I’ve just about had it with my friend Jim Sleeper.
This is what he does to infuriate me:
He writes these deep, complicated pieces, which are really essays, not blog posts, that are layered with links to other thoughtful pieces that very nearly grind you to the ground as you contemplate what they mean, that by the time you catch your breadth to even think of what to say about them, the moment to comment has almost passed. (Jae C. Hong/Associated Press) Barack Obama’s campaign wants to stem concerns about his viability in a general election race.
And, as you’re doing this, knocking on your consciousness, demanding to be considered, would be another Sleeper piece, equally as thoughtful, complex and reasoned as the one you’re wrestling with.
All I can say is, thank God for this interminable presidential primary election season.
Ok, now that I’ve gotten that off my chest, what of the substance of Jim’s piece?
I (partly) disagree with Jim (but is this his argument, or is he limning another’s) and agree with one of the responses to his TPM Cafe piece offering Sen. Barack Obama a “Way Out of the Race Trap” in this campaign.
Sleeper referred to Ed Kilgore’s piece at TPM Cafe highlighting a debate at The New Republic over whether Obama is fated to be another McGovern. Kilgore gently demolished that trope. Sleeper wondered why none of these guys mentioned Obama’s race when the importance of race had just shown itself in the recent Pennsylvania primary.
3 Detectives Acquitted in Bell Shooting By MICHAEL WILSON, April 26, 2008
Three detectives were found not guilty Friday morning on all charges in the shooting death of Sean Bell, who died in a hail of 50 police bullets outside a club in Jamaica, Queens.
Justice Arthur J. Cooperman, who delivered the verdict, said many of the prosecution’s witnesses, including Mr. Bell’s friends and the two wounded victims, were simply not believable. “At times, the testimony of those witnesses just didn’t make sense,” he said.
His verdict prompted several supporters of Mr. Bell to storm out of the courtroom, and screams could be heard in the hallway moments later. The three detectives — Gescard F. Isnora, Michael Oliver and Marc Cooper — were escorted out of a side doorway. Outside, a crowd gathered behind police barricades, occasionally shouting, amid a veritable sea of police officers.
The verdict comes 17 months to the day since the Nov. 25, 2006, shooting of Mr. Bell, 23, and his friends, Joseph Guzman and Trent Benefield, outside the Club Kalua in Jamaica, Queens, hours before Mr. Bell was to be married.
It was delivered in a packed courtroom and was heard by, among others, the slain man’s parents and his fiancée. The seven-week trial, which ended April 14, was heard by Justice Cooperman in State Supreme Court in Queens after the defendants waived their right to a jury, a strategy some lawyers called risky at the time. But it clearly paid off with Friday’s verdict.
Before rendering his verdict, Justice Cooperman ran through a narrative of the evening, and concluded “the police response with respect to each defendant was not found to be criminal.”
So, add Sean Bell to the names of people wounded or martyred without consequence by New York City’s police officers. A partial list
Eleanor Bumpers, October 1984
Abner Louima, August 1997 (he survived torture and sodomy with a broom handle)
Antoine Reid, June 1998
Kevin Cerbelli, October 1998
Amadou Diallo, February 1999
Patrick Dorismond, March 2000
Ousmane Zongo, May 2003
Timothy Stansbury Jr., Jan. 2004
Update: Anthony Baez, December 1994
I tried to restrain myself from commenting on Pope Benedict’s visit to the United States. I expected the media would go overboard in its coverage. But, even with his departure, I have to get some things off my chest.
I believe religion has its place and uses, the most relevant of which I think is that it serves as a balm or palliative for troubled souls. Anything people can latch onto to make them cope with our troubled world is always welcomed. But that is not all religion, whatever your faith or denomination, should be.
I’ll acknowledge, of course, that there are institutions of all faiths and denominations that do phenomenal work in the shadows, where people are sick and where they suffer. They uphold the best that we should expect of the faithful.
What I also know is that religion has been the cause of much suffering in the world.
Which brings me to the subject of Pope Benedict’s visit to the U.S. I must not believe in redemption because certain things I don’t think you should not be able to overcome. Among those I would include youthful dalliance with Nazism (although I did have my own dalliances–with Catholicism and Islam, not Nazism–as a youth but a word or two on those later).
Joseph Alois Ratzinger was a former Hitler Youth. His supporters insist membership in the Hitler Youth was required of all 14-year-old Germans of that awful period and that Ratzinger was an unenthusiatic member; moreover, that a cousin of his who had Down Syndrome was killed by Nazis in their eugenics campaign. Ratzinger was drafted into the German anti-aircraft corps at 16 and later trained in the German infantry but was precluded from actual combat because of an illness.
That’s more history than I wanted to get into here. But, this is the thing. Even allowing that Ratzinger regretted his past and atoned for it, which I don’t know that he did either, did he have to become the pope?
He was supposed to be guiding the search for a new pope when–confounding predictions that the next pope would be from the developing world, probably Latin America–he pulled a Cheney and had himself named pope instead.
