One of the world’s most famous writers, Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison, once described former President Bill Clinton as America’s first Black President.  In her eloquent defense of the President during the worst period of his presidency, in the October, 1998 New Yorker Magazine, Morrison said of Clinton

Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald’s-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

.  Here’s the whole article. The united and unflinching support of African-Americans during the McCarthy-era like investigation of Clinton saved his presidency. 

It was the powerful congressman from Harlem, Charles Rangel, who invited the then first lady, Hillary Clinton (before becoming Hillary Rodham Clinton) to run for the Senate, representing New York state.  In a note written by New York Times’ Adam Nagourney, he quoted CNN’s Larry King as saying the following in an interview establishing Rangel’s indisputable role in her senate run, with the following

Mr. King opened the program by introducing Representative Charles B. Rangel, the Harlem Democrat who has been the chief booster of a Clinton candidacy. ‘’This was your idea, Rangel, so we’ll start with you: How in the world did you think up ‘Hillary for Senate?’ ‘’ Mr. King inquired. ‘’You were the first to say it.’’

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When loud criticism of the expensive nature of his initial attempt to locate his post-presidential office on the 56th floor of the Carnegie Hall Tower, at a cost of $738,700, it was the black community that again came to his rescue, by alluring him to move his office to Harlem.  The Harlem Office with bigger space was leased at a cost of $210,000, thereby saving another bout of media criticism. 

Africans themselves have bought into the Clinton myth.  In Africa, he was the most revered white man that Africans came to believe as the embodiment of decency and god-like qualities.  During his two visits to Africa, he was given an hero’s welcome.  Wherever he went, hundreds of thousands of people came out to welcome him.  Women and children danced in the streets, and waived American flags.  African leaders bent over backwards to welcome him.  Then iconic world leader and South African president, Nelson Mandela, embraced Clinton’s visit and gave him enthusiastic support, telling him that “Africa doesn’t forget their friends.”

The question is were all these embrace and admiration of Bill Clinton misplaced; didn’t he plant the bases for which Blacks assimilated him as their own and defended him at every opportunity from attacks by his detractors?  Of course, the answer is a big YES.  In answering this, you have to understand the dichotomy of the black experience.  We are like dogs that have been starved for weeks, and then a ‘kind’ individual dangles and drops a piece of bone to us: it makes us eternally grateful to that individual.  Even have we embraced bad behavior, “raised by single mother, cheating of a wife, junk-food-loving, jazz-playing, as Toni Morrison wrote, as the basis upon which we have assimilated him as an black man.  Rather a sad commentary on our own values.

Going back to my BIG YES answer, Clinton courted the black community when white politicians of note, including Presidents Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan had instituted policies that had ostracized the community, and made it plain to them that their concerns weren’t really of interest to these leaders, who had employed code words to inflame white anger at blacks.  So here comes the white knight in shining armor who dangled that piece of bone to us after almost 16 years of continuous starvation - he courted us, ate with us, went to church with us, sang our songs, danced boogie with us, played saxophone with a black touch.  As governor of the southern state of Arkansas, he brought blacks into his administration.

In his first run for the White House, blacks were overwhelmingly supportive of Clinton, as he paraded a number of prominent blacks as his confidants, including Ronald Brown, Vernon E. Jordan, both of who played major roles in his administration, as well as others, like Susan Rice.  President Clinton was credited with creating more than 22 million jobs during his eight years in office, and most blacks feel a load of gratitude that they benefited in this upward mobility of becoming middle-class families.  He created a commission to discuss race, which fizzled and died for lack of action.  These were hot issue points, in terms of dangling the bone, which mesmerized the black folks about Clinton’s authenticity as one of us.

But let’s look at some of Bill Clinton’s actions. Remember the ‘Sister Souljah moment’ during the 1992 campaign, where Clinton, in an attempt to show his conservative credentials, lashed out at Sister Souljah for her offensive comment, in which she had said in a Washington Post article

“If black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people?

and then presidential candidate Clinton had quickly interjected

If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and you reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech.

.  After winning the presidency, you remember how quickly he dropped the nomination of Lani Gunier as Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, who had been falsely accused of advocating the creation of “congressional black districts” to ensure more black representation in Congress, a process which is popularly known in political terms as gerrymandering.  We are reminded of how Republican leader, Tom DeLay used this same method in creating more safe seats for Republicans in Texas.  His welfare policy created the problem of black men having to abandon their families, and with his one strike policy in terms of drug possessions, the incarceration rate of blacks increased dramatically during his administration. 

The adulation we Africans have had for him could then be misconstrued as having been misplaced.  The Clinton administration did not lift a finger when over 800,000 Tutsis and Hutus were murdered in a genocidal rage.  As much as we might dislike President Bush’s policies, including this author, we can safely say that he has invested untold billions of dollars in Africa, and fought forcefully for a resolution of the Darfur problem.

We could cite many more instances of this pattern of adopting policies detrimental to black interests, while pulling a wool over our eyes with tokenistic pretensions.  But the wool has finally been lifted over our eyes during this primary campaign, where the so-called ‘First Black President’ has used every occasion to try to marginalize Senator Barack Obama into a black candidate, which he has woefully failed to achieve.  We are left with the impression that all along that his love for blacks was calculated and convenient when it was time to use the black community.  It is now apparent that the Clinton myth as a Black President has been broken, tarnished and dumped in the gutter.  Incidentally, any visit to Africa now would earn him a worst scorn than the one that had been given to President Bush in his first visit to the continent.  I doubt that former President Nelson Mandela would ever deign to meet with him again. 

There is a group of whites who believe that African-Americans are not Americans. One of those is the racist right-wing conservative commentator, Patrick Buchanan, who has written a lengthy blog on how Blacks should be grateful that they were brought to America as slaves. First, he called Barack Obama’s brilliant speech on Tuesday, March 18,

It is the same old con, the same old shakedown that black hustlers have been running since the Kerner Commission blamed the riots in Harlem, Watts, Newark, Detroit and a hundred other cities on, as Nixon put it, “everybody but the rioters themselves.”

Nobody is calling Buchanan on his incendiary comments when he said:

First, America has been the best country on earth for black folks. It was here that 600,000 black people, brought from Africa in slave ships, grew into a community of 40 million, were introduced to Christian salvation, and reached the greatest levels of freedom and prosperity blacks have ever known.

Wright ought to go down on his knees and thank God he is an American.

Second, no people anywhere has done more to lift up blacks than white Americans. Untold trillions have been spent since the ’60s on welfare, food stamps, rent supplements, Section 8 housing, Pell grants, student loans, legal services, Medicaid, Earned Income Tax Credits and poverty programs designed to bring the African-American community into the mainstream.

Governments, businesses and colleges have engaged in discrimination against white folks — with affirmative action, contract set-asides and quotas — to advance black applicants over white applicants.

