Are Obama’s Surrogates Clueless?
20 March 2008 2:45 pm by Taylor Marsh
Dumb and dumber is the sub-heading to this one.
You’d think with the Easter holiday weekend upon us the Obama campaign would give it a rest. But Obama’s superdelegate surrogates are stepping all over the Wright issue,
making matters worse for Obama and the Democrats, by extension.
John Kerry should also seriously reconsider judging people like Ms. Ferraro
when it comes to comments on race. He has his own “Ferarro moment,”
saying that Obama is the one we’ve been looking for, but not because he’s a brilliant,
incredibly gifted politician that understands the world through the prism of
his life, but because of his skin color. But not only that, Obama can heal
religious extremism because he’s African American.
“… He has an ability to help us bridge the divide of religious extremism.
… .. Because he’s African American. Because he’s a black man who has come
from a place of oppression and repression in through the years in our own
country. We only broke the back of civil rights Jim Crow in the 1960s here.
Everybody in the world knows this is a recent journey for Amercia for America.”
– John Kerry (via Ben Smith)
I do not support Senator Obama’s candidacy, but I have no trouble giving the senator more credit than this, simply by virtue of his many natural gifts, none of which have anything whatsoever to do with the fact that he’s African American. You would think Democrats could talk about race in a manner that respected
the significance of Obama’s candidacy without reducing him to “the black
candidate,” something he’s resisted from the start.
That’s gone
now. Obama’s association with Rev. Wright blew it away, especially after the
speech, which had him reversing a previous lie that he hadn’t heard Wright’s
screeds. But when your own superdelegate surrogates are now publicly reducing
you to a stereotype it makes matters even worse. Segue to clueless
Missourian Claire McCaskill:
“He, for the first time, I think, as a black leader in America, has
come to the American people not as a victim, but rather as a leader,”
McCaskill said.
Ho-boy. So that means other African American leaders before Obama
presented themselves in the political arena as victims? Not because, like in the case of civil rights hero John Lewis, he earned it through his courage and undeniable leadership in that era. Or is McCaskill saying
that she thinks other black leaders have traded on a victim status, but Obama
transcends what McCaskill seems to imply is traditional African American
victimhood? Yikes.
At least Ferraro knew what she was saying, took heat for it and accepted it, because, rightly or wrongly, she meant what she said. I’m not sure Kerry or McCaskill have a clue.
