I am proud to live in Obama’s America too. Long time coming. Let’s work together now to bring us back into the international fold.
- Steve, November 4, 2008
There are many lessons to be learned from the recent U.S. Presidential election – but many more lessons commentators claim we have learned. It’s been a month since the election, and it’s time to look back with some perspective.
It was a historic election – this should not be understated. A Black man was elected to the highest office in a country where 2nd-class citizenship and economic inequality was written into our laws just 55 years ago. A woman was a serious competitor for the candidacy of one of two major parties in a country where gender inequality is still rampant and largely unaddressed. This represents progress along racial and gender lines.
It was a historic election – but this should not be overstated. Despite the competitive candidacies of a person of color and a woman, racial and gender disparities are real and ongoing. They are not merely anecdotal, but devastatingly economic. The average white household made $48k last year; the average Black household made $30k. The fact of Obama as president is not going to close that gap. Read More…
In a very, desparate, last-minute appeal to the most stereotypically knee-jerk issue of Cuban Americans, John McCain is making robo-calls that suggest insist that Castro has endorsed Barack Obama in the election. The content of the call has a misleading tone of “breaking news” to it, in which a slew of Latin American pariahs (supposedly in the eyes of Cuban-Americans) are associated with Obama. Perhaps most ludicrous of all is the appeal:
Don’t give Castro what he wants. Go vote right now for John McCain and avoid establishing in the United States political policies like those of Cuba.
“Don’t give Castro what he wants”? Are they serious? Do they truly believe the people they are targeting are idiots? After calling Obama a left-wing radical (he isn’t, unfortunately), a socialist (nope, sorry), a “redistributionist” (we wish!) and a host of other presumed political epithets, this is what’s thrown at Obama in the final hour of the campaign? Message to the GOP: McCarthyism is so 1950′s.
The McCain/Palin camp has spent the last 2-3 months making Barack Obama look good – which, as he is a lukewarm, center-right candidate, is pretty hard to do – because Obama has insisted on talking about actual “issues”, even if it is in the non-specific, abstract fashion that has made him famous. And Obama’s vague politicking, in comparison with a GOP ticket that does virtually nothing other than mud-slinging, has won the day (barring a massive election theft) in this climate of extraordinary political and economic peril.
Cornel West put it quite succinctly in the below recent clip from the show “Real Time with Bill Maher” (minute 0:50)
Well, for me, it’s just an exciting moment to be alive, when you see that kind of desperation. It really is. That’s what it is – it’s the last gasp of the conservative era where the economics of greed, the culture of indifference, and the politics of fear have been brought together in such a way that it hides and conceals the plight of poor people and working people.
Now, Brother West suggests that Barack Obama is at the heart of reversing this trend, which is an extraordinary exaggeration – if not wishful thinking. Obama has ignored the mudslinging, to his credit and to his advantage. But just as West tells us that popular movements have to come together to compel Obama to live up to much of his rhetoric (a non-trivial task, to be sure) let us not forget that Senator/President-elect Obama is not a champion of the poor nor the working-class. If there is one glimmer of hope in the future of an Obama presidency, it is that perhaps he can be pushed in that direction.
