STEAL THIS ELECTION
Posted May 7, 08:04 PM
If the year 2000 belongs to the Supreme Court, then 2008 belongs to the media. This year will go down as the one when the mainstream media worked over time to sabotage the Democratic primary.
For months, Senator Barack Obama has been the undisputed frontrunner. Even before this week’s decisive primary races in Guam, North Carolina and Indiana, he was ahead in the delegates count (1748 as compared to Clinton’s 1609, according to realclearpolitics.com).
He’s been ahead by a comfortable margin in the popular vote. He’s raised more money than anyone, with no sign of letting up. And as if that weren’t enough, he’s ignited record youth voter turnouts in one state after another all year.
By now, in any other election, the Democratic Party would have strongly encouraged the losing candidate to concede. The only logical reason why they haven’t—especially since Hillary Clinton doesn’t have a snowball’s chance in hell of winning—is because Party leaders don’t want to accept Obama as their candidate. The party’s failure to accept the front-runner has created an opening for the media to take him down.
Because of decisions made in elite newsrooms, for six weeks the nation’s attention has been focused on the pastor of the frontrunner. The magnitude of coverage for someone on the periphery of a major election, such as Wright, is unprecedented.
Let’s be clear: the media gave Jeremiah Wright national coverage for a speech at the NAACP convention the day after a heavily publicized PBS appearance. In recent history, I don’t ever recall the media giving ‘breaking news’ live coverage to any Black Civil Rights organization. Even President Bill Clinton’s 1992 chastisement of Sista Souljah at the Rainbow Coalition gathering was witnessed via played back sound bites.
The next day, plenty of stories warranted national coverage: record gas prices, the acquittal of New York police officers who fired 50 shots at an unarmed man, and American casualties in Iraq. Instead, you guessed it, the retired pastor’s press event topped headlines.
Those who accept as benign our media’s highly irregular focus on Reverend Wright, will say that he is news and that his being Obama’s minister, past or present, makes his center stage coverage par for the course. But I don’t see the media giving any associate of any other candidate one iota of such treatment. What makes Obama, who less than two months ago was labeled a “free pass toting media darling,” so special?
A week after Obama denounced Wright, the Reverend’s name is still synonymous with Obama. As a result Obama was transformed before our eyes from a candidate of hope to the angry, elite, unelectable Black man.
Or so it seems the mainstream media hoped.
Pay close attention as the pendulum slowly swings away from silhouettes of the angry Black man to the kinder, gentler, smiling face of Senator Clinton, praise songs focused on her experience, high fives to her toughness, and one story after another (from CNN to Fox) that unashamedly adopted Hillary Clinton’s campaign strategy as their news angle of the day.
As late as Monday, major news outlets were still at their sensational best, reporting on the latest polls that suggested Senator Clinton now has a better chance than Barack of beating McCain in the general election. The coverage suggested that the polls, not Obama’s comfortable lead, should determine whether or not Clinton remained a serious contender.
The final decision, according to the media—even after Obama again confirmed his position yesterday in North Carolina and Indiana—should come from superdelegates. This again, out of Clinton campaign strategy playbook.
Meanwhile those of us at home are seduced into a collective wait, hope, pray even, that Wright’s demonization or some other unforeseen glitch will finally pummel Obama into submission.
And at last the speculative focus on what could happen in this primary race, became a substitute for reporting what is happening.
Even if Obama wins, as some mainstream media outlets are now reluctantly conceding, the one-sided manipulative coverage we’ve collectively stomached is an international embarrassment, a huge disservice to the citizens of this country, and an enormous blow to the democratic process.
Wright-Obama Locked in Generational Conflict
Posted May 1, 02:15 PMJeremiah Wright's apparent undermining of Barack Obama's campaign gets to the heart of an ongoing battle that has been heating up in the Black community since Obama first announced his candidacy. By entertaining the mainstream media that has been quick to pull down Obama, Wright is displaying a dangerous disregard for Obama's historic candidacy. But he's not doing it on purpose. Jeremiah Wright, like others of his generation, is only treating Barack Obama's candidacy like the youthful pipe dream that he always thought it was.
Barack Obama winning the presidency cracks the foundation of Wright's lived experience. For his generation, white racism is inseparable from the very idea of America. According to their line of thinking, White racism will never allow a Black man to be president. Ever. (Did I say, Ever?) For them, this is fact, not conjecture.
This belief more than anything else is central to what others interpret as Wright's media carelessness but what I see as the ultimate display of the cynicism of Wright's generation.
We saw a similar cynicism in the unwillingness of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton--themselves, former presidential candidates--to take Obama's candidacy seriously.
We saw it more recently in civil rights icon, John Lewis' flip-flopping. The founding member of the Congressional Black Caucus supported Hillary early on but was forced by his district's overwhelming support of Barack Obama to cast his superdelegate ballot with the 'hope' candidate.