The assumption here is that the 40 million blacks in America have never contributed anything to America, don't even pay their taxes, only whites pay taxes. 

There is no doubt that the Republican strategy in this election is to drive the race issue and divide the country.  As the right-wing has avowed, it is going to do everything to make race the issue, by this type of discussion.  Buchanan is determined to inflame white anger, especially the so-called blue-collar voters, because he knows that blacks are going to react to his diatribe, and then he would shout, you see what I am saying.  He and his ilks have tried to marginalize, with the aid of former President Clinton, into a black candidate.  But there is a backlash, even the false news channel is having problem with its Obama-bashing.  Read his trash here.

MSNBC is reporting that Senator Barack Obama’s passport file was breached on numerous occasions, Jan. 9, Feb. 21 and March 14.  It said that three employees at the State Department were involved. MSNBC disclosed that the State Department said that “Two contract employees of the State Department were fired and a third person was disciplined for inappropriately looking at Democratic Sen. Barack Obama’s passport file.” Josh Marshall at http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com has disclosed the significance of the three days that the breaches occurred, including the Jan. 9th, the day after the New Hampshire primary, Feb. the 21st, the day of the Texas debate, and March 14th, “the day the Wright story really hit.”

The MSNBC piece said the State Department would not release the names of the offending individuals, and said that they were low-level employees.  The State Department didn’t believe the information accessed by these individuals were given to outside groups. 

Yeah! Go tell it to the marines. The people who brought us the Wright video of course are not satisfied with the damage they have done to Barack Obama, they want to dig further for more information to continue their campaign of character assassination against Obama.  These people are really vile.

Talk to most black people in the last few days, they would tell you, “Well, we said it would happen.  They haven’t physically shot him like they did the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Medgar Evers, but what they are doing is nothing less than the lynching of a fine black man.” First, they tried to hang him because of his middle name, “Hussein”.  They brought the noose around his neck.  They alleged that he was a Muslim because he was born in Hawaii and his white mother took him to Indonesia when he barely knew who he was, that he attended an Islamic Madrassa,

In fact, it was a major American news media, the Fox News Channel, that was used to give legitimacy to this totally false character assassination of Obama.  On January 19, 2007, a Fox News commentator Steve Doocy of the “Fox and Friends” program, had this to say:

DOOCY: Why didn’t anybody ever mention that that man right there was raised — spent the first decade of his life, raised by his Muslim father — as a Muslim and was educated in a madrassa?

DOOCY: We should also point out that Barack Obama’s father is the one who gave him the middle name of Hussein. And the thing about the madrassa, and you know, let’s just be honest about this, in the last number of years, madrassas have been, we’ve learned a lot about them, financed by Saudis, they teach this Wahhabism which pretty much hates us. The big question is was that on the curriculum back then? Probably not, but it was a madrassa and the big question is whether or not any of these revelations about the fact that he was a Muslim — right now I understand he does go to the Trinity United Church of Christ in Chicago, although not a regular parishioner — but raised as a Muslim, went to a madrassa.” Read the whole disgusting episode at http://www.thinkprogress.org

Now, this is a major American news media that continually harangues the airwaves about being “fair minded and balanced”, yet it neither called Doocy to order, but allowed the smear to fester. This campaign of calumny started after Senator Barack Obama had soundly beaten both Senators Hillary Clinton and John Edwards in the first primary in Iowa, January 3, 2008, where he scored an upset victory by winning 38% of the vote in a state that is more than 95% white.  The right-wing lynch mob reared its head, abetted by the Fox News Channel, but were driven back by the millions of white Americans who felt it was “Time for Change.” All these were designed to slow down the Obama momentum and movement, so that come February 5’s Super Tuesday, he would be knocked out of the race.  But Obama again prevailed by winning 13 out the 21 states contested on the February 5 Super Tuesday, again with the overwhelming support of white voters.  This black man, who is the off-spring of a black African father and a white American mother, was confounding the right-wing lynch mob.  More accusations of his Muslim affiliations had to be manufactured and paraded for the national media. 

This time, it was the Washington Bureau Chief of the NBC Network, Tim Russert, during the February 25 Democratic Party’s debate in Cleveland, Ohio.  An unsolicited endorsement of Barack Obama by America’s Nation of Islam leader, Minister Louis Farrakhan, provided fodder for Tim Russert’s totally partisan questioning of Obama.  Mind you, Obama had not gone to Louis Farrakhan for endorsement as Senator John McCain had done in going to Rev. John Hagee to endorse his candidacy.  According to Media Matters, “Russert began the discussion of Farrakhan by asking Obama, “On Sunday, the headline in your hometown paper, Chicago Tribune: ‘Louis Farrakhan backs Obama for president at Nation of Islam convention in Chicago.’ Do you accept the support of Louis Farrakhan?” Indeed, that was the headline of a February 25 Tribune article discussing Farrakhan’s endorsement of Obama. But Russert did not note the article’s subhead: “Senator has criticized him, says support not sought.” Nor did he mention that the article quoted Obama spokesman Bill Burton as saying: “Senator Obama has been clear in his objections to Minister Farrakhan’s past pronouncements and has not solicited the minister’s support.”

This well executed plot to hang Obama with Minister Farrakhan’s incendiary statements and denunciations of Jews as evil, was to play to the emotions of the fair-minded whites who had been backing Obama.  It worked very well, and for the first time after having won consecutive 11 states elections, Obama lost Ohio by one of the highest percentage he had done by 10% points.  Obama has been nicked with their knife, and the sharks have smelled blood.  It is time to tighten the noose around Obama’s neck, crank the whip on the horses and let his body hang for the vultures, or the carcass thrown as red meat for the frenzied sharks.

Again, it would be the Fox News Channel that would provide the rabidly angry lynch mob that found that their quarry was still breathing and alive, and ready to resurrect himself and fight back.  Fox paid untold amount to unearth a four-year old video of Barack Obama’s pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, making indendiary statements about the America’s treatment of blacks.  Now, the debate is no longer about Barack Obama being a Muslim who was raised in the Madrassa, it is now about how he stayed in the church of an pastor, allowed the pastor to offer him his Christian spiritual guidance, married him in a Chrsitian union with his wife, baptized his children in a Christian church.  Now, without ever altering any of the incendiary statements attributed to Rev.,Jeremiah Wright, the lynch mob has succedded in immobilizing this warrior candidate for a while.  Hour on the hour, the cable networks plaster their screens with Barack Obama standing next to Jeremiah Wright, and in the next second showing a video of the Rev. spewing his offensive comments.  There is jubilation in the right-wing Jim Crow land.  The candidate who stands the chance of beating their candidate is being run out of town.

