Labels: African Americans, Deep Thoughts, Empire, Politics and African Americans

In front of tens of thousands of cheering supporters, Barack Obama gave his acceptance speech one hour after it became clear he'd be the next President of the United States of America.

Here are excerpts from the speech delivered at Grant Park in Chicago.

On the significance of his election:
If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

***

It's been a long time coming, but tonight, because of what we did on this day, in this election, at this defining moment, change has come to America.

***

I will never forget who this victory truly belongs to - it belongs to you.

Echoes of the 2004 speech that made him a household name:
It's the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled - Americans who sent a message to the world that we have never been a collection of Red States and Blue States: we are, and always will be, the United States of America.

On John McCain:
I just received an extraordinarily gracious call from Senator McCain. He fought long and hard in this campaign, and he's fought even longer and harder for the country he loves. He has endured sacrifices for America that most of us cannot begin to imagine, and we are better off for the service rendered by this brave and selfless leader. I congratulate him and Governor Palin for all they have achieved, and I look forward to working with them to renew this nation's promise in the months ahead.

On his family:
I would not be standing here tonight without the unyielding support of my best friend for the last sixteen years, the rock of our family and the love of my life, our nation's next First Lady, Michelle Obama. Sasha and Malia, I love you both so much, and you have earned the new puppy that's coming with us to the White House. And while she's no longer with us, I know my grandmother is watching, along with the family that made me who I am. I miss them tonight, and know that my debt to them is beyond measure.

On the future:
The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep. We may not get there in one year or even one term, but America - I have never been more hopeful than I am tonight that we will get there. I promise you - we as a people will get there.

There will be setbacks and false starts. There are many who won't agree with every decision or policy I make as President, and we know that government can't solve every problem. But I will always be honest with you about the challenges we face. I will listen to you, especially when we disagree. And above all, I will ask you join in the work of remaking this nation the only way it's been done in America for two-hundred and twenty-one years - block by block, brick by brick, calloused hand by calloused hand.

On bipartisanship:
Let us remember that it was a man from this state who first carried the banner of the Republican Party to the White House - a party founded on the values of self-reliance, individual liberty, and national unity. Those are values we all share, and while the Democratic Party has won a great victory tonight, we do so with a measure of humility and determination to heal the divides that have held back our progress. As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours, "We are not enemies, but friends...though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection." And to those Americans whose support I have yet to earn - I may not have won your vote, but I hear your voices, I need your help, and I will be your President too.

On the genius of America:
To all those who have wondered if America's beacon still burns as bright - tonight we proved once more that the true strength of our nation comes not from our the might of our arms or the scale of our wealth, but from the enduring power of our ideals: democracy, liberty, opportunity, and unyielding hope.

For that is the true genius of America - that America can change. Our union can be perfected. And what we have already achieved gives us hope for what we can and must achieve tomorrow.

On the moment:
America, we have come so far. We have seen so much. But there is so much more to do. So tonight, let us ask ourselves - if our children should live to see the next century; if my daughters should be so lucky to live as long as Ann Nixon Cooper, what change will they see? What progress will we have made?

This is our chance to answer that call. This is our moment. This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American Dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism, and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people:

Yes We Can.

Labels: Barack Obama, Politics and African Americans

By RON FOURNIER

WASHINGTON – The elevation of Barack Obama to the White House is a transcendent moment, for what this election says about a nation where blacks were once considered property.

And that might be the least of it.

This is a once-in-a-lifetime event. At odd intervals — 1800, 1860, 1932, 1980 — the nation reaches a "pivot point," an election that draws the line between the past and the future. And 2008 appears to be just such a line in the shifting sands of our convulsive times.

Reagan-style conservative supremacy? Over. The era of baby boomer leadership? Waning.

And maybe, just maybe, something new has arrived: a post-partisan approach to governing, founded on the Obama Coalition, fueled by young and minority voters, powered by the 21st century technologies that helped turn a first-term senator from Illinois into a historic lodestone.

From the beginning, Obama had his sights on something bigger than the "50 percent plus one" approach championed by Karl Rove. He wanted a larger statement.

"Even if other candidates are able to eke out a victory, I think they are less likely to pull in independents and Republicans and new people who are currently not voting," Obama told The Associated Press 15 months ago.

"I think what people are looking for right now is somebody who can bring the country together and maybe shape the kind of majority that will actually deliver on health care, that will actually deliver on a bold energy strategy, that can actually do something about serious education reform."

On Tuesday, he received the huge wave of support he sought. But will he be able to do all that he promised? Will his ecstatic supporters be satisfied with anything less?

And did Obama really receive a mandate, or was he the beneficiary of the nation's disgust with President Bush, and its unease with America's course?

These are the questions that will be answered over the next four years. But for the moment, some astounding things are certain:

Our next president will be a man who identifies himself as black, but was raised by his white mother — a man who reflects the multiracial society America has become.

He was born in the 1960s, and was too young to experience the Vietnam era that left scars on the nation's psyche for decades. And his lack of experience, central to his opponents' campaigns against him in the primaries and general election, means that he is not necessarily invested in the way things have always been done.

Exit polls indicated that Obama's triumph was built on his overwhelming success with blacks, Hispanics, 18-to-34-year-olds and new voters.

This is the future of the U.S. electorate.

History shows that once a young voter casts ballots twice for a given party, he or she is unlikely to ever turn away. Hispanics are the nation's fastest-growing voting bloc. Indeed, the government recently reported that white people will no longer make up a majority of Americans by 2042, eight years sooner than previous estimates.

About one in 10 voters said this was the first year they had cast ballots, and 70 percent of them backed Obama. To cap it off, Obama won the female vote.

"From this day forward," says historian John Baick of Western New England College in Springfield, Mass., "politics, politicians and the people they serve will never be the same."

Obama takes over after 16 years of leadership by presidents born in the thick of the baby boom. In this fast-moving society, the worlds in which George W. Bush and Bill Clinton governed are so out of date they seem almost quaint.

Consider this: There were just a few hundred Web sites when Clinton took office and virtually no blogs when Bush entered the White House in January 2001.

Obama, of course, raised millions of dollars via the Internet. He tried to announce his selection of Joe Biden as his running mate with a text message. One of his favorite platforms, YouTube, did not exist when Bush began his second term.

When Obama needs help on Capitol Hill, the world's largest lobbying shop — millions of supporters strong — is a mass e-mail away. His campaign Web site, a virtual community, could evolve into the 21st century version of a political headquarters — the place you go to help the party or ask it to help you.

