petless, Obama has announced he is buying his girls a dog when the election is over, win or lose.

Big Boi, holla at your candidate. The future of the nation could depend on it.

posted by @ 10:24 am | 0 Comments

Friday, July 4th, 2008

Rinku Sen on Immigration and The Meaning of July 4th

A great piece here by Rinku, publisher of Colorlines and the president of ARC::

On this Fourth of July, I will be eating hot dogs. While I was trying to fit in as an Indian immigrant child throughout the 1970’s, they represented the quintessential American food. I begged my mother to let me have them for dinner every night instead of chicken curry and rice. She nixed the hotdogs but sometimes allowed spaghetti and meatballs — straight from a can. Hotdogs were “invented” by German immigrants serving their traditional sausages in the hustling streets of the new world, and spaghetti, everyone knows, came from Italy. If I had been celebrating Independence Day 150 years ago, however, neither would have been on the menu. In those days, Germans and Italians weren’t considered Americans, or even white. When they fought over the most lucrative street corner for food vendors in the 1880’s, the press reported these incidents as “race riots.”

I’ll be sharing this holiday with a group of restaurant workers, largely immigrants. Along with the hotdogs, we’ll have tacos, samosas, falafel. According to one side of immigration debate, we can keep our goodies to ourselves. America doesn’t want them, or us.

posted by @ 10:17 am | 1 Comment

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

Young Jeezy & The Power of Words

No disrespect to Young Jeezy, but he’s been spinning like a Korean b-boy this past week after jumping in the presidential cypher in this month’s cover story.

Jeezy raised eyebrows when he told Benjamin Meadows-Ingram:

“No disrespect to my man Barack, but I f**ked with John McCain. He greeted me like a god.”

But by yesterday, the rapper had issued a press release and a video saying that no, he in fact supports Obama.

(You think I could have ever written something like I just did back when MC Eiht was first saying, “Geeeeeeeaaaahh”? When you have to show you’re gangsta by saying you vote and you vote Democratic and you vote Black and you quote Aristotle to support that, something big has just happened.)

Jeezy says that the whole episode taught him “the power of words.” I wish he had thought about that when he was writing his lyrics for “Love In This Club”.

But now that he’s moved beyond bagging groceries, he had some profound thoughts on the elections in his MTV interview:

“..my mama is about to have surgery that I gotta pay for out of my pocket because she can’t get insurance. I don’t really feel McCain. It ain’t just because Barack is Black; he can make change. Just like Bush equals recession, Barack equals progression. I really feel that, all bullsh– aside. He’s gotta come in and keep it right.”

Which goes to what many of us have been saying all along: if folks felt free to rap more about what they actually think, rather than what they think they need to in order to get money (to pay for health insurance and other sh*t), it’d be a different world right now.

Jeezy says he’ll be putting up a song called “My President Is Black” on his website the Monday after July 4th.

Me? My head is still spinning.

posted by @ 8:36 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, July 3rd, 2008

2G2K Circus :: Obama as Billy Beane?

Uh oh! Ferentz went there by comparing Barack Obama to Billy Beane. Here we go now.

While I love the equating the two people who probably most inspire in me the most intense mix of fanboy awe and bar-side cynicism, I’m not sure the analogy is perfect. You might say that the campaign is Billy Beane-like, and the candidate is much older-school.

I think Michael Lewis was trying to show how Billy Beane had rationalized the game for the 21st Century, removed it from the mystical realm of old scouts and false indicators. And I think he did it because Oakland is one of the poorest drawing teams in the league–we’re consistently in the bottom quarter, I mean, shit, we’re moving to freakin Fremont.

He’s the epitome of the restless Adam Smith-style capitalist, relentlessly destroying the team to remake it. He’s probably the least wedded to narrative of anyone in the game. Every die-hard A’s fan–of which I am beyond one–knows their heart will get broken in the fall.

Nick Swisher or Danny Haren or Tim Hudson or Miguel Tejada–Miguel Tejada! whom Beane found on the cheap in the DR and built up from a scrawny little, um, beanpole into one of the best in the game–all of these were heroes who conformed to Oakland’s sense of underdog love and bootstrap pride. None of them got the long-term contract, and all of them were traded before their time.

The story Billy Beane delivers every year is this one: we’ll have a new crop of underachivers, outcasts, past-their-prime stars, and hot young stars on the field. And then when the year’s over, we’ll lose half of them–some to bigger paychecks (the Hankees, the Gnats) and some to oblivion. But don’t get too attached.

That’s certainly the mentality of the permanent party operatives, especially Dems who have been mainly out of power for the last forty years. The candidate is the candidate, and next year there will be another. Obama is Mr. Field of Dreams, though, and that’s why I agree with your conclusion. The campaign may be underestimating the damage it is doing with the standard post-primary rightward swing thing.

I think the essential tug-of-war in the Democratic party is between its idealism and its pragmatism. Most long-time observers don’t want to go there–they correctly point to 1968 and 1972 as times when this intraparty fight ended in disaster.

But no one can get to a new majority without some leaps of imagination, and that’s where numbers, statistics, and damn lies can strand this presidential campaign like the last two.

posted by @ 8:27 am | 0 Comments

Wednesday, July 2nd, 2008

Actually Don’t Read My Posts

Just read Humanity Critic. Man! I should just quit.

posted by @ 2:55 pm | 1 Comment



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