MICHAEL O. ALLEN

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Muhammad Ali’s Dream

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AliIt is a strange process that we put all our heroes and heroines through.

First, we seen them as dangerous and revile them. Then, in death, we (even their former antagonists and adversaries) adopt them and turn them into everything we wished the hero to be, everything we could not make them be when alive.

Much as we turned Martin Luther King, Jr. into a plaster saint that even the racists among us could quote to our own ends, so too shall we render Muhammad Ali.

For Ali, the process actually began when he lighted the Olympic flame at the 1996 Atlanta Olympics.

It was the first time the whole world saw how much Parkinson’s Disease had taken from Ali. Though, an apparition by the time he turned up in Atlanta, he stood tall, powerful and defiant still.

But because he could not really speak for himself, not anymore, people started speaking for him and saying for him things that he might not have said for himself.

His death may complete that process of sainthood. He would be fitted with feet of clay, the better to keep him in place. Writer Dave Zirin is cautioning against that in a Los Angeles Times opinion-editorial.

Kirin wrote:

“His life was one of polarization and reconciliation, anger and love, and a ferocious, uncompromising commitment to nonviolence, all delivered through the scandalously dirty vessel of corruption known as boxing. Few have ever walked so confidently and casually from man to myth, and that journey was well earned.”

I’ll quote one more passage but this article is required for anyone who ever cared about Ali and what he stood for:

“Ali’s death, however, should be an opportunity to remember what made him so dangerous in the first place. The best place to start would be to recall the part of him that died decades ago: his voice. No athlete, no politician, no preacher ever had a voice quite like his or used it as effectively as he did. Ali’s voice was playful, lilting, with a rhythm that matched his otherworldly footwork in the boxing ring. It’s a voice that forced you to listen lest you miss a joke, a gibe or a flash of joy.”

In a series of interviews with the BBC’s Michael Parkinson, Ali expanded on his views about everything under the sun. The most iconic of those interviews was the first one, which took place Oct. 17, 1971.

Some of what Ali remarked on then are commonplace today and are taken for granted. But, when Ali spoke, not only did African-Americans lack much power and rights, our society, including the power of our own government, resisted the civil rights movement.

June 6, 2016
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Mandela Sworn in as Freedom Reigns

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By MICHAEL O. ALLEN, Daily News Staff Writer | Wednesday, May 11, 1994

PRETORIA—Climaxing his journey from political prisoner to nation builder, Nelson Mandela assumed the office of president of South Africa yesterday vowing that “never again” would racial exploitation be tolerated.

In a joyous ceremony that marked the end of the country’s pariah status and celebrated the nation’s transformation into a beacon of racial reconciliation, Mandela proclaimed: “Let freedom reign.”

The American delegation included U.S. Vice President Al Gore, First Lady Hillary Clinton and Jesse Jackson. Gore said South Africa has sent a powerful message to the world that differences can be set aside for the sake of a nation.

Watched by international visitors including Vice President Gore, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Palestinian Leader Yasser Arafat, and Cuban President Fidel Castro, Mandela spoke in deep, measured tones as he swore allegiance to the new republic and its constitution.

As he said, “So help me God,” shouts of “Viva” rang out from the huge, multi-racial crowd gathered at the foot of the Union Buildings amphitheater.

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April 4, 2009
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Spike Lee: 'Barack changes everything'

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Lee lays it down for the Guardian

Ever since a college project filming riots in New York in 1977, Spike Lee has used his movies to provide an alternative commentary on life in his home country. Here, he tells John Colapinto what the future holds now that Obama has torn up the script for African-Americans

One morning last June, Spike Lee arrived early at the Sony Pictures Studios, in Culver City, California, to record the score for his new feature, Miracle at St Anna, a second world war film about the US Army’s 92nd Division, an all-black unit that battled the Nazis during the Italian campaign. Lee was joined in the studio’s control room by his music-recording team. A large window overlooked the cavernous soundstage where Judy Garland recorded “Over the Rainbow”, in 1938, when the lot belonged to MGM. A 95-piece orchestra that Lee had engaged had not yet arrived.