Just as millions of white Americans looked the other way or acquiesced as hundreds of blacks were lynched in the deep South, there is the concerted effort to provoke a backlash against Obama’s candidacy and momentum.  You know how ironic this is:  America has spent almost a trillion dollars fighting the war in Iraq, a trillion that could have been used in providing better health care, jobs, school funding, etc. for the so-called blue-collar workers who are being wooed by the right-wing Jim Crow lynch mob.  But now the ascendant concern of many of these people is the condemnable statements of a pastor, not the recession, not the imploding stock market, not the mortgage crash, As Obama said, in four years, there will be another distraction and the problems would continue to pile unresolved. 

In his electrifying, brilliant, charismatic, forceful, courageous, powerful and eloquently delivered speech on Tuesday, Barack Obama has served notice that he is as qualified and even more than his opponents to accede to the presidency of the United States.  Admirably, he did what had to be done without compromising his inner core principles: decency for himself and for his fellow man, who made disgusting statements that are now being used to lynch him.  He has denounced and rejected Rev. Wright’s harangues but he wasn’t about to disown him.  In this particular aspect of his speech, Obama said, “And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.:

That’s courage, that’s principle. Even if the right-wing Jim Crow lynch mob succeeds in dethroning his candidacy, Barack Obama has impacted the world in this 21st century as no one else has.

America has a choice, Obama threw the challenge.  “For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.”

In the end, only the tone-deaf will ignore his call to America.  Barack Obama, you are a warrior king.  You have brought smiles and made the whole world proud of you.  Nothing right now can ever diminish you.

Here’s the full post of Barack Obama’s speech.  It was a great speech, and we hope that America finds time to digest it and puts behind her the divisiveness of attacking Jeremiah Wright, who has not done worse than many of the white preachers, but who Obama has distanced himself from.  Obama spoke forcefully for understanding of the black community as well as the white community.

“We the people, in order to form a more perfect union.”

Two hundred and twenty one years ago, in a hall that still stands across the street, a group of men gathered and, with these simple words, launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy. Farmers and scholars; statesmen and patriots who had traveled across an ocean to escape tyranny and persecution finally made real their declaration of independence at a Philadelphia convention that lasted through the spring of 1787.

The document they produced was eventually signed but ultimately unfinished. It was stained by this nation’s original sin of slavery, a question that divided the colonies and brought the convention to a stalemate until the founders chose to allow the slave trade to continue for at least twenty more years, and to leave any final resolution to future generations.

Of course, the answer to the slavery question was already embedded within our Constitution – a Constitution that had at its very core the ideal of equal citizenship under the law; a Constitution that promised its people liberty, and justice, and a union that could be and should be perfected over time.

And yet words on a parchment would not be enough to deliver slaves from bondage, or provide men and women of every color and creed their full rights and obligations as citizens of the United States. What would be needed were Americans in successive generations who were willing to do their part – through protests and struggle, on the streets and in the courts, through a civil war and civil disobedience and always at great risk - to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.

This was one of the tasks we set forth at the beginning of this campaign – to continue the long march of those who came before us, a march for a more just, more equal, more free, more caring and more prosperous America. I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for of children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton’s Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I’ve gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world’s poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It’s a story that hasn’t made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity. Despite the temptation to view my candidacy through a purely racial lens, we won commanding victories in states with some of the whitest populations in the country. In South Carolina, where the Confederate Flag still flies, we built a powerful coalition of African Americans and white Americans.

This is not to say that race has not been an issue in the campaign. At various stages in the campaign, some commentators have deemed me either “too black” or “not black enough.” We saw racial tensions bubble to the surface during the week before the South Carolina primary. The press has scoured every exit poll for the latest evidence of racial polarization, not just in terms of white and black, but black and brown as well.

And yet, it has only been in the last couple of weeks that the discussion of race in this campaign has taken a particularly divisive turn.

On one end of the spectrum, we’ve heard the implication that my candidacy is somehow an exercise in affirmative action; that it’s based solely on the desire of wide-eyed liberals to purchase racial reconciliation on the cheap. On the other end, we’ve heard my former pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright, use incendiary language to express views that have the potential not only to widen the racial divide, but views that denigrate both the greatness and the goodness of our nation; that rightly offend white and black alike.

I have already condemned, in unequivocal terms, the statements of Reverend Wright that have caused such controversy. For some, nagging questions remain. Did I know him to be an occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy? Of course. Did I ever hear him make remarks that could be considered controversial while I sat in church? Yes. Did I strongly disagree with many of his political views? Absolutely – just as I’m sure many of you have heard remarks from your pastors, priests, or rabbis with which you strongly disagreed.

But the remarks that have caused this recent firestorm weren’t simply controversial. They weren’t simply a religious leader’s effort to speak out against perceived injustice. Instead, they expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country – a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America; a view that sees the conflicts in the Middle East as rooted primarily in the actions of stalwart allies like Israel, instead of emanating from the perverse and hateful ideologies of radical Islam.

As such, Reverend Wright’s comments were not only wrong but divisive, divisive at a time when we need unity; racially charged at a time when we need to come together to solve a set of monumental problems – two wars, a terrorist threat, a falling economy, a chronic health care crisis and potentially devastating climate change; problems that are neither black or white or Latino or Asian, but rather problems that confront us all.

Given my background, my politics, and my professed values and ideals, there will no doubt be those for whom my statements of condemnation are not enough. Why associate myself with Reverend Wright in the first place, they may ask? Why not join another church? And I confess that if all that I knew of Reverend Wright were the snippets of those sermons that have run in an endless loop on the television and You Tube, or if Trinity United Church of Christ conformed to the caricatures being peddled by some commentators, there is no doubt that I would react in much the same way.

But the truth is, that isn’t all that I know of the man. The man I met more than twenty years ago is a man who helped introduce me to my Christian faith, a man who spoke to me about our obligations to love one another; to care for the sick and lift up the poor. He is a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who has studied and lectured at some of the finest universities and seminaries in the country, and who for over thirty years led a church that serves the community by doing God’s work here on Earth – by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS.

In my first book, Dreams From My Father, I described the experience of my first service at Trinity:  “People began to shout, to rise from their seats and clap and cry out, a forceful wind carrying the reverend’s voice up into the rafters….And in that single note – hope! – I heard something else; at the foot of that cross, inside the thousands of churches across the city, I imagined the stories of ordinary black people merging with the stories of David and Goliath, Moses and Pharaoh, the Christians in the lion’s den, Ezekiel’s field of dry bones. Those stories – of survival, and freedom, and hope – became our story, my story; the blood that had spilled was our blood, the tears our tears; until this black church, on this bright day, seemed once more a vessel carrying the story of a people into future generations and into a larger world. Our trials and triumphs became at once unique and universal, black and more than black; in chronicling our journey, the stories and songs gave us a means to reclaim memories that we didn’t need to feel shame about…memories that all people might study and cherish – and with which we could start to rebuild.”