To some degree, Obama succeeded by turning the concept of micro-politics on its head. Founded by Clinton and perfected by Bush, micro-politics relies on the dark arts of data mining, voter segmentation and polling.

Micro-politicians divide the country into like-minded groups, then peel off their rivals' votes — a few from here, a few more from there — to cobble together narrow victories. They divide — or polarize — and conquer.

While Obama borrowed micro-targeting tactics from Bush and Clinton, the Illinois senator used them to find and motivate unregistered voters rather than to slice and dice the traditional crop.

"This is a realigning election because folks who are going to vote from here on out are people who don't have a strong partisan connection," says political scientist Natalie Davis of Birmingham Southern College in Birmingham, Ala. "They don't see things in terms of red and blue. They see things more in terms of solving problems."

But parties still matter, and with gains in the House and the Senate, Obama takes office with more political capital than perhaps any president since Lyndon Johnson defeated Barry Goldwater in 1964. That landslide produced a House with 295 Democrats and a Senate with 68 Democrats.

In addition, many Democrats who won seats in U.S. statehouses Tuesday night will play a role in drawing the next decade's political maps, a process that can cement the power of the ruling party.

Obama will need all the help he can get, as an inexperienced chief executive handed the burdens of a recession, a trillion-plus dollars in new government debt, an aging society, rising health care costs, failed energy policies and two foreign wars.

After a generation of politics based on promises of less government and lower taxes, Obama will ask Congress to expand government's reach and tackle the nation's massive problems. He even ran saying he would raise some people's taxes.

Again, those are tomorrow's tasks. For now, we can marvel at this moment, when we can look back and see the past, and look forward at a sharply drawn future.

Baick, the Western New England College historian, likens 2008 to 1960, and the victory of John F. Kennedy.

"He managed to convince Americans through popular memory and myth that we are good again," Baick says, "that we are different and young."

Echoes of Obama.

In 1960, the question that loomed over the campaign was whether a Catholic could get elected president. Voters answered yes. Nearly five decades later, that milestone is a mere footnote to the Kennedy presidency.

The question this time was whether a black man could win the presidency. Forty percent of all white Americans hold a negative view of blacks, according to polling by The Associated Press, and two-thirds of white Democrats express racial misgivings.

Yet on Election Day, Obama won more than four of every 10 white votes. Americans said yes, we can overcome our original sin.

Fifty years from now, President Obama will be remembered for more than the color of his skin.

And this moment will never be forgotten.

___

EDITOR'S NOTE: Ron Fournier is Washington bureau chief for The Associated Press.

Labels: Barack Obama, Politics and African Americans

Will Spend More in Final 25 Days Than McCain Will in Entire General

Posted by Evan Tracey

What a week. If a 30-minute purchase on network TV is not enough evidence that Barack Obama has more money than there is TV time left to buy, then I have a Bridge to Nowhere to sell you. In terms of message imbalance between the two presidential campaigns, it is clear that a critical mass has been reached. Obama is on pace to spend more on TV in the final 25 days of this election than John McCain's entire $85 million matching-fund check. For those keeping score at home, Obama has aired more than 25,000 commercials in the past four days alone.

McCain is in a shouting match against a man with a bull horn. Whatever McCain does in the final 25 days, it will not be enough to break through the noise unless his campaign finds a message that connects with voters. Timing is everything in politics, and McCain's campaign may have waited too long to play the Ayers, Rezko and Wright cards. These types of attacks do not work while voters are sweating the ups and downs of the economy and stock market.

So now what? If you are McCain? You must draw down ad buys in states you cannot win and focus on the states you must. Secondly, you need to find a message that connects with voters and their economic anxiety. You need a persuasive argument about how Obama would be worse for the already fragile economy. Anything less will not get the job done.

The big question for Obama is what will he do with his 30 minutes of primetime TV? I suspect it will be an epically produced closing argument that will rival those from the best courtroom TV dramas. This campaign is rewriting the rules on presidential campaign advertising.

Forget the Internet for now; this is a made-for-TV campaign!

Labels: advertisement, Barack Obama, Politics and African Americans

On May 20, 2008, Barack Obama won the state of Oregon. No matter what opinion people made about Obama "not being ready to lead" a bi-racial man with a Muslim father and a Christan mother had taken one more step toward entering the Oval Office. The mauling he gave Senator Clinton in several predominantly White states in massive numbers seemed unthinkable.
Or was it?

In 2000 author Robert Greene penned the 48 Laws of Power. His groundbreaking bestseller gives a modern twist to classical war strategy. Greene's in depth discussion on the effects of mastering of one's emotions can easily be seen in the Clinton vs. Obama skirmishes.
Greene expanded his unique approach to observing warfare in The Art of Seduction and The 33 Strategies of war.
He is arguably the foremost sought after strategist in business, politics and war - our Prince Machiavelli of modern warfare, if you will.


In watching Barack Obama's rise, it is hard to not see a pattern of his victories closely connected with the 48 Laws of Power and the 33 Strategies of War.
At times Obama appears to have been playing a magnificent game of political chess from the start of his bid for the Oval Office. I sat down with Robert Greene to discuss Senator Obama's tactical and strategic movements in his campaign. While everyone seems to have their site locked into the DNC convention, Robert Greene advises that we all prepare ourselves for a protracted political battle.


AB: Lets start with Law 24: The Perfect Courtier. You say that individual "thrives in a world where everything revolves around power and political dexterity. He has mastered the art of indirection; he flatters, yields to superiors, and asserts power over others in the most oblique and graceful manner. Learn and apply the laws of courtiership and there will be no limit to how far you can rise in the court.
"

RG: I never thought about it before, but it does make perfect sense. If you wanted to psychoanalyze it a little bit. With his background, in being bi-racial and having to navigate in different worlds...If you look at his Kenyan father, then you look at the White side in Kansas and Hawaii- he's been towing a line between the two worlds. And if you read his book, he's asking "Where do I fit"? It's a really interesting story, I like his books. He's always had to learn how to be the courtier. He's always had to be diplomatic. How not to offend this person or that. These two sides had very different sensibilities, while he's trying too figure out who he is. So, I think its in his nature. Its not a fake thing. Some people learn to be the courtier later in life. Its a nice quality, but some people can feel like its a little bit manipulative. But I think its very deep in his identity, from his multiracial background. I'm not sure, I can only speculate.