A month earlier, at a press conference at the Cannes Film Festival, Lee had sparked a very public feud with Clint Eastwood when he accused him of having omitted black soldiers from his two recent movies about Iwo Jima, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. (Historians estimate that between 700 and 900 black servicemen participated in the battle.) The spat had escalated quickly. Eastwood told the Guardian that he had left out the black soldiers because none had actually raised the flag, adding that “a guy like that should shut his face”. Lee shot back, telling ABCNews.com, “The man is not my father and we’re not on a plantation either.”

Lee’s remarks appeared online three days before he began recording the score for Miracle at St Anna. Lee sees the movie, the first by a major American director to treat the experience of black soldiers in the war, as redress not only for Eastwood’s pictures but for an all-white Hollywood vision of the second world war which dates to the 1962 John Wayne movie The Longest Day – and before.

As the orchestra began to gather on the soundstage, Lee scribbled notes about the score on a yellow legal pad. He is 5ft 6in, with a barrel chest and a pigeon-toed walk. His baleful, half-hooded eyes peered out from behind tortoiseshell frames. There was a diamond stud in his left earlobe. He is 51, has a small bald spot at the crown of his short Afro, and wore an orange T-shirt with a picture of Barack Obama and the word “REPRESENT”.

It’s been more than 20 years since Lee’s debut, the 1986 movie She’s Gotta Have It – a breezy sex comedy about a liberated African-American woman and her three male suitors – and he remains Hollywood’s most prominent black filmmaker. He has directed 18 features, three of which (Do the Right Thing, Jungle Fever, and Malcolm X) have earnt him a reputation as a filmmaker obsessed with race. Releasing movies at an average of nearly one a year, Lee has maintained a pace matched only by Woody Allen.

Lee is the artistic director of NYU’s graduate film programme, where he teaches a master class in directing. He also makes music videos and TV ads (he has done spots for Converse, Jaguar, Taco Bell and Ben & Jerry’s, among others) and has made two superb documentaries: 4 Little Girls, about the 1963 bombing by the Ku Klux Klan of a black church in Alabama, and When the Levees Broke, about the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. He is able to accomplish so much in part because he often rises at 5am. “You want to get a lot done, you gotta get up in the morning,” he told me. The rest, he says, is “time management”. But Lee’s output also reflects the unusual fecundity of his imagination. “Spike was the idea man,” Herb Eichelberger, who taught Lee in an undergraduate film course in Atlanta in 1977, told me. “He was a good writer, and he would explore those ideas and turn them into full-blown mini-epics.”

Continue . . .

January 4, 2009
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Learnin’

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What I’m Learning (Slowly) From Obama


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By Jim Sleeper, TPMCafé, November 11, 2008

It’s well known by now that Barack Obama learns from his mistakes and tries hard not to make them twice. So can those of us who supported him. Even here on what we fancy is the right side of history, we can look at our own mistakes candidly in order to learn from them, painful though that may be.

My use of “we” is rhetorical, if not imperial, of course, since my own performance as a commentator was so flawless. But, seriously, folks: Obama has a lot to teach at least a few of us about managing anger and about subordinating our righteous moralism to strategic generosity in order to win truly moral gains.

Right though I am to have insisted, from years of experience, that whites would vote in large numbers for blacks (See the “Voting Wrongs” chapter in Liberal Racism, or this 1996 article from The New Republic),-I was wrong to be churlish and self-righteous toward white-liberal and black activist defenders of racial-identity politics who built their careers and politics on the presumption of racial bloc voting – and, indeed, on the presumption that racial groupthink is the flywheel of politics and public policy.

Wrong though their own presumptions were, those people had plausible reasons for clinging to them. And the irony is that even as Obama – the candidate I could only dream of as I wrote Liberal Racism — vindicated my insistence that movements for justice have to transcend race in order to uproot racism and some of its structural supports, it was I who wavered in that faith as the test of Nov. 4 drew nigh.

Continue . . .

