Letters to the Editor
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@cheeta
You say: "She should've let all those ugly episodes be."
What 'ugly episodes' are we talking about here? Please be specific.
Re the Clintons as opportunists: what do you think motivates Obama? Do you see him playing Gandhi in the remake?
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I will take on Willentz, to renounce and to reject....
I.
He makes an argument about Obama's attacks on Hillary's stance on NAFTA and health care without noting that Hillary has supported free trade agreements while a Senator, and she has made positive statements about NAFTA. Obama's mailing uses one quote by Clinton that is apparently slim sourced, but NPR and other media have pointed out that she has made other similar positive statements, even in her book. (Of course Obama has also made positive statements about free trade in his book but that is not something Willentz mentions.) And as for the health care mailings, they are no more misleading to mosts observers than the flyers Clinton sent out claiming that Obama doesn't support womens' right to choose....Within the context of this campaign I have not seen that Obama's mailers are more misleading than, say Clinton's ads in South Carolina that accused him of supporting the ideas of Reagan.
II.
He fails to mention the example that drew most peoples' attention: the person (I've forgotten who it was now) who said that Obama might be seen as a drug dealer. The drug dealer remark was thought by some people to be racial, since Obama had only mentioned experimenting with taking drugs. He had never mentioned selling them. No one ever assumed that George Bush was a drug dealer when he took cocaine because that is supposedly a racial thing. So that remark was considered to be less innocent than the example that Willentz chooses to give for his argument. Willentz' thesis allows for gender blindness while focusing primarily on Obama's race. This seems out of balance. ie. what about a "gender card" is it less insidious to play a gender card? What would that imply about gender? That it doesn't matter to American history or society? That's, well, sexist.
III.
He calls Frank Rich a vehement Obama supporter at the New York Times, without mentioning Krugman (who he quoted in section one against Obama's health care mailings) has been at least as vehement for Clinton. Also since John Lewis has switched his support to Obama, it now seems inaccurate and possibly wishful to call this article "inaccurate and possibly wishful" that described Lewis' contemplation of changing his support.
Finally, in an appeal to emotions, blaming Obama's supporters for the photo of Obama in the turban forgets the fact that Drudge said it was a Clinton supporter who turned it in to him. Is Drudge part of Obama's media support? Why would Drudge would lie to protect Obama? Right now Obama is leading in the delegate count and in the polls, so why would his supporters need a stunt like this? And why would Drudge want Obama to win when Obama is beating McCain in the polls with more ease than Clinton?
Still, Willents' weakest argument is that if Obama hadn't somehow tricked people into thinking that the Clintons are a couple of spooks then all would be different. This presupposes that the Clintons have not made any contributions toward their own fall...and also to the idea that to like Obama better means to not like the Clintons at all, which many of us who voted for the Clintons and supported them during their darkest hours find hard to believe.
NPR which I love dearly is no supporter of Obama...they all but call him "that young black guy" (clearly old white people are the base). And CNN hasn't been offering pillows to Obama either. They seem to think Clinton has all the stuff to be commander in chief.
But reducing history to an argument is what articles like Willentz' are supposed to do. They're supposed to make us think. But in stacking the cards, I don't think he's made anything more than a cheap jab that discounts the intelligence and the depth of analysis at least half of the Democratic party including important thinkers like John Lewis and Toni Morrison, politicians like Chris Dodd and Russ Feingold, strategists like Samantha Power etc. etc.
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Sean Wilentz's TNR article is complete garbage, and here's why
There are numerous problems with Wilentz's article, from top to bottom: Factual, logical, definitional, and in terms of double-standards. Worse, Wilentz does not fully disclose his bias in favor of the Clinton campaign, though it is obvious when reading the article. (What is it with journalists who fail to disclose their connections and biases -- did they miss that day in j-school?)
I think the biggest problem with Wilentz's article is philosophical: He fails to define "race baiting" or make distinctions between different types of reference to race. Wilentz consistently conflates two opposite types of "race baiting": (1) References to race designed to play on people's racism, and (2) references to race disgned to play on people's sense of outrage AGAINST racism.