Its very nice. He's very graceful. He does not get angry. I thought the one moment where he blew it a little was in a debate with Clinton. It was in January I believe. He kinda lost his cool. He got a little bit angry and testy. I supported him early on. He was my first pick. For while I felt a little bit alienated from him. I did not think he was tough enough. I wanted to see him fighting back. But I understood later on that that's very hard for him to do. It does not play well. For the position that he is in, trying to be the first Black President. For him to show anger at a White woman was strategically not gonna play. So, he lost it a little bit in this one debate. But he never repeated it. I mean, its not really a strategy on his part, but its very effective.


I was just reading before you called about him speaking in Florida. He was meeting with Jewish voters. It was kind of interesting to see him charming them again, winning them over. I can make references to Jewish people and Jewish culture that are very appropriate. So there he is being the courtier.Its a quality hat will serve very well in his campaign. Bill Clinton was a master at it. He could talk to Hollywood liberals and then he could go to a factory in Ohio.


Now, some people don't think he has the common touch. I think there is a bit of truth to that. Maybe he is not comfortable with the White steel worker in Pennsylvania. But he has a different kind of power. A different kind of charm. I think he'll actually get over some of these supposed weaknesses that he has with White voters. I think he is very much a courter.


AB: The first law I think I openly recognized with Barack is Law 32: Play to Peoples Fantasies. There you say "The truth is often avoided because it is ugly and unpleasant. Never appeal to truth and reality unless you are prepared for the anger that comes for disenchantment. Life is so harsh and distressing that people who can manufacture romance or conjure up fantasy are like oases in the desert: Everyone flocks to them. There is great power in tapping into the fantasies of the masses.
"

Now, I do not mean to imply that he is fraudulent in spirit, or an actor. But, I don't think I have seen someone in my lifetime who has been able to mentally and emotionally move masses the way he does. I can only compare it to watching old footage of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Maybe Malcolm X.


RG: Or JFK.


AB: Perfect example in JFK. It looks like his change theme has drawn millions of people into what they want to see in America. It seems like he creates this dream for you of what America can be, but leaves room for you to impose your dream on top.


RG: I think you're right. We don't like to bring sophisticated psychology when discussing these things. The fantasy always kind of plays a line between a vague hope with a little bit of reality thrown in. If you put too much reality in it obscures. If you put too much hope there is nothing we can really connect to. So, throughout the ages the people who have been able to master this know how to make the perfect illusionary quality. Its like watching a good writer writing a novel.


Barack makes change inspiring. But he does not fill in too many details. Strategically that's very smart. The problem with America in the 21st century is that the country is so splintered. It's cracking up into smaller and smaller niche markets and groups. By region, by ethnicity and all these things. So that makes it hard to connect the whole country together. Its hard to get over all that and bring people together with a message. The only way you can do that is to be very inspiring and not being too concrete with what you are offering.


I can refer to John Kennedy in 1960 when he ran for President. He kinda drove the Republicans crazy with his vagueness. He never really said what he was going to do on a whole score of issues. But he talked about the new frontier and bringing back a certain spirit in America. It really connected in that moment. I think the people around him, like David Axelrod who have backgrounds in marketing an advertising are crafting a story. They are trying to do more of a JFK, or even Regan type campaign. They know that this is the moment for that. Because Americans are very disillusioned with probably the worst President we've ever had. Things look very bleak.


AB: The fantasy law connects directly to Law 45: Preach the Need for change, but never reform too much at once. I think he's hitting law 45 right on the nail.


RG: How so?

AB: Because he keeps the discussion of change very nebulous. Mainly though Obama keeps you believing that A) that change can happen, and B) that he is the agent for the change you want to see in America. One of his best qualities, and something I think Senator Clinton should have embraced was Law 46: Never Appear Too Perfect. He never lets you forget that he's got a wife and kids and that he has his own struggles with cigarettes or whatever. I think 46 keeps people listening to him.


RG: You and I may feel that way. But I'm wondering if other people don't see that in him. I saw him yesterday in his speech after he won Oregon and he said "I'm not perfect, I've made mistakes". I think that kind of humility is very endearing. But I think there are a lot of people that he doesn't connect to. They see him as kind of arrogant and over educated person who is looking down on them. Its funny how its subjective. So to you and I we think he does embody law 46. Other people think that he doesn't do it enough.


It's all fake though really in the end. Because Hillary is eating hot dogs and drinking beer acting like shes one of the yokels. They made one hundred million dollars last year. She comes from a wealthy background. Certainly more elite than he is. Its all fake in the end. But I think that part is subjective in the end. He's going to have to work a bit on his image. He's gonna have to connect with that NASCAR crowd a little bit.


AB: Moving beyond Hillary and looking toward McCain, are we moving from power to the war? If you could tell him to study only 3 of the 33 Strategies of War what would they be?

RG: The one he should study, and has actually done pretty well so far is Strategy 20: Maneuver Them Into Weakness. Its a Chinese concept. I struggled my hardest to bring this to the Western audience, because its not easy to explain. In the East, its the position you take that matters. Everything is related to something else- nothing is isolated. What you want in war or strategy is to take positions that put your rival in a corner and have less options than you.


The Western approach is not like that at all. The Western approach is to go straight in at the enemy and kill as many as you can.


In politics you want to get to a position that allows you to go here or there. Obama did that brilliantly from day one and Hillary messed it up. Here he is moving toward the general election. How can he move John McCain into positions that are untenable? That's the game. You can already see the position he's trying to put McCain in is, "He's Bush" But how do you make that case? Its one thing to say. Its another thing to make people feel it. If he can make people in Kentucky and Pennsylvania feel that McCain will make us live through four more years of the hell we've been living through it will be very effective.


But it can't be just with words. You have to do and show- its interesting to watch. Now, very fortunately, the Democrats control Congress. For instance the vote to the GI bill that just occurred. It will force McCains hand to show that he supports Bush. If he doesn't, he'll alienate his right wing base. In the Power book we call that putting your enemy on the horns of a dilemma. You go right, you are screwed. You go left, you are screwed. If he votes for the GI bill, he looks like a Democrat. If he votes against it, he looks like he's Bush again.


Obama has to keep his options fluid. You don't wanna commit to anything that's gonna screw you in the end. Any kind of position for instance on the economy. He did that in one debate but I don't think that's going to come back to hurt him. Don't say exactly that you'll never raise taxes on this. Keep it a little bit vague. Give yourself room to put McCain in very uncomfortable positions.