November 12, 2008
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‘Race’ in Obama’s victory

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In the waning days of the campaign, as I struggled to overcome my deep pessimism that this could actually happen, that Americans would actually elect a black man president, I began to let go of my anger for the noxious and dishonorable that campaign he ran against our now president-elect Barack Obama.

I have never worshiped at the Cult of John McCain, never believed him to be the truth-telling, straight-talking, national war hero. I felt that he showed himself during the campaign to be the craven, corrupt politicians that he truly is. McCain’s campaign, at times, seemed to be inviting people to kill that traitorous and treasonous character they were running against, a fictional character named Barack Hussein Obama. As the campaign wore on, I felt McCain deserved to have his name go down in infamy with Joe McCarthy and others who have besmirched our history.

I began to cope with my paralyzing anxiety about the outcome of the election by letting go of my anger at McCain.

I liked that he promptly came out and gave his concession speech, that it was somewhat gracious. Nevertheless, something about the speech stuck in my craw. I am talking about this passage:

This is an historic election, and I recognise the special significance it has for African-Americans and for the special pride that must be theirs tonight.

I’ve always believed that America offers opportunities to all who have the industry and will to seize it. Senator Obama believes that, too.

But we both recognise that, though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our     nation’s reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound.

A century ago, President Theodore Roosevelt’s invitation of Booker T. Washington to dine at the White House was taken as an outrage in many quarters.

America today is a world away from the cruel and frightful bigotry of that time. There is no better evidence of this than the election of an African-American to the presidency of the United States.

Let there be no reason now … Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth.

Senator Obama has achieved a great thing for himself and for his country. I applaud him for it, and offer him my sincere sympathy that his beloved grandmother did not live to see this day. Though our faith assures us she is at rest in the presence of her creator and so very proud of the good man she helped raise.

I was overwhelmed and overjoyed at Sen. Obama’s victory and I did not complain about what everyone was insisting was a gracious concession speech. I stumbled upon a discussion thread on Facebook that led me to believe I was not the only one to think that there’s something not quite right with McCain’s words here.

The person who started the discussion titled it: race in the Obama win, then wrote:

It was interesting to me how McCain’s concession speech, gracious though it was, seemed to dwell on the “achievement” of an African-American, while Colin Powell’s remarks noted that Obama’s win went “far beyond race”. I guess the fact of Obama’s rainbow ethnicity is not easily grasped here.

A commenter wrote:

McCain (and Gerry Ferraro) truly believe the ONLY reason Obama won – was because of his ethnicity. They     cannot and will not see him as who/what he actually is – beyond the color of his skin. That is their prism for all people of color. That is their limitation. We are leaving them behind…sadly.”

But it was another commenter who captured my (irrational?) bitterness at McCain’s choice of words:

Of course, as we all know, being black has always been a tremendous advantage in this country. Just ask Dred Scott, Rosa Parks, Emmett Till, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman, Frederick Douglass, Medgar Evers, Malcolm X, Homer Plessy…

President-elect Obama’s victory in the presidential election has been hailed in every corner of this nation by people of all races and celebrated all over the world, every corner of the world. This victory simply goes beyond race, although race is a significant component. It is an achievement for America to be proud of, not just African Americans. This historic event restores, for the moment at least, America’s role as a beacon of hope for the world.

McCain, of course, was not the only guilty part in this fixation on race, the entire media and our political class was guilty. Obama has willfully refused to pander to race or note the racial import of his quest, at times frustrating the media. I remember media types noting with frustration that he did not mention his race (he did not actually mention himself, crediting voters, instead) when he claimed the nomination from Sen. Hillary Clintoon in June.

I could not wait to get my New York Times but found its front page of this historic event deeply underwhelming. If any newspaper was capable of capturing such an important and historic while noting the significant racial component, it would be my beloved Times. But on this occasion, it failed:

Something about that front page did not move me. Here are some other front pages:

Or, The Wall Street Journal:

The Washington Post:

The Philadelphia Inquirer:

I don’t know why but I really like the Omaha World-Herald front page:

November 6, 2008
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On the road to Tuesday, Nov. 4, 2008

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Editor’s note:

I am so nervous about the presidential election on Tuesday that I’m almost paralyzed. Certainly here I have been content to let others post instead of writing myself. I hope to summon some of my own words before Tuesday’s voting actually begins (I know boat loads of people have already voted).