Ratzinger was always conservative but the Catholic Church needed change–doctrines about marriage, celibacy and the priesthood, women ordination, gay rights, abortion, and a host of other issues–and he was unlikely agent of change. He hasn’t been. Church doctrines have been just as destructive under his papacy.
There isn’t much to say about my dalliance with Islam. As a boy, I partook in the festivities when Muslims break their fast during the Ramadan season. I appreciated but did not try to convert to, or even learn the religion.
Catholicism was another matter. I very nearly converted to Catholicism, all on account of a boyhood crush on a neighborhood girl. My family in Africa when I was growing up was Baptist. I was raised in the church, and I graduated from a Baptist high school.
I fell into deep infatuation with a girl when I was about 10 years old. Besides the fact that she was Ibo and I was Yoruba, she was also Catholic to my Baptist. So, of course, I started going to her church.
Not only that, I started taking Catechism classes because she took communion and it was something I wanted to share with her. The studies went well enough, I memorized all the prayers:
“Hail Mary, full of grace, the Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women, and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.
“Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners, now and at the hour of our death. Amen.”
And so on and so forth.
I lived in deep poverty in those days and I remember much of my life in Africa being full of turmoil. The time I was besotted with the girl and Catholicism I remember as being relatively happy and peaceful. The church and its practiced rituals comforted me. The happiness came from plays I wrote, child plays really, and on dulcet evenings, we would perform for family and friends.
I was always the hero in the plays and she my heroine.
I don’t remember exactly how this period ended, except that just before the baptismal mass, when I would take my first communion as a Catholic, I fell violently ill. By the time I recovered I no longer wanted to be a Catholic (I believe, also, that the girl moved away from the neighborhood and, with my her gone, so did my ardor for the Catholic church).
But, in forsaking the Catholic Church, I did not exactly return to my church.
Partly for my grandmother, who I adored, I attended church services devotedly during my adolescence and youth and participated in other activities at church. But I had questions that no one in my church or my high school scripture union could answer. When I left high school and moved away from home, eventually arriving in the United States as a 16-year-old, a time when no one compelled me to go to church, I stopped going to church regularly.
Often when I have found myself in church in the intervening years, it was often on assignment as a newspaper reporter. I have returned to this or that church occassionaly to worship (the Riverside Church was the last one a few years ago) but left still questioning, still not having answers.
This wasn’t the overriding question that pushed me away from the Christian church all these years but it is one I want to ask at the moment:
Why is there so much suffering in this world?
Colson Whitehead, author of numerous books (John Henry Days, Apex Hides the Hurt, The Colossus of New York, The Intuitionist, and the forthcoming Sag Harbor) and a fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers, has written a piece for The New York Times that could only have been written by The Guy Who’s Where He Is Only Because He’s Black.
First, I think it’s brilliant.
Second, I wish I’d written it.
A taste:
People think I have it easy, but it’s surprisingly difficult being The Guy Who Got Where He Is Only Because He’s Black, what with the whole having to be everywhere in the country at once thing. One second I’m nodding enthusiastically in a sales conference in Boise, Idaho, and the next I’m separating conjoined triplets at the Institute For Terribly Complicated Surgery in Buchanan, N.Y., and then I have to rush out to Muncie, Ind., to put my little “Inspector 12” tag in a bag of Fruit of the Loom.
It’s exhausting, all that travel. Decent, hard-working folks out there have their religion and their xenophobia to cling to. All I have is a fistful of upgrades to first class and free headphones. Headphones That Should Have Gone to a More Deserving Passenger.
Guns? I wish I had a gun! Ever run out of truffle oil before a dinner party and have to go to Whole Foods on a weekend? It’ll make you want to spread a little buckshot around, that’s for sure.
Look, we’re all hurting, trying to make ends meet. I have serious overhead with all the résumés I send out. The postage is one thing, but I also like to print my résumé on a nice creamy bond. I think it sends a message. Then there’s the dry cleaning and the soap — I prefer to be clean and articulate in my interviews, put my best foot forward. I think it’s working. People are responding to how I present myself.
As roy edroso (of Alicublog) said a few days ago (in another brilliant piece of political agitprop I wish I’d employed first):
Well, at least people have stopped referring to him as an affirmative action case — because it’s clear no candidate has ever been held to this kind of ridiculous standard.
As the race for the Democratic Party nomination for president reaches its racial nadir, let’s hope we can look and see who is the best candidate and who has all the advantages here. And let’s remember who has elevated our political discourse this election season.
UPDATE I: I would be remiss if I do not bring to your attention this piece by LeftyEnglish.
Charisse brought it to my attention. Here’s LeftyEnglish:
One of the things I continue to hear morons like Scarborough (yes, I am a masochist) prattle on about is this: “Obama struggles with working class voters.”