Another law from the war book is Strategy 28: Give Your Rivals Enough Rope to Hang Themselves. You never stop a man who's killing himself. McCain has a temper. Its the old Bob Dole thing. Love him or hate him, he's got a temper and its legendary. So he's got to frustrate him and bait him into things. Seeing John McCain lose his temper. It does not look so good. He looks like a cranky old man.


I talk about this in my book in regards to Lee Atwater. He's kind of a satanic figure in politics. He did that very same thing in 1988 with Bob Dole. But I'm afraid its a very powerful tactic and could be very effective on John McCain. I already saw, with the GI bill he got very testy.


War Strategy number 12: Grand Strategy. Its the most important in the book. Its that you plan, and that you do it looking far ahead into the future. You don't want to be someone that's attacking into the wind everything something new comes into the election cycle. Politicians muck this up again and again. Because its not an election that takes place every week. Its in November. One day. There are going to be setbacks. There are going to be things that you did not plan for happening. I mean, Democrats are really bad at this. I mean pathetic bad. If you have a grand strategy, it makes you consistent. It keeps you going in that line, when it seems everything around you not.


So much of the bad stuff happening, with Clinton losing this state or that state- it could have pushed him off course. But it didn't. He stayed pretty consistent on message there. If he follows those, it'll be a slam dunk.

Labels: Music, Politics and African Americans, Strategy

This is Your Nation on White Privilege
By Tim Wise


For those who still can’t grasp the concept of white privilege, or who are constantly looking for some easy-to-understand examples of it, perhaps this list will help.

White privilege is when you can get pregnant at seventeen like Bristol Palin and everyone is quick to insist that your life and that of your family is a personal matter, and that no one has a right to judge you or your parents, because “every family has challenges,” even as black and Latino families with similar “challenges” are regularly typified as irresponsible, pathological and arbiters of social decay.

White privilege is when you can call yourself a “fuckin’ redneck,” like Bristol Palin’s boyfriend does, and talk about how if anyone messes with you, you'll “kick their fuckin' ass,” and talk about how you like to “shoot shit” for fun, and still be viewed as a responsible, all-American boy (and a great son-in-law to be) rather than a thug.

White privilege is when you can attend four different colleges in six years like Sarah Palin did (one of which you basically failed out of, then returned to after making up some coursework at a community college), and no one questions your intelligence or commitment to achievement, whereas a person of color who did this would be viewed as unfit for college, and probably someone who only got in in the first place because of affirmative action.

White privilege is when you can claim that being mayor of a town smaller than most medium-sized colleges, and then Governor of a state with about the same number of people as the lower fifth of the island of Manhattan, makes you ready to potentially be president, and people don’t all piss on themselves with laughter, while being a black U.S. Senator, two-term state Senator, and constitutional law scholar, means you’re “untested.”


White privilege is being able to say that you support the words “under God” in the pledge of allegiance because “if it was good enough for the founding fathers, it’s good enough for me,” and not be immediately disqualified from holding office--since, after all, the pledge was written in the late 1800s and the “under God” part wasn’t added until the 1950s--while believing that reading accused criminals and terrorists their rights (because, ya know, the Constitution, which you used to teach at a prestigious law school requires it), is a dangerous and silly idea only supported by mushy liberals.

White privilege is being able to be a gun enthusiast and not make people immediately scared of you.

White privilege is being able to have a husband who was a member of an extremist political party that wants your state to secede from the Union, and whose motto was “Alaska first,” and no one questions your patriotism or that of your family, while if you're black and your spouse merely fails to come to a 9/11 memorial so she can be home with her kids on the first day of school, people immediately think she’s being disrespectful.

White privilege is being able to make fun of community organizers and the work they do--like, among other things, fight for the right of women to vote, or for civil rights, or the 8-hour workday, or an end to child labor--and people think you’re being pithy and tough, but if you merely question the experience of a small town mayor and 18-month governor with no foreign policy expertise beyond a class she took in college--you’re somehow being mean, or even sexist.

White privilege is being able to convince white women who don’t even agree with you on any substantive issue to vote for you and your running mate anyway, because all of a sudden your presence on the ticket has inspired confidence in these same white women, and made them give your party a “second look.”

White privilege is being able to fire people who didn’t support your political campaigns and not be accused of abusing your power or being a typical politician who engages in favoritism, while being black and merely knowing some folks from the old-line political machines in Chicago means you must be corrupt.

White privilege is being able to attend churches over the years whose pastors say that people who voted for John Kerry or merely criticize George W. Bush are going to hell, and that the U.S. is an explicitly Christian nation and the job of Christians is to bring Christian theological principles into government, and who bring in speakers who say the conflict in the Middle East is God’s punishment on Jews for rejecting Jesus, and everyone can still think you’re just a good church-going Christian, but if you’re black and friends with a black pastor who has noted (as have Colin Powell and the U.S. Department of Defense) that terrorist attacks are often the result of U.S. foreign policy and who talks about the history of racism and its effect on black people, you’re an extremist who probably hates America.

White privilege is not knowing what the Bush Doctrine is when asked by a reporter, and then people get angry at the reporter for asking you such a “trick question,” while being black and merely refusing to give one-word answers to the queries of Bill O’Reilly means you’re dodging the question, or trying to seem overly intellectual and nuanced.


White privilege is being able to claim your experience as a POW has anything at all to do with your fitness for president, while being black and experiencing racism is, as Sarah Palin has referred to it a “light” burden.

And finally, white privilege is the only thing that could possibly allow someone to become president when he has voted with George W. Bush 90 percent of the time, even as unemployment is skyrocketing, people are losing their homes, inflation is rising, and the U.S. is increasingly isolated from world opinion, just because white voters aren’t sure about that whole “change” thing. Ya know, it’s just too vague and ill-defined, unlike, say, four more years of the same, which is very concrete and certain…

White privilege is, in short, the problem.





http://www.timwise.org/

Labels: Music, Politics and African Americans, Racism

By JODI KANTOR

CHICAGO — The young law professor stood apart in too many ways to count. At a school where economic analysis was all the rage, he taught rights, race and gender. Other faculty members dreamed of tenured positions; he turned them down. While most colleagues published by the pound, he never completed a single work of legal scholarship.

At a formal institution, Barack Obama was a loose presence, joking with students about their romantic prospects, using first names, referring to case law one moment and “The Godfather” the next. He was also an enigmatic one, often leaving fellow faculty members guessing about his precise views.