My friend Jim Sleeper, who deserves a wider audience, has been one of the best and wisest writers on this election. I am going to post links here to a few of his last few pieces, which he has kindly grouped under: Thinking About Race and This Election

My Almost-Hidden Stake in an Obama Win By Jim Sleeper, Talking Points Memo Cafe, October 27, 2008, 2:21PM

Some people are still wondering whether Barack Obama will be flummoxed on Nov. 4 by the so-called “Bradley Effect.” Maybe, maybe not, but that we’re even debating it shows that much has changed for the better, as I note in a short commentary just posted at “Things No One Talks About,” in Dissent magazine.

What I don’t talk about even there is that some of us were heralding this change even before we’d heard of Obama, way back when some of his biggest current backers were claiming that prospects like his could never materialize, and even that they shouldn’t, because who needs a deracinated neo-liberal? The struggles behind his struggle can be quickly sketched, but they were hard-won, and worth knowing about.

So let’s glance back 15 or 20 years, to when contests involving even only white candidates were shadowed by Willie Horton, Sister Souljah, Tawana Brawley, and O.J. Simpson. Only a few black scholars, such as William Julius Wilson and Orlando Patterson, and white writers, such as yours truly, suggested that the significance of race was declining – and that it should.

Continue . . .

Things No One Talks About, by Jim Sleeper, Dissent,

October 27, 2008

AS PUNDITS dithered late last week over “the Bradley effect” and other racial clouds on Obama’s horizon, the candidate was making a difficult, possibly final, visit to the white mother of his white mother. Few commented on the implications of the fact that while racial identity runs deep in America, maternal bonding runs deeper. But maybe our Hollywood-besotted political culture requires the drama and sentiment in Obama’s farewell visit to “Toot” (the Hawaiian name for “grandma” is “Tutu“) to drive those implications home.

Sarah Palin claims that Obama doesn’t know or represent the real America. That both Obama’s color and his childhood exposure to Muslims are assets to America’s image abroad doesn’t matter much to Americans who are still offended or frightened by racial and religious difference. Image is one thing; intimate fears another. In a small former steel town in Pennsylvania this weekend a 71-year old woman, a Democrat who considers McCain a grouchy old man and Sarah Palin a joke, paused when a New York Times reporter asked her about Obama. “He scares me,” she said finally. “The coloreds are excited, but my friends and I plan to write in Hillary’s name.”

No one mentions that Obama’s biracial provenance and childhood brush with Islam launched him on struggles that have prepared him unusually well to address one of his country’s most daunting challenges: youthful alienation in inner cities where, at least until 9/11, the Nation of Islam held a certain appeal.

Continue . . .

How to Gauge Racism in This Election, By Jim Sleeper, Talking Points Memo Café, October 28, 2008

As the polls tighten, Slate’s veteran blowhard press critic Jack Shafer surely knows that sensationalist journalism and racism are two of the biggest reasons. But, as Todd Gitlin notes here, Shafer is training his piercing gaze on liberals in the media, who, he complains, are so enraptured by Obama that they can’t bear to acknowledge his faults and their inevitable disappointments if he wins.

Let me give this sage of journalism something he deserves — a viral e-mail. This one really stopped me. It will help Shafer and all of us, far more than his own commentary does, to tell whether liberal pundits’ jitters are worth frothing about right now. Ask yourself these simple questions:

What if it had been the Obamas, not the Palins, parading five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?

Would the polls be so tight if it had been Barack Obama who’d finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class and if John McCain had been president of the Harvard Law Review?

Where would the polls be if McCain had married only once and had stayed married, while Obama had been the divorcee?