When Obama said, in his second-too-many press conference on Wright, that "the person I saw yesterday is not the person I met twenty years ago," he was expressing frustration but also a recognition that Wright's generation isn't equipped to confront the difficulties of race in our time. Wright's vision only allows him to see what America was and not what America could be. Barack Obama has outgrown him.
Now, those who look at Wright's media blitz and ponder, "Why now?" are missing the point. It's not that Wright fails to recognize that he's hurting Barack's campaign. Rather, it's a question of how he's approaching the situation. To Wright, if a Black presidency is unfathomable, how can he hurt it? White racism decided long ago--regardless of what Wright does--that Obama's inability to win is a foregone conclusion.
As legions of young supporters have shown throughout this election season however, that's crap. And it's not that younger generation politicians like Barack Obama, Newark mayor Corey Booker and their young multi-racial supporters have forgotten that white racism is alive and well. What's unique to their generation's racial worldview is that they believe they can defeat it.
Their faith in what America could be, despite the naysayers groaning behind the Wright whirlwind, is what will save Barack Obama's campaign.
Bakari Kitwana is author of Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop, and Artist-in-Residence at the Center for the Study of Race, Politics and Culture at the University of Chicago.
Gut Reaction to Acquittal of Sean Bell's Killers
Posted May 1, 02:13 PMUntil people on the side of justice are willing to make the killers' lives a living hell regardless of what the criminal injustice system does, there will be more Sean Bells. 50 shots forever in the body politic of America's logic of justifiable homicide.
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Use the Youth Vote to Defeat Barack Obama
Posted May 1, 02:09 PMThe youth vote is poised to be the decisive factor in the 2008 Presidential Election. Young people have set records all year at primaries across the country and any candidate on the wrong side of that groundswell shouldn't sleep easy. In a recent USA Today op-ed, American Enterprise Institute fellow David Frum laments the Republican loss of the youth vote to more savvy Democratic Party organizers. But in my estimation, the youth vote is still up for grabs.
Those outside of the Obama campaign, like Frum, assume that Team Obama is extraordinarily skilled at organizing young people. They're dead wrong. Obama may be reaching young voters but his is a marketing campaign. What's needed is an outreach campaign to already organized collectives of young people. There is a difference.
Obama's message of change is indeed attractive to young voters who have been waiting for their generation's Freedom Rides. But a concerted effort to tap into the countless youth activists who have been organizing since 2004 would give Obama a solid base and not simply the loose confederate of individuals that he has now--and that will fall apart after the election.
Politically organized bodies of youth do exist. The Hip Hop Congress has over 80 chapters around the country and the League of Young Voters daily organizes youth in states like Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Nevada. These organizations reach young people where they are and prior to this election season, were already making electoral politics sexy for them.
By default--and for now--Barack Obama's campaign has been the beneficiary of these groups' grassroots efforts.
Over the last two months, I've been traveling across the country with youth organizers on a 10-city townhall meeting tour, discussing what young people should expect to get out of participating in the upcoming election.
During our visits to places like Boston, Hartford, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Fairfield and Bethlehem, I conducted informal polls of well-known and respected twenty-and-thirty-something activists. I made an intriguing discovery.
Of those organization's leaders with the most significant national following, guess how many Team Obama had contacted? None.
It's a mistake for Obama to cruise on the assumption that young voters will neither cross over to Hillary Clinton nor Republicans.
Obama's opposition would be wise to consider the following.
• Put a firm offer on the table for young voters that you can realistically deliver (be it reduced student loan debt, working class jobs, sharing the burden of the Iraq war, or a strategy to lower gas prices).
• Tap young leaders with a following for significant decision-making positions in your campaign and beyond.
• Start an ongoing dialogue that will last through the election and that builds an accountable relationship between the White House and youth.
A substantive move in any of these directions will yield what Clinton and John McCain have been praying for: the occasion to finally see the fear of impending defeat in Obama's eyes.
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Those outside of the Obama campaign, like Frum, assume that Team Obama is extraordinarily skilled at organizing young people. They're dead wrong. Obama may be reaching young voters but his is a marketing campaign. What's needed is an outreach campaign to already organized collectives of young people. There is a difference.
Obama's message of change is indeed attractive to young voters who have been waiting for their generation's Freedom Rides. But a concerted effort to tap into the countless youth activists who have been organizing since 2004 would give Obama a solid base and not simply the loose confederate of individuals that he has now--and that will fall apart after the election.
Politically organized bodies of youth do exist. The Hip Hop Congress has over 80 chapters around the country and the League of Young Voters daily organizes youth in states like Wisconsin, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania and Nevada. These organizations reach young people where they are and prior to this election season, were already making electoral politics sexy for them.
By default--and for now--Barack Obama's campaign has been the beneficiary of these groups' grassroots efforts.
Over the last two months, I've been traveling across the country with youth organizers on a 10-city townhall meeting tour, discussing what young people should expect to get out of participating in the upcoming election.
During our visits to places like Boston, Hartford, San Francisco, San Luis Obispo, Fairfield and Bethlehem, I conducted informal polls of well-known and respected twenty-and-thirty-something activists. I made an intriguing discovery.