Mr. Obama, now the junior senator from Illinois and the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee, spent 12 years at the University of Chicago Law School. Most aspiring politicians do not dwell in the halls of academia, and few promising young legal thinkers toil in state legislatures. Mr. Obama planted a foot in each, splitting his weeks between an elite law school and the far less rarefied atmosphere of the Illinois Senate.

Before he outraised every other presidential primary candidate in American history, Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status.

Standing in his favorite classroom in the austere main building, sharp-witted students looming above him, Mr. Obama refined his public speaking style, his debating abilities, his beliefs.

“He tested his ideas in classrooms,” said Dennis Hutchinson, a colleague. Every seminar hour brought a new round of, “Is affirmative action justified? Under what circumstances?” as Mr. Hutchinson put it.

But Mr. Obama’s years at the law school are also another chapter — see United States Senate, c. 2006 — in which he seemed as intently focused on his own political rise as on the institution itself. Mr. Obama, who declined to be interviewed for this article, was well liked at the law school, yet he was always slightly apart from it, leaving some colleagues feeling a little cheated that he did not fully engage. The Chicago faculty is more rightward-leaning than that of other top law schools, but if teaching alongside some of the most formidable conservative minds in the country had any impact on Mr. Obama, no one can quite point to it.

“I don’t think anything that went on in these chambers affected him,” said Richard Epstein, a libertarian colleague who says he longed for Mr. Obama to venture beyond his ideological and topical comfort zones. “His entire life, as best I can tell, is one in which he’s always been a thoughtful listener and questioner, but he’s never stepped up to the plate and taken full swings.”

Mr. Obama had other business on his mind, embarking on five political races during his 12 years at the school. Teaching gave him satisfaction, along with a perch and a paycheck, but he was impatient with academic debates over “whether to drop a footnote or not drop a footnote,” said Abner J. Mikva, a mentor whose own career has spanned Congress, the federal bench and the same law school.

Douglas Baird, another colleague, remembers once asking Mr. Obama to assess potential candidates for governor.

“First of all, I’m not running for governor, “ Mr. Obama told him. “But if I did, I would expect you to support me.”

He was a third-year state senator at the time.

Popular and Enigmatic

Mr. Obama arrived at the law school in 1991 thanks to Michael W. McConnell, a conservative scholar who is now a federal appellate judge. As president of The Harvard Law Review, Mr. Obama had impressed Mr. McConnell with editing suggestions on an article; on little more than that, the law school gave him a fellowship, which amounted to an office and a computer, which he used to write his memoir, “Dreams From My Father.”

The school had almost no black faculty members, a special embarrassment given its location on the South Side. Its sleek halls bordered a neighborhood crumbling with poverty and neglect. In his 2000 Congressional primary race, Representative Bobby L. Rush, a former Black Panther running for re-election, used Mr. Obama’s ties to the school to label him an egghead and an elitist.

At the school, Mr. Obama taught three courses, ascending to senior lecturer, a title otherwise carried only by a few federal judges. His most traditional course was in the due process and equal protection areas of constitutional law. His voting rights class traced the evolution of election law, from the disenfranchisement of blacks to contemporary debates over districting and campaign finance. Mr. Obama was so interested in the subject that he helped Richard Pildes, a professor at New York University, develop a leading casebook in the field.

His most original course, a historical and political seminar as much as a legal one, was on racism and law. Mr. Obama improvised his own textbook, including classic cases like Brown v. Board of Education, and essays by Frederick Douglass, W. E. B. Dubois, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X, as well as conservative thinkers like Robert H. Bork.

Mr. Obama was especially eager for his charges to understand the horrors of the past, students say. He assigned a 1919 catalog of lynching victims, including some who were first raped or stripped of their ears and fingers, others who were pregnant or lynched with their children, and some whose charred bodies were sold off, bone fragment by bone fragment, to gawkers.

“Are there legal remedies that alleviate not just existing racism, but racism from the past?” Adam Gross, now a public interest lawyer in Chicago, wrote in his class notes in April 1994.

For all the weighty material, Mr. Obama had a disarming touch. He did not belittle students; instead he drew them out, restating and polishing halting answers, students recall. In one class on race, he imitated the way clueless white people talked. “Why are your friends at the housing projects shooting each other?” he asked in a mock-innocent voice.

A favorite theme, said Salil Mehra, now a law professor at Temple University, were the values and cultural touchstones that Americans share. Mr. Obama’s case in point: his wife, Michelle, a black woman, loved “The Brady Bunch” so much that she could identify every episode by its opening shots.

As his reputation for frank, exciting discussion spread, enrollment in his classes swelled. Most scores on his teaching evaluations were positive to superlative. Some students started referring to themselves as his groupies. (Mr. Obama, in turn, could play the star. In what even some fans saw as self-absorption, Mr. Obama’s hypothetical cases occasionally featured himself. “Take Barack Obama, there’s a good-looking guy,” he would introduce a twisty legal case.)

Challenging Assumptions

Liberals flocked to his classes, seeking refuge. After all, the professor was a progressive politician who backed child care subsidies and laws against racial profiling, and in a 1996 interview with the school newspaper sounded skeptical of President Bill Clinton’s efforts to reach across the aisle.

“On the national level, bipartisanship usually means Democrats ignore the needs of the poor and abandon the idea that government can play a role in issues of poverty, race discrimination, sex discrimination or environmental protection,” Mr. Obama said.

But the liberal students did not necessarily find reassurance. “For people who thought they were getting a doctrinal, rah-rah experience, it wasn’t that kind of class,” said D. Daniel Sokol, a former student who now teaches law at the University of Florida at Gainesville.

For one thing, Mr. Obama’s courses chronicled the failure of liberal policies and court-led efforts at social change: the Reconstruction-era amendments that were rendered meaningless by a century of resistance, the way the triumph of Brown gave way to fights over busing, the voting rights laws that crowded blacks into as few districts as possible. He was wary of noble theories, students say; instead, they call Mr. Obama a contextualist, willing to look past legal niceties to get results.

For another, Mr. Obama liked to provoke. He wanted his charges to try arguing that life was better under segregation, that black people were better athletes than white ones.

“I remember thinking, ‘You’re offending my liberal instincts,’ ” Mary Ellen Callahan, now a privacy lawyer in Washington, recalled.

In his voting rights course, Mr. Obama taught Lani Guinier’s proposals for structuring elections differently to increase minority representation. Opponents attacked those suggestions when Ms. Guinier was nominated as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993, costing her the post.