That has been my experience at Trinity. Like other predominantly black churches across the country, Trinity embodies the black community in its entirety – the doctor and the welfare mom, the model student and the former gang-banger. Like other black churches, Trinity’s services are full of raucous laughter and sometimes bawdy humor. They are full of dancing, clapping, screaming and shouting that may seem jarring to the untrained ear. The church contains in full the kindness and cruelty, the fierce intelligence and the shocking ignorance, the struggles and successes, the love and yes, the bitterness and bias that make up the black experience in America.

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.
Some will see this as an attempt to justify or excuse comments that are simply inexcusable. I can assure you it is not. I suppose the politically safe thing would be to move on from this episode and just hope that it fades into the woodwork. We can dismiss Reverend Wright as a crank or a demagogue, just as some have dismissed Geraldine Ferraro, in the aftermath of her recent statements, as harboring some deep-seated racial bias.

But race is an issue that I believe this nation cannot afford to ignore right now. We would be making the same mistake that Reverend Wright made in his offending sermons about America – to simplify and stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.

The fact is that the comments that have been made and the issues that have surfaced over the last few weeks reflect the complexities of race in this country that we’ve never really worked through – a part of our union that we have yet to perfect. And if we walk away now, if we simply retreat into our respective corners, we will never be able to come together and solve challenges like health care, or education, or the need to find good jobs for every American.

Understanding this reality requires a reminder of how we arrived at this point. As William Faulkner once wrote, “The past isn’t dead and buried. In fact, it isn’t even past.” We do not need to recite here the history of racial injustice in this country. But we do need to remind ourselves that so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow.

Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven’t fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today’s black and white students.

Legalized discrimination - where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

This is the reality in which Reverend Wright and other African-Americans of his generation grew up. They came of age in the late fifties and early sixties, a time when segregation was still the law of the land and opportunity was systematically constricted. What’s remarkable is not how many failed in the face of discrimination, but rather how many men and women overcame the odds; how many were able to make a way out of no way for those like me who would come after them.

But for all those who scratched and clawed their way to get a piece of the American Dream, there were many who didn’t make it – those who were ultimately defeated, in one way or another, by discrimination. That legacy of defeat was passed on to future generations – those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hope or prospects for the future. Even for those blacks who did make it, questions of race, and racism, continue to define their worldview in fundamental ways. For the men and women of Reverend Wright’s generation, the memories of humiliation and doubt and fear have not gone away; nor has the anger and the bitterness of those years. That anger may not get expressed in public, in front of white co-workers or white friends. But it does find voice in the barbershop or around the kitchen table. At times, that anger is exploited by politicians, to gin up votes along racial lines, or to make up for a politician’s own failings.

And occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews. The fact that so many people are surprised to hear that anger in some of Reverend Wright’s sermons simply reminds us of the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning. That anger is not always productive; indeed, all too often it distracts attention from solving real problems; it keeps us from squarely facing our own complicity in our condition, and prevents the African-American community from forging the alliances it needs to bring about real change. But the anger is real; it is powerful; and to simply wish it away, to condemn it without understanding its roots, only serves to widen the chasm of misunderstanding that exists between the races.

In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

Like the anger within the black community, these resentments aren’t always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism.

Just as black anger often proved counterproductive, so have these white resentments distracted attention from the real culprits of the middle class squeeze – a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many. And yet, to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns – this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.
This is where we are right now. It’s a racial stalemate we’ve been stuck in for years. Contrary to the claims of some of my critics, black and white, I have never been so naïve as to believe that we can get beyond our racial divisions in a single election cycle, or with a single candidacy – particularly a candidacy as imperfect as my own.

But I have asserted a firm conviction – a conviction rooted in my faith in God and my faith in the American people – that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more perfect union.

For the African-American community, that path means embracing the burdens of our past without becoming victims of our past. It means continuing to insist on a full measure of justice in every aspect of American life. But it also means binding our particular grievances – for better health care, and better schools, and better jobs - to the larger aspirations of all Americans—the white woman struggling to break the glass ceiling, the white man who’s been laid off, the immigrant trying to feed his family. And it means taking full responsibility for own lives – by demanding more from our fathers, and spending more time with our children, and reading to them, and teaching them that while they may face challenges and discrimination in their own lives, they must never succumb to despair or cynicism; they must always believe that they can write their own destiny.

Ironically, this quintessentially American – and yes, conservative – notion of self-help found frequent expression in Reverend Wright’s sermons. But what my former pastor too often failed to understand is that embarking on a program of self-help also requires a belief that society can change.

The profound mistake of Reverend Wright’s sermons is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It’s that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country – a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black; Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old—is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know—what we have seen – is that America can change. That is true genius of this nation. What we have already achieved gives us hope – the audacity to hope – for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

In the white community, the path to a more perfect union means acknowledging that what ails the African-American community does not just exist in the minds of black people; that the legacy of discrimination - and current incidents of discrimination, while less overt than in the past - are real and must be addressed. Not just with words, but with deeds – by investing in our schools and our communities; by enforcing our civil rights laws and ensuring fairness in our criminal justice system; by providing this generation with ladders of opportunity that were unavailable for previous generations. It requires all Americans to realize that your dreams do not have to come at the expense of my dreams; that investing in the health, welfare, and education of black and brown and white children will ultimately help all of America prosper.

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world’s great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother’s keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister’s keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. We can tackle race only as spectacle – as we did in the OJ trial – or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina - or as fodder for the nightly news. We can play Reverend Wright’s sermons on every channel, every day and talk about them from now until the election, and make the only question in this campaign whether or not the American people think that I somehow believe or sympathize with his most offensive words. We can pounce on some gaffe by a Hillary supporter as evidence that she’s playing the race card, or we can speculate on whether white men will all flock to John McCain in the general election regardless of his policies.
We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we’ll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.
That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, “Not this time.” This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can’t learn; that those kids who don’t look like us are somebody else’s problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don’t have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn’t look like you might take your job; it’s that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.
This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should’ve been authorized and never should’ve been waged, and we want to talk about how we’ll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

I would not be running for President if I didn’t believe with all my heart that this is what the vast majority of Americans want for this country. This union may never be perfect, but generation after generation has shown that it can always be perfected. And today, whenever I find myself feeling doubtful or cynical about this possibility, what gives me the most hope is the next generation – the young people whose attitudes and beliefs and openness to change have already made history in this election.

There is one story in particularly that I’d like to leave you with today – a story I told when I had the great honor of speaking on Dr. King’s birthday at his home church, Ebenezer Baptist, in Atlanta.

There is a young, twenty-three year old white woman named Ashley Baia who organized for our campaign in Florence, South Carolina. She had been working to organize a mostly African-American community since the beginning of this campaign, and one day she was at a roundtable discussion where everyone went around telling their story and why they were there.