What if it was Obama who had been a member of the Keating Five (the U.S. Senators accused of corruption in a scandal that helped ignite the Savings and Loan meltdown of the late 1980s and early 1990s)?

How tight would the polls be if it had been Obama whose military service had included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes?

Continue . . .

Treat, or Trick? Elections Officials, Beware!, By Jim Sleeper, Talking Points Memo Café, October 31, 2008

In honor of Halloween, here’s one more frisson about election tricks that are perverse enough to block the treat of a victory.

One Saturday morning in 1982 I walked into the Brooklyn Board of Elections and found 30 supporters of then-State Senator Vander Beatty “checking” voter registration cards from the recent primary election.

The hobgoblins of Florida, 2000, never outdid what I saw that morning in Brooklyn. But, believe me, it can happen again.

Beatty’s minions – the young Rev. Al Sharpton among them — were actually fabricating “evidence” of voter fraud in Beatty’s recent defeat in his bid to succeed Shirley Chisholm, who was retiring from Congress.

They were forging thousands of signatures on voter-registration cards to create enough fraud to invalidate the 54-46% victory of his opponent, State Senator Major R. Owens, in the historic Bedford Stuyvesant district, one of the first created under the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

Beatty would submit the Saturday morning forgeries to a county court as evidence that Owens had rigged the election!

I hadn’t simply stumbled upon this scam. A political operative close to the Brooklyn Democratic machine had tipped me off. Had I not rushed down to the board that Saturday knowing what to look for, Beatty would likely have won his suit, and Owens, a redoubtable reformer, a graduate of the famed black Morehouse College, a librarian by training and a long-time progressive activist, would have been smeared.

So a lot was at stake in my Village Voice story that week on Beatty’s outrageous gambit: “Look at it this way,” said my tipster; “The man is either going to Congress or he’s going to jail.” (The pdf of these old stories is very slow, but worth the wait if you’re interested. Read the second story, “Vander Batty’s Desperate Gamble.”)

Continue . . .

November 1, 2008
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A Good Story

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I am a regular reader of Newsweek magazine. Most of the time, I don’t like what I read in there. I find its journalism often sloppy, if not downright dishonest. The fact is, I read it through gritted teeth most of the time.

For instance, I think they’re highly tilted toward John McCain in this election. He was their preferred candidate during the Republican primaries. Although they’re intrigued by Sen. Barack Obama’s candidacy, especially now that he’s the Democratic Party nominee, McCain remains their man.

They’ll do anything, including shred any credibility the magazine has left to get him elected.

But, I am writing today to praise Newsweek, not to bash it. At least praise Christopher Dickey, its longtime foreign correspondent, for a superb piece on the magazine’s cover this week.

Southern Discomfort is a special piece of journalism, well written. As a writer, one of the things I struggle with is the pronoun “I.” Dickey wielded it judiciously in this piece to great effect. He did not get in the way of telling this story, which is quite an achievement.

I could try to quote from it but there’s so much that’s good in the piece that you, dear readers, would be better off buying the magazine at the newsstand, or reading the piece here:

I cannot resist one quote from the article, which got me:

“I think if there were a better economy more people would take a risk on Obama,” said Patricia Murtaugh Wise, a lawyer from Nashville sightseeing with her kids at Atlanta’s landmark Varsity Drive-In restaurant. Her friends are blaming Bush more than his party, she said. “I’m not sure people are saying, ‘Because Bush got us into this, let’s vote for a Democrat.’ I think people are saying, ‘Let’s get a new person in there’.”

Her name notwithstanding, the quote and the reasoning behind it are patently stupid. If, as the woman said, times are good, her excuse not to vote for Obama would be that he’d ruin the good thing she had going.

August 6, 2008
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Bill Clinton’s Shameful Demise

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Unfortunately, all the good Bill Clinton did as president, the goodwill he won with African Americans and the great relationships he forged over the course of his political, he’s not intent on frittering away in bitterness. He’s affronted by Sen. Barack Obama’s political ascent and he’s not going to let it go, promising now to speak his mind next year.

Next year?