“I think he thought they were good and worth trying,” said David Franklin, who now teaches law at DePaul University in Chicago.

But whether out of professorial reserve or budding political caution, Mr. Obama would not say so directly. “He surfaced all the competing points of view on Guinier’s proposals with total neutrality and equanimity,” Mr. Franklin said. “He just let the class debate the merits of them back and forth.”

While students appreciated Mr. Obama’s evenhandedness, colleagues sometimes wanted him to take a stand. When two fellow faculty members asked him to support a controversial antigang measure, allowing the Chicago police to disperse and eventually arrest loiterers who had no clear reason to gather, Mr. Obama discussed the issue with unusual thoughtfulness, they say, but gave little sign of who should prevail — the American Civil Liberties Union, which opposed the measure, or the community groups that supported it out of concern about crime.

“He just observed it with a kind of interest,” said Daniel Kahan, now a professor at Yale.

Nor could his views be gleaned from scholarship; Mr. Obama has never published any. He was too busy, but also, Mr. Epstein believes, he was unwilling to put his name to anything that could haunt him politically, as Ms. Guinier’s writings had hurt her. “He figured out, you lay low,” Mr. Epstein said.

The Chicago law faculty is full of intellectually fiery friendships that burn across ideological lines. Three times a week, professors do combat over lunch at a special round table in the university’s faculty club, and they share and defend their research in workshop discussions. Mr. Obama rarely attended, even when he was in town.

“I’m not sure he was close to anyone,” Mr. Hutchinson said, except for a few liberal constitutional law professors, like Cass Sunstein, now an occasional adviser to his campaign. Mr. Obama was working two other jobs, after all, in the State Senate and at a civil rights law firm.

Several colleagues say Mr. Obama was surely influenced by the ideas swirling around the law school campus: the prevailing market-friendliness, or economic analysis of the impact of laws. But none could say how. “I’m not sure we changed him,” Mr. Baird said.

Because he never fully engaged, Mr. Obama “doesn’t have the slightest sense of where folks like me are coming from,” Mr. Epstein said. “He was a successful teacher and an absentee tenant on the other issues.”

Leaving the Classroom

As Mr. Obama built his political career, his so-called groupies became an early core of supporters, handing out leaflets and hosting fund-raisers in their modest apartments.

“Maybe we charged an audacious $20?” said Jesse Ruiz, now a corporate lawyer in Chicago. Mr. Obama was sheepish asking for even that, Mr. Ruiz recalls. With no staff, Mr. Obama would come by the day after a fund-raiser to stuff the proceeds into a backpack.

Mr. Obama never mentioned his humiliating, hopeless campaign against Mr. Rush in class (he lost by a two-to-one margin), though colleagues noticed that he seemed exhausted and was smoking more than usual.

Soon after, the faculty saw an opening and made him its best offer yet: Tenure upon hiring. A handsome salary, more than the $60,000 he was making in the State Senate or the $60,000 he earned teaching part time. A job for Michelle Obama directing the legal clinic.

Your political career is dead, Daniel Fischel, then the dean, said he told Mr. Obama, gently. Mr. Obama turned the offer down. Two years later, he decided to run for the Senate. He canceled his course load and has not taught since.

Now, watching the news, it is dawning on Mr. Obama’s former students that he was mining material for his political future even as he taught them.

Byron Rodriguez, a real estate lawyer in San Francisco, recalls his professor’s admiration for the soaring but plainspoken speeches of Frederick Douglass.

“No one speaks this way anymore,” Mr. Obama told his class, wondering aloud what had happened to the art of political oratory. In particular, Mr. Obama admired Douglass’s use of a collective voice that embraced black and white concerns, one that Mr. Obama has now adopted himself.

In class, Mr. Obama sounded many of the same themes he does on the campaign trail, Ms. Callahan said, ticking them off: “self-determinism as opposed to paternalism, strength in numbers, his concept of community development.”

But as a professor, students say, Mr. Obama was in the business of complication, showing that even the best-reasoned rules have unintended consequences, that competing legal interests cannot always be resolved, that a rule that promotes justice in one case can be unfair in the next.

So even some former students who are thrilled at Mr. Obama’s success wince when they hear him speaking like the politician he has so fully become.

“When you hear him talking about issues, it’s at a level so much simpler than the one he’s capable of,” Mr. Rodriguez said. “He was a lot more fun to listen to back then.”

Labels: Politics and African Americans

Responding to Floria again:

I’m not one for big change though, because I think it can be damaging at the outset. I believe if one is to attempt to change the entire process of our government, then there would be several unforeseen consequences at the outset.

I agree with you that “slow and steady” change is more lasting and more desirable than sudden or forced change. That is actually one of the major things that attracted me to Barack Obama’s candidacy and that convinced me of the danger of a Hillary presidency. When Obama first announced, I doubted he was ready, and I tentatively supported Hillary because I wanted a Democrat to win and I believed she would be ruthless in making sure she won. But gradually, little by little, I came to embrace Obama’s candidacy.

There were two key factors - and I think I wrote about this previously in slightly different terms. The first was that I came to believe that America was in a worse condition than I had previously thought - that Bush had fundamentally altered the balance of power in Washington and severely diminished the legislative and judicial branches of government; that partisan polarization was a major problem because it fostered a “team” mentality, in which no matter what the underlying consensus was on the issue, each party sought electoral gain by playing to the extremes. (For me, the Republican advocacy of torture and skepticism of climate change made this clear.) The second factor was that as I began to learn more about Obama and his thought, the more I came to admire him. Specifically, this New Yorker piece called “The Conciliator” (which is long, but well worth it) first introduced me to the aspect of Obama that I admire most, what Cass Sunstein calls in a recent New Republic piece, “visionary minimalism.” What Sunstein describes is the paradox of Barack Obama’s thought (as opposed to the paradox of his campaign). Sunstein describes two differing approaches to the world: minimalist and visionary. As he describes it, “minimalists are fearful of those who are gripped by abstractions, simple ideologies, and large-scale theories” and “visionaries have a large-scale understanding of where the nation should be heading…[and] call for wholesale rejection of the views of “the other side.” Sunstein sees Obama bridging these two conflicting tendencies:

“Visionary minimalist” may sound like an oxymoron, but in fact–and this is the key point–Obama’s promise of change is credible in part because of his brand of minimalism. He is unifying, and therefore able to think ambitiously, because he insists that Americans are not different “types” who should see each other as adversaries engaged in some kind of culture war. Above all, Obama rejects identity politics. He participates in, and helps create, anti-identity politics. He does so by emphasizing that most people have diverse roles, loyalties, positions, and concerns, and that the familiar divisions are hopelessly inadequate ways of capturing people’s self-understandings, or their hopes for their nation. Insisting that ordinary Americans “don’t always understand the arguments between right and left, conservative and liberal,” Obama asks politicians “to catch up with them.”