“Wow. That’s a lot of voters he’s having trouble with.” I say to myself. And then I remember to pull the Q-tip out of my brain… Continue
That would be Carl Bialik, who examines the way numbers are used and abused in a blog at the Wall Street Journal, crunches the numbers post-Pennsylvania.
He does not in this post reach a earth-shattering conclusion different from conventional wisdom but it’s still an enjoyable read, especially when you consider he’s dealing in numbers.
The numbers do not favor Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s cause. Unless you change the rules and make them all favor her. Even then, they bring only close enough for an almost tie. 
Her argument to the Superdelegates then, argument which she voiced in Pennsylvania, would be that she is best suited for the general election because Sen. Barack Obama is simply the kind of candidate Democrats nominate only to see them lose ignominiously in the general election.
So, overturn the results so far and give the nomination to her, even if she is trailing by all the measures by which you determine the party nominee.
She, for instance, is saying that results from caucuses should not count because they skew to Mr. Obama’s strength, which is organizing. I consider myself a political junkie and this is the first time I’ve heard this argument against the caucuses.
There’s a certain part of me that appreciates HRC’s win-at-all-cost mentality. For once, I don’t want to be virtuous. I want to see Democrats give Republicans a dose (maybe even more than that) of their own medicine.
I don’t know what Sen. John McCain, the Republican nominee, has to say about anything. I know he believes war is a good thing, that people need to get second jobs to deal with the declining economy and the credit crisis, and that he and the money bags he married are sitting on a mountain of wealth.
A debate between the Democratic Party nominee, Clinton or Obama, and this corrupt and unprincipled man should be a no-contest. HRC is a fighter. She’s more than demonstrated that? But, can she guarantee a win?
No. And, is it too much to want some grace and intelligence and brilliance, all of which Obama possesses in abundance (which Clinton does too, except for the grace part) in your nominee? And when you consider Obama already leads in the number of votes and delegates and by any other measure you want to use, why overturn that?
Editorial
The Low Road to Victory
The Pennsylvania campaign, which produced yet another inconclusive result on Tuesday, was even meaner, more vacuous, more desperate, and more filled with pandering than the mean, vacuous, desperate, pander-filled contests that preceded it.
Voters are getting tired of it; it is demeaning the political process; and it does not work. It is past time for Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton to acknowledge that the negativity, for which she is mostly responsible, does nothing but harm to her, her opponent, her party and the 2008 election.
If nothing else, self interest should push her in that direction. Mrs. Clinton did not get the big win in Pennsylvania that she needed to challenge the calculus of the Democratic race. It is true that Senator Barack Obama outspent her 2-to-1. But Mrs. Clinton and her advisers should mainly blame themselves, because, as the political operatives say, they went heavily negative and ended up squandering a good part of what was once a 20-point lead.
On the eve of this crucial primary, Mrs. Clinton became the first Democratic candidate to wave the bloody shirt of 9/11. A Clinton television ad — torn right from Karl Rove’s playbook — evoked the 1929 stock market crash, Pearl Harbor, the Cuban missile crisis, the cold war and the 9/11 attacks, complete with video of Osama bin Laden. “If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen,” the narrator intoned.
If that was supposed to bolster Mrs. Clinton’s argument that she is the better prepared to be president in a dangerous world, she sent the opposite message on Tuesday morning by declaring in an interview on ABC News that if Iran attacked Israel while she were president: “We would be able to totally obliterate them.”
By staying on the attack and not engaging Mr. Obama on the substance of issues like terrorism, the economy and how to organize an orderly exit from Iraq, Mrs. Clinton does more than just turn off voters who don’t like negative campaigning. She undercuts the rationale for her candidacy that led this page and others to support her: that she is more qualified, right now, to be president than Mr. Obama.
Mr. Obama is not blameless when it comes to the negative and vapid nature of this campaign. He is increasingly rising to Mrs. Clinton’s bait, undercutting his own claims that he is offering a higher more inclusive form of politics. When she criticized his comments about “bitter” voters, Mr. Obama mocked her as an Annie Oakley wannabe. All that does is remind Americans who are on the fence about his relative youth and inexperience.
No matter what the high-priced political operatives (from both camps) may think, it is not a disadvantage that Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton share many of the same essential values and sensible policy prescriptions. It is their strength, and they are doing their best to make voters forget it. And if they think that only Democrats are paying attention to this spectacle, they’re wrong.
After seven years of George W. Bush’s failed with-us-or-against-us presidency, all American voters deserve to hear a nuanced debate — right now and through the general campaign — about how each candidate will combat terrorism, protect civil liberties, address the housing crisis and end the war in Iraq.
It is getting to be time for the superdelegates to do what the Democrats had in mind when they created superdelegates: settle a bloody race that cannot be won at the ballot box. Mrs. Clinton once had a big lead among the party elders, but has been steadily losing it, in large part because of her negative campaign. If she is ever to have a hope of persuading these most loyal of Democrats to come back to her side, let alone win over the larger body of voters, she has to call off the dogs.