What if I told you in 2004 that the Democratic party would run an African American candidate for president in 2008? I tell you National Journal will officially label this candidate the most liberal member of the United States Senate. This candidate will also have served less than three years in that Senate, with no executive, foreign policy, or military experience. Then I tell you that this candidate will lose the party's primaries in Texas, California, New York, Ohio, Florida, and Pennsylvania. Oh, and his minister sounds like Louis Farrakhan, and actually pals around and gives awards to Farrakhan. This is the situation the Democratic party finds itself in, and not only that, but the presumptive Republican nominee has the highest favorability rating of any candidate Gallup's tracked in the last eight years. It's a recipe for disaster in a year when the Democratic party could only defeat itself. But that's the Democrats' specialty. Glenn Greenwald writes today under the headline, "Obama's faith in the reasoning abilities of the American public." Seriously? After almost eight years of whining about how stupid Americans are, that's where Democrats want to put their faith? His opening graph:
I haven't written about the Obama speech yet (video here) because I spent much of the day reading the instantaneous reactions of virtually everyone else, and because the issues raised by the speech are complex and my views about it are somewhat ambiguous. Personally, I found the speech riveting, provocative, insightful, thoughtful and courageous -- courageous because it eschewed almost completely all cliches, pandering and condescension, the first time I can recall a political figure of any significance doing so when addressing a controversial matter.
Mere mortals, and we can now count Obama among them, don't get elected to national office by eschewing cliches, pandering and condescension. I did a show last night on New England Cable News with a black preacher from Boston and a black Obama supporter. Both thought the speech was magnificent because Obama spoke the truth, and the woman thought that Obama had finally laid to rest her fears that Obama didn't see himself as part of the civil rights struggle. Geez, I can't think of a worse outcome for the first "post-racial" candidate. And as far as the truth, again, nobody ever won an election by telling hard truths to the American people. That's just not how politics works (and by the way, the only hard truth Obama needed to tell last night was that his connection to Wright was one of political necessity and nothing more). Meanwhile, back on planet earth, the Republican party is elated:
Now, with the emergence of the notorious video portraying Rev. Jeremiah Wright damning the country, criticizing Israel, faulting U.S. policy for the attacks of Sept. 11 and generally lashing out against white America, GOP strategists believe they've finally found an antidote to Obamamania. In their view, the inflammatory sermons by Obama's pastor offer the party a pathway to victory if Obama emerges as the Democratic nominee. Not only will the video clips enable some elements of the party to define him as unpatriotic, they will also serve as a powerful motivating force for the conservative base.
And that is the ultimate truth of all this. Obama has been fatally wounded, and yet the Democratic party superdelegates, who exist solely to prevent such a catastrophe in a close primary battle, can do nothing about it. If they hand the nomination to Clinton, the party loses the black vote, and Clinton cannot win without those votes. Just a few month after all the worry on the right about Democratic turnout, the fracturing of the Republican coalition, the lack of exciting Republican candidates...it turns out the Democrats intend to commit collective suicide with a final nod to the "reasoning abilities of the American public."