And Ashley said that when she was nine years old, her mother got cancer. And because she had to miss days of work, she was let go and lost her health care. They had to file for bankruptcy, and that’s when Ashley decided that she had to do something to help her mom.
She knew that food was one of their most expensive costs, and so Ashley convinced her mother that what she really liked and really wanted to eat more than anything else was mustard and relish sandwiches. Because that was the cheapest way to eat.

She did this for a year until her mom got better, and she told everyone at the roundtable that the reason she joined our campaign was so that she could help the millions of other children in the country who want and need to help their parents too.

Now Ashley might have made a different choice. Perhaps somebody told her along the way that the source of her mother’s problems were blacks who were on welfare and too lazy to work, or Hispanics who were coming into the country illegally. But she didn’t. She sought out allies in her fight against injustice.

Anyway, Ashley finishes her story and then goes around the room and asks everyone else why they’re supporting the campaign. They all have different stories and reasons. Many bring up a specific issue. And finally they come to this elderly black man who’s been sitting there quietly the entire time. And Ashley asks him why he’s there. And he does not bring up a specific issue. He does not say health care or the economy. He does not say education or the war. He does not say that he was there because of Barack Obama. He simply says to everyone in the room, “I am here because of Ashley.”

“I’m here because of Ashley.” By itself, that single moment of recognition between that young white girl and that old black man is not enough. It is not enough to give health care to the sick, or jobs to the jobless, or education to our children.

But it is where we start. It is where our union grows stronger. And as so many generations have come to realize over the course of the two-hundred and twenty one years since a band of patriots signed that document in Philadelphia, that is where the perfection begins.

The last several days in the Democratic presidential primaries has been dominated by the excreta foul-mouthed ignorant and patently racist rantings of an former congresswoman and a former vice-presidential nominee of the Democratic party in 1984, Geraldine Ferraro.  Ms. Ferraro was chosen by Walter Mondale as his vice-presidential running mate.  Ms. Ferraro had told a California newspaper, The Daily Breeze, that Senator Barack Obama’s meteoric performance in the current Democratic party primaries was only due to the fact that he was black.  Her actual statement, “If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position.  And if he was a woman [of any color], he would not be in this position. He happens to be very lucky to be who he is.” When the controversy over her comments burst open, she became defiant, said she wasn’t going to apologize, and charged that “Racism works in two different directions. I really think they’re attacking me because I’m white. How’s that?”

Everybody has been tip-toeing around the fact that Geraldine Ferraro has always been a racist.  She is a racist, pure and simple.  The chorus has been “Oh, I have known Gerry for a long time, she;s not a racist.” Give me a break, a la former President Bill Clinton.  Pure bunkum!  This is the duplicity of the American political class, not calling spade a spade.  The so-called non-racist Gerry Ferraro said the same thing of the Rev. Jesse Jackson in 1988, when she told Chicago Tribune’s Frank James that “If Jesse Jackson were not black, he wouldn’t be in the race.” It is a pattern that says that blacks can never get anywhere, if they were not black, which comjures the bogey of affirmative action where blacks are taking the positions of whites only because they are blacks.

This is of course a pattern that the Clintons have tried to steer this campaign, to marginalize Obama’s candidacy as a merely black candidate, appealing only to black voters.  Coming before the Pennsylvania primary on April 22, it certainly looks like a calculated strategy to frighten white voters who have voted for Obama in droves in so-called ‘red states’ where there are hardly blacks in those states.  As a strategy, it would seem to have worked in the Mississippi primary, where 74% of white voters voted for Senator Clinton, though on closer examination it really was an improvement for Obama in those southern states. 

This brings me to the decidedly disingenuous discussion of race and prejudice and as to why Obama should not be considered white?  No, no, guys, sheath your swords and let’s look at this as civilized individuals.  It is Obama’s antecedent that makes the ignorance of a Geraldine Ferraro so palpable.  Of course, an Italian-American like Ferraro who until recently was not considered a true white, would be quite jealous of the kind of accomplishment that Obama on his own has achieved.  If we were to measure what Obama should be called through the life he has lived, he should be attributed with about 75% of white, and 25% of black.  I know everybody is already shouting blasphemy.  But that should be the truth.  Let’s examine the fact.  Barack Obama, Sr., married Obama’s mother and they had Obama, Jr.  But after only 2 years, his black father abandoned him to be raised by his single white mother and his white grandparents.  In actual fact, out of Obama’s 45 years of existence, only 2 years of his life we can really claim to be our black.  Of course, this is tongue in cheek as we understand that an ounce of black blood is all that is needed to classify anyone as black.

Obama’s white family has as much claim to him as he has allowed us to have 100% claim to him.  Why shouldn’t they?  He speaks of his single teenage mother raising him, and then taken over by his white grandparents.  Hence the anger that the late mother would have felt about the pirahnic frenzy with which so-called angry white women are attacking her son.  For God’s sake she was his mother.  A single mother abandoned by her black husband when she was only 20 years old.  But she didn’t break down and raise a vagabond as a son.  Not only did she not break down, she on the contrary achieved a stellar career that allowed her to influence the lives of the indigent, achieving her Ph.D. in the process. 

Writing in the International Herald Tribune, a sister publication of the New York Times, Janny Scott of the New York Times wrote of Obama’s mother, Stanely Ann, “Fluent in Indonesian, Soetoro moved with Maya first to Yogyakarta, the center of Javanese handicrafts. A weaver in college, she was fascinated
with what Soetoro-Ng calls “life’s gorgeous minutiae.” That interest inspired her study of village industries, which became the basis of her 1992 doctoral dissertation.

She became a consultant for the United States Agency for International Development on setting up a village credit program, then a Ford Foundation program officer in Jakarta specializing in women’s work. Later, she was a consultant in Pakistan; then she joined Indonesia’s oldest bank to work on what is described as the world’s largest sustainable microfinance program, creating services like credit and savings for the poor.

Visitors flowed constantly through her Ford Foundation office in central Jakarta and through her house in a neighborhood to the south, where papaya and banana trees grew in the front yard and Javanese dishes like opor ayam were served for dinner. Her guests were leaders in the Indonesian human rights movement, people from women’s organizations, representatives of community groups doing grass-roots development.”

It is the above kind of stellar achievement that feminism is made of, a teenage mother who didn’t wilt in the face of abandonment, but on the contrary went back to school and achieved success on her own terms, not the pampered life of a Hillary Clinton.  Shame on the so-called angry white women.  They cannot carry the shoes that Obama’s mother wore.  What would Stanley Ann have thought of their bunch - disgraceful. 