Wilentz also conflates major campaign moves with small errors in judgment by low-totem-pole campaign operatives and by supporters with peripheral or no connection to the official campaign. A major campaign move would be something done or said by the top campaign staff, or a big advertisement released with the campaign's blessing. But Wilentz frequently cites the things done by supporters and fails to establish any link to the official campaign -- an error I often see people in these message boards make. At the end of the article, Wilentz tries to conclude that the Obama campaign's "race baiting" is as bad as the Willie Horton ads, but nothing he has given as evidence even approaches that level of campaign move.
Wilentz also fails to mention a very obvious and important truth: Accusing somebody of "race baiting" can be, in itself, a form of race baiting. I know this from this message board, as both AKA Smith, ljwalker53 and somebody named ncawley all told me that I was "race baiting" in my messages, when in fact I hadn't even brought up race at all. I asked AKA Smith, who also is very fond of accusing me and other people of sexism completely out of the blue, to explain where I had been using "race baiting," and she never provided any response. To this day I have no idea why I was accused of such. But I strongly suspect the Clinton side's motivation in such accusations: If you do accuse the other side of race baiting, and then they defend themselves, pretty soon you're enmeshed in a bitter discussion of race. The net effect of having a discussion of race is that (1) it distracts from the bigger, more important issues, (2) it inevitably makes people look angry, or whiny, which either way makes them look unappealing, and (3) pretty soon somebody's going to say something stupid that makes the other side look good by comparison.
Wilentz's article, which is based on the flimsiest of evidence, tries to make a damning case against Obama, as if Obama himself is pulling the strings on an orchestrated effort to cleverly and slyly make the Clintons look racist. Not only doesn't Wilentz make the case, but it's pretty obvious to me that he's a hypocrite who's no better than what he decries. First of all, he doesn't hold the Clinton campaign accountable for any of the negative aspects of their campaign. If he were an objective judge of campaign tactics, he would at least mention some of the things that have come out of the Clinton camp. But even worse, he ends his article by saying the Obama campaign wants to win "by any means necessary." In case you don't get the reference, that's a line famously attributed to Malcolm X, a militant Muslim black man who advocated violence (in contrast to MLK Jr.'s passive resistance). Does Wilentz really want us to take him seriously after such a cheap shot?
One more problem with the "race-baiting" accusation: Many of the common-sense flaws that some Obama supporters display, in terms of using race issues inappropriately, or being too easily offended by comments/situations that are in fact fairly ambiguous, are routinely displayed by Clinton supporters who go overboard in the exact same way in reference to sexism. Why doesn't Wilentz acknowledge that? Is it because there is no term in our current political vernacular for "sex-baiting"? Clearly, if we are to use Wilentz's threshold, then there is just as much "sex-baiting" from the Clinton camp as there is "race-baiting" from the other side.
Wilentz never acknowledges that Obama himself has studiously avoided race-baiting. Wilentz tries to suggest that Obama is just as bad for NOT race-baiting as he would be if he DID race-bait, because, Wilentz's line of reasoning goes, Obama is just trying to look above-board while he's letting his operatives do the dirty work. Wilentz does not acknowledge that Obama sends a clear message in his speeches that he's trying to get past the racial divides of the past, and that Obama has strongly repudiated racially-themed attacks within his campaign. You'd think that would be worth mentioning, even as a caveat, but Wilentz pretends nothing like it has occurred.
It's a very dishonest article, obviously written with a strong bias rather than from the perspective of a real journalist. He may be a Princeton history professor, but I think the guy's a sellout. I'm not the only one: Even several writers for The New Republic found his article abhorrent, and they responded to it with a vengeance. Here are those links:
http://blogs.tnr.com/tnr/blogs/the_plank/archive/2008/02/27/did-obama-play-the-race-card.aspx
http://www.tnr.com/politics/story.html?id=129d0545-4db1-4dfd-988c-2c6e1c807934
I'm going to go into some more details in my next message. Seriously, as I read the article, I lost count of all the problems with it.