Give it a rest, Mr. Clinton. The nation has more pressing matter to attend to than the swamp in your mind.

Clinton Embraces Return to Ambassador Role: After the Bitter Primaries, He Calls Charity ‘My Life’ By Anne E. Kornblut, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, August 3, 2008; A01

KIGALI, Rwanda, Aug. 2 — There will be no Clinton restoration — not this year, at least. But the rehabilitation of Bill Clinton has begun.

The former president in many ways ended the Democratic primary campaign more isolated than his wife, with his own friends and allies unhappy with his flashes of anger and ill-chosen words and blaming him in part for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton’s defeat. With a negligible relationship with Sen. Barack Obama — he has spoken to him just once since the primaries — Clinton has been shut out of the Obama campaign almost entirely and does not know even basic things, such as the role he will play at the Democratic convention.

It is uncharted territory for the most successful Democratic politician of his generation, and part of the reason he was in Kigali on Saturday, the latest stop in a grueling journey across Africa to visit some of the places where his charitable foundation has been active — and in the process re-establish his role as a global elder statesman. At the same time, Clinton began, slowly, to discuss the bruising Democratic primary season that ended two months earlier.

In his first extended interview since his wife exited the campaign in defeat, Clinton said he was glad to be back doing international foundation work. “This is my life now, and I was eager to get back to it, and I couldn’t be happier,” Clinton said in a hotel suite, with three aides looking on.

In a session that lasted more than 45 minutes, Clinton described his role in the 2008 campaign as “a privilege, an honor,” and said, “I loved it,” but he declined to discuss any of his own possible mistakes, describing them as a distraction. “Next year, you and I and everybody else will be freer and have more space to say what we believe to be the truth” about the primaries, he said.

Clinton volunteered very little praise of Obama, beyond describing him as “smart” and “a good politician” when asked about him toward the end of the interview. He did, however, muse at length about the role that race could play in the general election — the issue that some of his former black allies angrily accused him of introducing in the Democratic primaries — as a factor, if not a decisive one.

August 3, 2008
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Nothing Won Yet

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Amid encouraging recent poll numbers, the Washington Post points out some obstacles to an Obama victory in the general election on Nov. 4.

At the heart of the Obama campaign’s strategy is a national effort to increase registration and turnout among the millions of Democratic-inclined Americans who have not been voting, particularly younger people and African Americans. The push began during the primaries but expanded this month to a nationwide registration drive led by 3,000 volunteers dispatched around the country.

Gaining greater African American support could well put Obama over the top in states where Democrats have come close in the past two elections, and could also help him retain the big swing states of Pennsylvania and Michigan.

There is no guarantee that African Americans will register to vote or, even if registered, would turn out to vote on election day. I covered (in the margins) the bitterly racial mayoral rematch between David Dinkins and Rudy Giuliani in 1993 as a reporter for the New York Daily News.

I can offer anecdotal evidence: The fear that blacks felt of a Giuliani mayoralty (which were later borne out) was palpable on election night. But many of the black Harlem residents that I interviewed that election night, despite seemingly knowing what was at stake, did not bother showing up to vote.

The Obama candidacy is an opportunity for Americans to make a choice. It is also an opportunity for black Americans to make history. Sen. Obama bet his whole candidacy on democracy from the bottom up. The challenge is not just for well-meaning whites to vote for the clearly superior candidate in this election. The challenge is also to African Americans.

Or will they prove Obama wrong?

July 28, 2008
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A different country? No.

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I may have said this before but I used to love reading Paul Krugman and I certainly hope to get around to loving to read him again.

Right about now, he’s lost all credibility with me.

His column today is a prime example of how he lost me. Hillary Rodham Clinton ran a, as Sen. Barack Obama said, valiant race. She lost and conceded and threw her support behind Sen. Obama. Krugman was one of Mrs. Clinton’s most fervent supporters.

Deploying column after column to bludgeon Sen. Obama’s policy positions and extol the wisdom and virtues of HRC, Mr. Krugman seemed blinded to any good points Obama may have made during the course of the campaign, or to any good qualities he may have.