We have claimed 100% of Barack Obama because he has allowed us to do so, though in the final analysis he has nothing to do with how he is defined, the world defined because he has black blood in him, disregarding the white blood he also has and the antecedents of how he was raised.  We have claimed 100% of Obama because he has made us proud, becoming the ‘first black man’ to be named editor of the Harvard Law School Journal, marrying one of our most qualified, brilliant and gorgeous black woman who has proceeded to bear two beautiful children for us. 

The politics of race and prejudice has been deliberately thrust into the primary, in the Clinton ‘win-at-all-costs strategy, using surrogates like Geraldine Ferraro.  Only the uninformed and bamboozled would fall for it.  Obama has as much claim to being white as we have to claiming 100% of him. 

Congressional Democrats are beginning to coalesce around an Obama candidacy as their party’s presidential candidate, believing that an Obama ticket would be more helpful in getting them elected, especially in the so-called “red states.” “Red states” are the states in the U.S. that normally vote for the Republican party.

In the well-connected Hill report by Alexander Bolton, he writes, “Democratic lawmakers are becoming persuaded that Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) would have a more positive impact on other Democrats on the November ballot than Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

Obama’s advantage over Clinton would be most pronounced in the Southern and Western states President Bush carried in 2000 and 2004, say lawmakers interviewed by The Hill. In total, 32 members of Congress from these “red states” have endorsed Obama. Twenty-two lawmakers from those states have backed Clinton. 

Briton Simon Mann has finally confessed to plotting a coup against the oil-rich Equatorial Guinea, according to BBC. A lot of concern is being shown for his welfare, while the fact that he tried to overthrow the government of an independent African country is being ignored.  Mann said that he was not the “main man”, but then who is?  He should say so, and point the right finger at Sir Mark Thatcher, son of the former British Prime Minister. 

With 99% of results announced in Mississippi, Barack Obama had 247,456 votes or 60%, while Hillary Clinton had 153,745 votes or 38%.  That’s 22 percentage points higher.  Polls before the election had said that Obama would win with about 15%.  Interesting thing also, according to MSNBC exit polls, Blacks constituted 50% of the Democratic electorate. There has been talk about the Catholic vote going overwhelmingly for Clinton, but according to the exit poll, Catholics constituted 8% of the voters, and 54% voted for Clinton, while 42% voted for Obama.  Another interesting point is that Republicans made up 13% of the voters, and they overwhelmingly supported Clinton with 76% to 24% of the vote.  What do you make of that?

Associated Press (AP) and the three cable networks, CNN, FoxNews, and MSNBC, have all projected Senator Barack Obama as having won the Mississippi Democratic primary election.  However, the talking heads now point to the fact that half the electorate in Mississippi are African Americans.  But they forget to mention that Obama won last Saturday’s primary caucus in Wyoming which is overwhelmingly white.  It has a population of less than 1% blacks in the state.  In fact, of the 29 states he has won, only South Carolina, Georgia and Louisiana has a sizable number of blacks in the population.

Let’s look at the 2006 census of populations in these states - Louisiana 31%, Maryland 27%, South Carolina 29%, Georgia 30%, Virginia 20%.  You could then see how warped their analyses are.

Senator Obama’s camp today put out a statement questioning Senator Clinton’s “claim to be experienced in foreign policy.  Below is the full memo from a former State Department official, Greg Craig, who is advising Senator Obama, originated the memo.  If you wish to know about Craig, read more about him here.

To: Interested Parties

From: Greg Craig, former director, Policy Planning Office, U.S. State Department

RE: Senator Clinton’s claim to be experienced in foreign policy: Just words?

DA: March 11, 2008

When your entire campaign is based upon a claim of experience, it is important that you have evidence to support that claim. Hillary Clinton’s argument that she has passed “the Commander- in-Chief test” is simply not supported by her record.

There is no doubt that Hillary Clinton played an important domestic policy role when she was First Lady. It is well known, for example, that she led the failed effort to pass universal health insurance. There is no reason to believe, however, that she was a key player in foreign policy at any time during the Clinton Administration. She did not sit in on National Security Council meetings. She did not have a security clearance. She did not attend meetings in the Situation Room. She did not manage any part of the national security bureaucracy, nor did she have her own national security staff. She did not do any heavy-lifting with foreign governments, whether they were friendly or not. She never managed a foreign policy crisis, and there is no evidence to suggest that she participated in the decision-making that occurred in connection with any such crisis. As far as the record shows, Senator Clinton never answered the phone either to make a decision on any pressing national security issue – not at 3 AM or at any other time of day.

When asked to describe her experience, Senator Clinton has cited a handful of international incidents where she says she played a central role. But any fair-minded and objective judge of these claims – i.e., by someone not affiliated with the Clinton campaign – would conclude that Senator Clinton’s claims of foreign policy experience are exaggerated.

Northern Ireland:

Senator Clinton has said, “I helped to bring peace to Northern Ireland.” It is a gross overstatement of the facts for her to claim even partial credit for bringing peace to Northern Ireland. She did travel to Northern Ireland, it is true. First Ladies often travel to places that are a focus of U.S. foreign policy. But at no time did she play any role in the critical negotiations that ultimately produced the peace. As the Associated Press recently reported, “[S]he was not directly involved in negotiating the Good Friday peace accord.” With regard to her main claim that she helped bring women together, she did participate in a meeting with women, but, according to those who know best, she did not play a pivotal role. The person in charge of the negotiations, former Senator George Mitchell, said that “[The First Lady] was one of many people who participated in encouraging women to get involved, not the only one.”

News of Senator Clinton’s claims has raised eyebrows across the ocean. Her reference to an important meeting at the Belfast town hall was debunked. Her only appearance at the Belfast City Hall was to see Christmas lights turned on. She also attended a 50-minute meeting which, according to the Belfast Daily Telegraph’s report at the time, “[was] a little bit stilted, a little prepared at times.” Brian Feeney, an Irish author and former politician, sums it up: “The road to peace was carefully documented, and she wasn’t on it.”

Bosnia:

Senator Clinton has pointed to a March 1996 trip to Bosnia as proof that her foreign travel involved a life-risking mission into a war zone. She has described dodging sniper fire. While she did travel to Bosnia in March 1996, the visit was not a high-stakes mission to a war zone. On March 26, 1996, the New York Times reported that “Hillary Rodham Clinton charmed American troops at a U.S.O. show here, but it didn’t hurt that the singer Sheryl Crow and the comedian Sinbad were also on the stage.”

Kosovo:

Senator Clinton has said, “I negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo.” It is true that, as First Lady, she traveled to Macedonia and visited a Kosovar refugee camp. It is also true that she met with government officials while she was there. First Ladies frequently meet with government officials. Her claim to have “negotiated open borders to let fleeing refugees into safety from Kosovo,” however, is not true. Her trip to Macedonia took place on May 14, 1999. The borders were opened the day before, on May 13, 1999.