Of those organization's leaders with the most significant national following, guess how many Team Obama had contacted? None.
It's a mistake for Obama to cruise on the assumption that young voters will neither cross over to Hillary Clinton nor Republicans.
Obama's opposition would be wise to consider the following.
• Put a firm offer on the table for young voters that you can realistically deliver (be it reduced student loan debt, working class jobs, sharing the burden of the Iraq war, or a strategy to lower gas prices).
• Tap young leaders with a following for significant decision-making positions in your campaign and beyond.
• Start an ongoing dialogue that will last through the election and that builds an accountable relationship between the White House and youth.
A substantive move in any of these directions will yield what Clinton and John McCain have been praying for: the occasion to finally see the fear of impending defeat in Obama's eyes.
Kitwana: Is Bush Giving a Second Chance to Inmates?
Posted May 1, 01:57 PMBush signs Second Chance Act to benefit drug offenders
Lengthy sentences have been the weapon of choice in War on Drugs
New law backed by 5 million
Today when President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, I couldn't help but wonder if he's more in search of a second chance for himself than for the millions of Americans languishing in American prisons under his watch.
The Second Chance Act, at least symbolically, represents a dramatic policy shift on drug crimes-by comparison, it's the moral equivalent of America lifting the economic embargo against Cuba overnight.
Not since the Nixon Administration has America considered rehabilitation as a solution to drug crimes. For much of the last three decades, lengthier sentences have been the universal American public policy answer to crime and punishment. The result has been the approximately two million strong prison? population.
The Second Chance Act mandates a strong commitment to rehabilitation as central to America's criminal justice system, calls on the Justice Department to increase research on reentry, creates a national Reentry Resource Center to advocate successful reentry approaches, and is backed by 5 million annually.
Although education, housing assistance and employment top the list of experimental programs for which matching grants will be available, the new law won't fly without a serious commitment to:
• a public relations campaign to reverse the Willie Hortonization of the urban poor. It's going to take time and money to reverse three decades of insisting the poor are unworthy of rehabilitation.
• jobs for working class Americans. The Bush years mark the greatest loss of jobs in America since the Depression. Without living wage jobs for America's working class, ex-offenders have few places to re-enter the American economy except in the underground economy.
• economic development in impoverished urban centers that have been all but abandoned. I'm not talking about transplanting the poor to the benefit of latte-sipping middle and upper class gentrifiers. Rather, we need a real commitment to rebuilding infrastructure in poor communities that's as large as infrastructure rebuilding in Iraq and the multi-billion dollar bailout that the Bush Administration is advocating for financial markets.
I am all for rehabilitation. But if Bush is hoping to redeem his legacy in his eleventh hour, it will take more than empty gestures or the genuflecting of a reformed compassionate conservative.
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Lengthy sentences have been the weapon of choice in War on Drugs
New law backed by 5 million
Today when President Bush signed the Second Chance Act, I couldn't help but wonder if he's more in search of a second chance for himself than for the millions of Americans languishing in American prisons under his watch.
The Second Chance Act, at least symbolically, represents a dramatic policy shift on drug crimes-by comparison, it's the moral equivalent of America lifting the economic embargo against Cuba overnight.
Not since the Nixon Administration has America considered rehabilitation as a solution to drug crimes. For much of the last three decades, lengthier sentences have been the universal American public policy answer to crime and punishment. The result has been the approximately two million strong prison? population.
The Second Chance Act mandates a strong commitment to rehabilitation as central to America's criminal justice system, calls on the Justice Department to increase research on reentry, creates a national Reentry Resource Center to advocate successful reentry approaches, and is backed by 5 million annually.
Although education, housing assistance and employment top the list of experimental programs for which matching grants will be available, the new law won't fly without a serious commitment to:
• a public relations campaign to reverse the Willie Hortonization of the urban poor. It's going to take time and money to reverse three decades of insisting the poor are unworthy of rehabilitation.
• jobs for working class Americans. The Bush years mark the greatest loss of jobs in America since the Depression. Without living wage jobs for America's working class, ex-offenders have few places to re-enter the American economy except in the underground economy.
• economic development in impoverished urban centers that have been all but abandoned. I'm not talking about transplanting the poor to the benefit of latte-sipping middle and upper class gentrifiers. Rather, we need a real commitment to rebuilding infrastructure in poor communities that's as large as infrastructure rebuilding in Iraq and the multi-billion dollar bailout that the Bush Administration is advocating for financial markets.
I am all for rehabilitation. But if Bush is hoping to redeem his legacy in his eleventh hour, it will take more than empty gestures or the genuflecting of a reformed compassionate conservative.
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Bakari KitwanaBakari Kitwana is a journalist, activist and political analyst whose commentary on politics and youth culture have been seen on the CNN, FOX News (the O'Reilly Factor), C-Span, PBS (The Tavis Smiley Show) and heard on NPR.