I don’t mind partisanship, or even disingenousness. I subscribe to the adage that all is fair in love and war. But what I do mind dishonesty.

And the best face you could put on most of the arguments Mr. Krugman has marshalled in support of Mrs. Clinton and against Mr. Obama is to say that they are dishonest. Even when the examples he’s using are right on the money. Or, should I say especially when . . .

Anyway, in “It’s a different Country,” Mr. Krugman was at it again.

Fervent supporters of Barack Obama like to say that putting him in the White House would transform America. With all due respect to the candidate, that gets it backward. Mr. Obama is an impressive speaker who has run a brilliant campaign — but if he wins in November, it will be because our country has already been transformed.

Mr. Obama’s nomination wouldn’t have been possible 20 years ago. It’s possible today only because racial division, which has driven U.S. politics rightward for more than four decades, has lost much of its sting.

And the de-racialization of U.S. politics has implications that go far beyond the possibility that we’re about to elect an African-American president. Without racial division, the conservative message — which has long dominated the political scene — loses most of its effectiveness.

Mr. Krugman’s examples are these:

Big Government: Americans don’t dislike big government. They actually support Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid, government programs that dominate domestic spending.

If Ronald Reagan and other politicians succeeded, for a time, in convincing voters that government spending was bad, it was by suggesting that bureaucrats were taking away workers’ hard-earned money and giving it to you-know-who: the “strapping young buck” using food stamps to buy T-bone steaks, the welfare queen driving her Cadillac. Take away the racial element, and Americans like government spending just fine.

But why has racial division become so much less important in American politics?

Part of the credit surely goes to Bill Clinton, who ended welfare as we knew it. I’m not saying that the end of Aid to Families With Dependent Children was an unalloyed good thing; it created a great deal of hardship. But the “bums on welfare” played a role in political discourse vastly disproportionate to the actual expense of A.F.D.C., and welfare reform took that issue off the table.

There’s nothing wrong with this argument. On its own, it is right.

Mr. Krugman goes on to talk about other examples, including the decline in urban violence.

As the historian Rick Perlstein documents in his terrific new book “Nixonland,” America’s hard right turn really began in 1966, when the Democrats suffered a severe setback in Congress — and Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California.

Krugman acknowledged that none of these examples mean that Obama would win the presidency. He then concluded this way:

But if Mr. Obama does win, it will symbolize the great change that has taken place in America. Racial polarization used to be a dominating force in our politics — but we’re now a different, and better, country.

First of all, let me say that, if the country Paul Krugman is talking about is these United States of America, it is not that different a country.

I questioned the country Krugman is talking about because he wondered in his column why “racial division” has “become so much less important in American politics.” America remains and will be for a long time a deeply racist and racialized nation. I take no pleasure in saying that but it is the truth.

The genius of the Obama campaign is in figuring out a way to navigate the virulent currents of our public life. He is a singular figure (Just as Sen. Clinton, for an entirely different reason, has been a singular figure in convincing us a female could be a commander-in-chief) who has come along with a promise of leading us to a better place.

Because the Democratic Party establishment was already committed to HRC, Obama fashioned his own brand new constituency so that his message could eventually resonate with people who might otherwise not listen to an African American candidate.

Obama had to do that in order to get anyone to listen to him. And, as it is, both candidates brought record number of people out to vote during the primary and caucus season.

Jesse Jackson made a couple of exhilarating runs at the presidency, crafting a “rainbow coalition” of minorities, women, and the poor and working classes but it was never going to be enough because, ultimately, you needed white voters, which the Rev. Jackson did not get in the requisite numbers.

Obama signaled this time was going to be different when he won the overwhelmingly white Iowa and came a scintillating second in just as white New Hampshire.

It was indeed Obama’s transformative campaign and not a de-racialized nation that led to those early triumphs and the ones that followed.

For Krugman to come out with his column Monday denying that and offering other reasons, as valid as they may be, strikes me as sour grapes bordering on churlishness.

June 10, 2008
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