Many independents and Republicans have shown a keen interest in him precisely because he always sees, almost always respects, and not infrequently accepts their deepest commitments.

To the extent that Obama is able to call simultaneously for change and reconciliation, it is in significant part for this reason. And to the extent that Obama’s candidacy is producing a kind of national exhilaration not seen in many decades, his practice of anti-identity politics is a key factor. For him, reconciliation is change, and it is also what makes change possible. Recall that minimalists are willing to endorse large shifts from the status quo–after diverse people have been heard, learned from, and brought on board.

Obama’s minimalism thus has a clear pragmatic purpose. The challenges of health care reform, Iraq, economic growth, climate change, and energy independence cannot possibly be met well, and perhaps cannot be met at all, without cross-cutting coalitions. Real transformations require a degree of consensus. Obama’s point also has intrinsic and not merely instrumental importance, and for one simple reason: It says something deeply true, and long neglected, about how Americans actually understand themselves. If Obama’s visionary minimalism turns out to have enduring power, it will be for that reason.

It is well worth reading Sunstein’s entire article. Sunstein is an informal adviser to Obama - which makes his analysis both more interesting, and forces you to think about the issue skeptically. Several months earlier, Larissa MacFarquhar writing a profile for the New Yorker though wrote something very similar:


In his view of history, in his respect for tradition, in his skepticism that the world can be changed any way but very, very slowly, Obama is deeply conservative. There are moments when he sounds almost Burkean. He distrusts abstractions, generalizations, extrapolations, projections. It’s not just that he thinks revolutions are unlikely: he values continuity and stability for their own sake, sometimes even more than he values change for the good. Take health care, for example.

“If you’re starting from scratch,” he says, “then a single-payer system”—a government-managed system like Canada’s, which disconnects health insurance from employment—“would probably make sense. But we’ve got all these legacy systems in place, and managing the transition, as well as adjusting the culture to a different system, would be difficult to pull off. So we may need a system that’s not so disruptive that people feel like suddenly what they’ve known for most of their lives is thrown by the wayside.”

Obama’s voting record is one of the most liberal in the Senate, but he has always appealed to Republicans, perhaps because he speaks about liberal goals in conservative language. When he talks about poverty, he tends not to talk about gorging plutocrats and unjust tax breaks; he says that we are our brother’s keeper, that caring for the poor is one of our traditions. Asked whether he has changed his mind about anything in the past twenty years, he says, “I’m probably more humble now about the speed with which government programs can solve every problem.”

By focusing on the ends, and using every means at her disposal to achieve those ends, Hillary Clinton both ensures maximal polarization and maximal resistance. The amount of change she will be able to bring about will be determined by what she is able to force through. By focusing on improving the processes - without attempting a radical overhaul, and while bringing in all stakeholders - Obama minimizes polarization, minimizes resistance, and maximizes change over the long-term. In other words - if you believe America is facing serious strategic challenges and that our polity is not in shape to tackle them - Obama is the only candidate which a chance of tackling them. If you are wary of dramatic change, Hillary’s current approach to achieving change may very well prevent her from achieving much. But her focus on ends rather than means would bring about more sudden and drastic change - the kind you presumably fear.

It was these two “realizations” on my part that lead me to embrace Barack Obama’s candidacy: one, seeing the moment we are in; two, understanding more about the Hillary’s and Barack’s thought. This is why I was a fan of Obama before he seemed like he had a chance. This is why I thought he was the best person for the job of president even when Hillary was considered inevitable. The paradox of Obama’s campaign is that even if you believe Obama should be president, many still need to be convinced that he can be elected. Obama as a head of government, a head of state would be a visionary minimalist; but he will only become a great president if a movement is able to coalesce that pushes for meaningful change. Obama, being a minimalist, would then have to channel it, focus it, hold it back where prudent. This dynamic could make Obama one of our greatest presidents. But even as the situation now stands, without such a movement, I still believe he is the best choice.

Postscript: Regarding Obama’s tendency to over-dramatize: I don’t know anything of the example you gave. But in general, I have found that Obama plays down dramatic moments; that in his speeches, he avoids applause lines, preferring to build a gradual narrative. And Obama is the only candidate to have lived in a Third World country for any extended period of time - Indonesia in his youth. If you read Dreams of My Father, he writes about the exact difference in attitude you describe - between living in the midst of a country, and living out of a hotel.

Labels: Politics and African Americans

By WARREN BENNIS and NOEL TICHY

As these late November days fade away, the critical Iowa caucus looms ever closer -- less than six weeks away. Which explains why the rhetoric of the two leading Democratic candidates is becoming more shrill but also more clarifying.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama have taken off their gloves. In one corner stands the champion of experience, with the best executive coach in the free world at her side and a dog-eared playbook of strategies that have won in the past. Standing in the opposite corner is a young contender, fairly new at the game, underweight and probably overmatched, but a natural, as they say. Mr. Obama and his handlers are putting their money on his judgment, disdaining the experience card as a stale rerun of earlier campaigns, skewering Mrs. Clinton's twisty judgments about Iraq, and subtly pushing the present over the legacy of the '60s, destiny over dynasty.

One newspaper article on Mrs. Clinton's latest TV ad noted that it mentioned her experience five times. Bloggers also highlight the themes of experience and judgment whenever they describe the ever more heated fight between the Democratic front runners.

Where do we put our money? First, let us cite Ted Sorenson, one of John F. Kennedy's closest advisers and speechwriters. When asked about his former boss's judgment, Mr. Sorenson responded, "I cannot emphasize how important that elusive quality is; far more important than organization, structure, procedures and machinery. These are all important, yes, but nothing compared to judgment."

After a five-year study of leadership covering virtually all sectors of American life, we came to the inescapable conclusion that judgment regularly trumps experience. Our central finding is that judgment is the core, the nucleus of exemplary leadership. With good judgment, little else matters. Without it, nothing else matters.

