Interestin'
Uh-bama - the Lost Years
Reportage in these two papers is particularly significant because Obama’s early political career-the time between his first campaign for the Illinois State Senate in 1995 and his race for U.S. Senate in 2004-can fairly be called the “lost years,” the period Obama seems least eager to talk about, ...
What they portray is a Barack Obama sharply at variance with the image of the post-racial, post-ideological, bipartisan, culture-war-shunning politician familiar from current media coverage and purveyed by the Obama campaign. As details of Obama’s early political career emerge into the light, his associations with such radical figures as Reverend Jeremiah Wright, Father Michael Pfleger, Reverend James Meeks, Bill Ayers, and Bernardine Dohrn look less like peculiar instances of personal misjudgment and more like intentional political partnerships. At his core, in other words, the politician chronicled here is profoundly race-conscious, exceedingly liberal, free-spending even in the face of looming state budget deficits, and partisan.
...state senator Donne Trotter..’s claim that Obama was just a “white man in black face.”...To the extent that Obama can be accused of having shaky “black credentials,” that very accusation pushes him to practice race-conscious politics all the more energetically.
...The Defender quotes Obama as saying that, “while everyone agrees that the Hispanic population has grown, they cannot expand by taking African-American seats.”
...In an essay published in 1988 entitled “Why Organize? Problems and Promise in the Inner City,” Obama tried to make room for both “accommodation and militancy” in black political engagement. He wrote, RTWT
Next entry: Oh, Niiiice
Previous entry: Oh! My!!