The negotiations that led to the opening of the borders were accomplished by the people who ordinarily conduct negotiations with foreign governments – U.S. diplomats. President Clinton’s top envoy to the Balkans, former Ambassador Robert Gelbard, said, “I cannot recall any involvement by Senator Clinton in this issue.” Ivo Daalder worked on the Clinton Administration’s National Security Council and wrote a definitive history of the Kosovo conflict. He recalls that “she had absolutely no role in the dirty work of negotiations.”

Rwanda:

Last year, former President Clinton asserted that his wife pressed him to intervene with U.S. troops to stop the Rwandan genocide. When asked about this assertion, Hillary Clinton said it was true. There is no evidence, however, to suggest that this ever happened. Even those individuals who were advocating a much more robust U.S. effort to stop the genocide did not argue for the use of U.S. troops. No one recalls hearing that Hillary Clinton had any interest in this course of action. Based on a fair and thorough review of National Security Council deliberations during those tragic months, there is no evidence to suggest that U.S. military intervention was ever discussed. Prudence Bushnell, the Assistant Secretary of State with responsibility for Africa, has recalled that there was no consideration of U.S. military intervention.

At no time prior to her campaign for the presidency did Senator Clinton ever make the claim that she supported intervening militarily to stop the Rwandan genocide. It is noteworthy that she failed to mention this anecdote – urging President Clinton to intervene militarily in Rwanda – in her memoirs. President Clinton makes no mention of such a conversation with his wife in his memoirs. And Madeline Albright, who was Ambassador to the United Nations at the time, makes no mention of any such event in her memoirs.

Hillary Clinton did visit Rwanda in March 1998 and, during that visit, her husband apologized for America’s failure to do more to prevent the genocide.

China

Senator Clinton also points to a speech that she delivered in Beijing in 1995 as proof of her ability to answer a 3 AM crisis phone call. It is strange that Senator Clinton would base her own foreign policy experience on a speech that she gave over a decade ago, since she so frequently belittles Barack Obama’s speeches opposing the Iraq War six years ago. Let there be no doubt: she gave a good speech in Beijing, and she stood up for women’s rights. But Senator Obama’s opposition to the War in Iraq in 2002 is relevant to the question of whether he, as Commander-in-Chief, will make wise judgments about the use of military force. Senator Clinton’s speech in Beijing is not.

Senator Obama’s speech opposing the war in Iraq shows independence and courage as well as good judgment. In the speech that Senator Clinton says does not qualify him to be Commander in Chief, Obama criticized what he called “a rash war . . . a war based not on reason, but on passion, not on principle, but on politics.” In that speech, he said prophetically: “[E]ven a successful war against Iraq will require a US occupation of undetermined length, at undetermined cost, with undetermined consequences.” He predicted that a U.S. invasion of Iraq would “fan the flames of the Middle East,” and “strengthen the recruitment arm of al Qaeda.” He urged the United States first to “finish the fight with Bin Laden and al Qaeda.”

If the U.S. government had followed Barack Obama’s advice in 2002, we would have avoided one of the greatest foreign policy catastrophes in our nation’s history. Some of the most “experienced” men in national security affairs – Vice President Cheney and Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and others – led this nation into that catastrophe. That lesson should teach us something about the value of judgment over experience. Longevity in Washington, D.C. does not guarantee either wisdom of judgment.

Conclusion:

The Clinton campaign’s argument is nothing more than mere assertion, dramatized in a scary television commercial with a telephone ringing in the middle of the night. There is no support for or substance in the claim that Senator Clinton has passed “the Commander-in-Chief test.” That claim – as the TV ad – consists of nothing more than making the assertion, repeating it frequently to the voters and hoping that they will believe it.

On the most critical foreign policy judgment of our generation – the War in Iraq – Senator Clinton voted in support of a resolution entitled “The Joint Resolution to Authorize the Use of U.S. Military Force Against Iraq.” As she cast that vote, she said: “This is probably the hardest decision I have ever had to make—any vote that may lead to war should be hard—but I cast it with conviction.” In this campaign, Senator Clinton has argued – remarkably – that she wasn’t actually voting for war, she was voting for diplomacy. That claim is no more credible than her other claims of foreign policy experience. The real tragedy is that we are still living with the terrible consequences of her misjudgment. The Bush Administration continues to cite that resolution as its authorization – like a blank check – to fight on with no end in sight.

Barack Obama has a very simple case. On the most important commander in chief test of our generation, he got it right, and Senator Clinton got it wrong. In truth, Senator Obama has much more foreign policy experience than either Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan had when they were elected. Senator Obama has worked to confront 21st century challenges like proliferation and genocide on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. He possesses the personal attributes of a great leader – an even temperament, an open-minded approach to even the most challenging problems, a willingness to listen to all views, clarity of vision, the ability to inspire, conviction and courage.

And Barack Obama does not use false charges and exaggerated claims to play politics with national security.

Speaker of the House, Nancy Pelosi, has shot down suggestions that there will be a Democratic dream team as the Clintons have been suggesting lately.  Said Pelosi in Waltham, Mass.  She said, “Think that ticket either way is impossible,” talking to NECN’s Alison King.  She attributed her observation to Senator Hillary Clinton’s continuous disparaging of Senator Barack Obama as not being qualified to be commander-in-chief, while touting Republican nominee, John McCain, as being qualified.

Senator Obama has dismissed any notion of a dream ticket with Senator Clinton, she being the candidate and he being the vice presidential nominee.

ABC’s News Senior National Correspondent is reporting how many bloggers are questioning the motive behind Senator Clinton’s new ad which deliberately altered the color of Barack Obama to make him look darker.  See the photo here: 

The bloggers believe it is the same kind of doctoring employed by Time Magazine to make OJ Simpson look more sinister.  See the photo here:

It is becoming very clear how racist the Clintons have been, and now showing their true colors.  Her fear mongering may have paid off, but more people are beginning to see that she is a woman who would do anything to get elected, even resorting to changing Obama skin color.  Pathetic, indeed.

The heavyweight boxing match between Senators Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton can today be considered to be in its ninth round.  It has always been how dare this upstart and the black community to challenge the hand that fed them, especially for those who had always regarded Clinton’s husband as the black president that blacks never had.  The fight wasn’t supposed to have gone this far.  But despite the heavy betting in favor of the she who had had it all, Senator Clinton, first lady to a governor, first lady to a president, senator from that state of robber barons, New York, and the other a former vice-presidential candidate and a former senator Senator Obama surprised everybody by winning the first round, delivering devastating blows to his then two opponents.  But Hillary, having learned the tricks of the trade, by intimidating and scaring away individuals like the wimpy and scurrilous so-called America’s Mayor Giulliani, came back in the second round, New Hampsire, to land some of her own blows, winning that round. 

In the third round, South Carolina, the boxing match instead turned into a sort of WWE wrestling match.  As we know how WWE wrestling matches are chereographed, and how dirty that could be, Clinton deployed her husband on the side of the ring to hit Obama with a two by four while the referee was being distracted by the Queen of Mean.  But the crowd booed, in this case, the media.  Obama deflected the attack and went on to win the third round decisively.  The Queen of Mean didn’t know what hit her, and she quickly expelled her husband from the ring side, instead letting him take pot chops from the arena. 

Imitating the immortal “Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee” Muhammad Ali’s boast against Sonny Liston, but without the aura of the great man, Senator Clinton promised the world how she was going to end the fight in the sixth round, on “Super Tuesday”, but when the round ended unfortunately for her it was Barack Obama who was still standing tall, having landed more blows himself and winning a lot more points.  Surprised by the blows, Senator Clinton wilted, losing the next several rounds as her opponent continued to pile on points.  But like every gladiator, especially with knowledge of dirty and gutter in-fighting, she warned that she was going to throw the kitchen sink at Obama, and throw the kitchen sink she has.  The blows she has landed by winning round nine, including the big states of Ohio and Texas, have knocked Obama back to the ropes, and he may just have been saved by the bell. 

Let’s face it, guys.  Senator Obama went from being an amateur to the big heavyweight fight at Madison Square Garden, when he was picked to be the keynote speaker at the Democratic National Convention in 2004.  That one punch at the Madison Square Garden established him as an formidable fighter.  But the test of how prepared he was was to come in 2006 when he ran for the United States Senate against another formidable Republican opponent, Mr. Jack Ryan, a successful investment banker who made millions, but decided to leave that field and went into teaching at an inner-city school.  A contest of juggernauts - pitting a successful investment banker against a successful Harvard University Law School Journal President and community organizer.  But that test never happened, due to no fault of Obama’s, but to the sucker punch delivered to Jack Ryan by his actress wife, Jeri Ryan (remember Star Trek), who accused her husband of forcing her to perform nude in front of other people at Clubs.  Ryan was forced to drop out, and the Republicans scurried around to come up with that carpet-bagger Ambassador Alan Keyes, the perennial also ran in heavyweight bouts, the presidential primaries, but who never seems to ever get out of the first round.  Of course, Obama wasted no time in knocking him out with a one-two punch.

Yesterday, the two gladiators fought the ninth round.  For all intents and purposes, it has to be agreed that Senator Clinton delivered some devastating blows to Barack Obama, knocking him back to the ropes.  It wasn’t like Obama didn’t see the blows coming.  While waiting for the ninth round to come, Clinton had signaled Obama that she was going to throw the whole kitchen sink at him, according to the New York Times. 

First, it was the Clinton’s connivance with NBC’s Saturday Night Live (SNL), that did a skit portraying the media as fawning over Obama.  The Clinton campaign exploited this, and the media swallowed this carefully orchestrated attack.  There is this herd mentality of the American media that says as soon as one shouts loud enough, they would follow it line and sinker.  The media began their ritual soul-searching as to whether they had been biased against the Queen of Mean.  The opposite of being biased, is also being biased against your opponent, and the media has been pounding on Obama since then.

Then, last Sunday, on CBS’s 60 Minutes, the moron Steve Croft decided to bring up the rumors swirling around in the internet about Obama being a Muslim.  Croft decided to ask Clinton whether she believed Obama was a Muslim.  Rather than answering a “no” to the question, Senator Clinton demurred and prevaricated with her answer with, “oh, if I were to take him at his words,” or “as far as I know,” thereby fueling the rumor, especially that of an Obama supporter in the interview who had mentioned these concerns about Obama.  As an individual who would have been regarded as an fair journalist, why didn’t Croft pose a counter question to Obama as to the ugly rumors swirling about Clinton’s private life, or whether Obama believed the Clintons had anything to do with the death of Vince Foster.  Where was the fairness in this question and where was the fawning/cuddling of Barack Obama? 

The third kitchen sink was the advertisement in Texas, which questioned Obama’s qualification to be president and commander-in-chief.  It showed a phone ringing in the White House at 3 a.m. in the night.  Mrs. Clinton is seen fully dressed in her designer dress picking up the phone.  Listen, I must admit it was an devastating and negative effective ad, first used by late President Lyndon Johnson against McGovern.  The media lapped up this caricature without questioning why a president should be fully dressed at 3 a.m. in the morning, waiting for a phone call.  The media never asked when was the last time she ever picked up a red phone.  Of course, totally ignored was Obama’s quick response to the ad, pointing out how Clinton made the wrong decision, the first time she picked up that “red” phone. 

The fourth kitchen sink was self-inflicted, when Barack Obama’s economic adviser decided to play amateur diplomacy, and with for all people the consul-general of Canada in Chicago.  Imagine!!  The first rule of a presidential primary campaign is never meet with foreign diplomats, as Senator Kerry learned the hard way, as when he started boasting about how presidents in other countries preferred for him to win the presidency in 2004.  In fact, why meet with a underling like an consul-general, who proceeded to transmit a convoluted account of what had been discussed, implying that Obama was merely mouthing his anti-NAFTA rhetoric for political purposes only.  While the Canadian government has denied that Obama’s private position was different from his public position, a bit late, it is also whispered that it was the Canadian Prime Minister who made public the original transmittal from his consulate in Chicago. 

As earlier stated, the ninth round of this heavyweight boxing fight between Senator Barack Obama and Senator Hillary Clinton has ended, in what has been christened “Mini Super Tuesday,” with Senator Clinton landing the largest blows, with her wins in the huge states of Ohio and Texas.  But Senator Obama is still standing, after receiving the heavy blows and he is still far ahead in points because of his past performance in earlier rounds.  But if he thinks he is going to coast to victory in this vicious fight, he is totally mistaken, because the Queen of Mean fights very dirty.  There is no hurrah in being a loser, the world of politics is littered with the carcasses of the Al Gores and John Kerrys of this world.  The adage that “good guys finish last time,” is quite appropriate here.  You cannot compete against a man/woman who is used to playing in the gutter, while you are trying to protect his/her dirt spraying over your immaculate dress.  No, it doesn’t happen that way.  You have got to get down to the same gutter, defeat your opponent, go to the shower and clean yourself, raise the championship belt aloft, smile at the crowd, call for unity and praise your opponent for giving you a great fight. 

Do we even remember who Senator Kerry beat for the nomination? Yes, we know who Bush beat, John McCain, because he is running again.  If he doesn’t want to be a dot on the historical chart, Senator Barack Obama needs to stop being St. Obama, take off his gloves and fight the Queen of Mean in the gutter.  As we say in Africa, “Do me I do you, God no go vex.” In other words, slap me and I slap you back, God will not be angry.