Take any leader, a U.S. president, a Fortune 100 CEO, a big-league coach, wartime general, you name it. Chances are you remember them for their best and worst calls. Can anyone forget that Harry Truman issued the order to drop the first atom bomb? Or Kennedy's handling of the Cuban missile crisis? When Nixon comes to mind, so does Watergate. The first George Bush: "Read my lips." Clinton? Monica. George W.? Iraq.

Leadership is, at its marrow, the chronicle of judgment calls. These will inevitably write the leader's legacy. Don't get us wrong. We are not discounting the importance of experience. Seminal and appropriate experiences must be drawn on and understood before judgments can be informed. But experience is no guarantee of good judgment. There is a huge difference between 20 years of experience that advances one's learning and one year of experience repeated 20 times.

In fact, there are numerous times when past experiences can prevent wise judgments. Barbara Tuchman long ago observed how generals tend to fight the last war, refusing to face new realities, almost always with disastrous consequences. And often, especially in today's dizzying world, we need to understand what Zen Buddhists call the "beginner's mind," which recognizes the value of fresh insight unfettered by experience. In this more contemporary view, the compelling idea is the novel one. Perhaps no one articulated the nature of the beginner's mind better than the composer Hector Berlioz when he said of his more popular rival Camille Saint-Saëns: "He knows everything. All he lacks is inexperience."

Judgment isn't quite an unnatural act, but it also doesn't come naturally. And speaking from decades of experience, we're not sure how to teach it. (We know it can be learned.) Wisely processed experience, reflection, valid sources of timely information, an openness to the unbidden and character are critical components of judgment as well. As David McCullough reminds us over and over again, "Character counts in the presidency more than any other single quality."

Yes, Mrs. Clinton, experience is not without value. But judgment, fed by solid character, should determine the choice of our next president.

Labels: Politics and African Americans, Stuff

March 12, 2008

-By Illana Bryant



This year's primaries have been some of the most exciting in living memory. There's been new thinking, bold new political approaches and bold new marketing practices. Barack Obama's campaign has been extraordinary for a number of reasons, ranging from the radical use of new media tools to the use of social networking to further his reach. Following is an apolitical summary of five innovative ways the campaign has used messaging and media to help create Obama's grassroots movement:

1. Leveraging the power of inspiration

If you want your audience to love you, wear your T-shirt and forgive your weaknesses, then connect with them on a level beyond the rational benefits/details. The voter's long journey to the voting booth may twist and turn on those rational policy points, but selecting the candidate inside the booth is often a split-second, emotional decision -- in much the same way that consumers make product choices on the shelves.

Obama's campaign has laid out a clear set of inspiring values -- hope, action, change -- that weaves consistently through all forms of communication. The rest is commentary. And the campaign has been very good at seamlessly translating these values directly into simple slogans designed to elicit the same responses. Phrases like "Change we can believe in" and "Yes, we can" are examples of phrases that epitomize the Obama brand values and speak positively to the subconscious in a way that would make NLP (Neuro-linguistic Programming) practitioners proud.

2. Bottom-up brand management

The Obama brand is led from the bottom up, not the top down. The campaign has a social-networking site with powerful, instant peer-to-peer communication. With features like "create your own event" and "create your own Obama group," the campaign has created a self-organizing system. Obama HQ provides the tools for these people to meet, organize, fund-raise and canvass voters, but does not dictate the content or intervene with the peer groups. The chat rooms and events on barackobama.com, such as "Jazz Brunch for Obama Fundraiser," "Anime Fans for Obama" and "Barack the Kitchen Club," show the eclectic and organic nature of the organization. I'm sure if I set up a "Twisty Balloon Animals for Obama Fundraiser" this would be uploaded unedited to the site. This creates grassroots ownership and makes campaigners less like foot soldiers and more like the passionate minuteman of the American Revolution. If you want to show up to proverbially fight for Obama with a pitchfork and a homemade uniform, all you have to do is sign up and you're in.

This campaign's user-generated brand culture also has a halo effect, spawning independent grassroots Obama campaigns and communities online. For example, the "Yes We Can" viral video created by Will.i.am and cYclops has achieved nearly 6 million hits on YouTube without any seeding or media funding. The video, a personal project created by Will.i.am and first posted on his blog, dipdive, has broken viral ratings. Mark Jurkovac, CEO of cYclops and executive producer of the video, recalls that as soon as it went viral "we got calls from all sorts of groups saying they wanted to do their version of the 'Yes We Can' and so we decided to create an online community for this kind of content." A Web site, hopeactchange.com, was created and has since become a social community for Obama user-generated content, a sort of pro-Obama YouTube. The Web site allows voters to upload their photographs to create a video installation set to the music.

Though Obama is credited as the CEO of Inspiration, no one involved in these projects has spoken to or worked directly with the official Obama campaign. As a self-organizing community, hopeactchange continues to generate new viral content.

3. Continuous activation through 'SMART' objectives

Marketing 101 instructs that to achieve goals, objectives must be "Specific, Measurable, Actionable, Realistic and Timed." It seems that all internal Obama peer-to-peer campaign initiatives follow this dictum. There are no woolly entreaties to "donate your time to the cause." Initiatives give a specific goal and date (e.g., "1.5 million calls by Tuesday") and make them actionable and realistic through easy-to-use online tools (e.g., "click on this button and make 20 calls from this list") and results are posted in real time. Momentum is maintained by a new internal action objective that greets registered users on the home page and in targeted emails.

4. Social networking infused with healthy competition

The Obama Web site's social-networking tools are infused with healthy peer-to-peer competition that helps to drive traffic. Matching peer donations, viewable personal fundraising pages and shared postings of peers with the highest calling rates are examples of how the campaign harnesses friendly peer-to-peer competition. The Web site's point scoring system awards actions on level of commitment and usefulness to the cause. These points are not redeemable, but help users understand their level of action in the movement and to set personal goals.

5. Pop-up stores to galvanize online/offline activities

The Obama campaign has overcome its lack of infrastructure in key areas by utilizing what in marketing-speak we call a pop-up store -- a temporary distribution channel/brand experience set up in a vacant retail space. For example, my local Obama campaign HQ was an old movie rental shop. It was rebranded in Obama campaign livery and began distributing campaign material and running phone banks despite still having the original "We Got Movies" neon sign over the door. These pop-up stores on the ground are combined with the Web site's powerful Mapquest-style location tool so peer groups could find each other and local events, as well as find their new campaign HQ. The result is a holistic integration of a real-world grassroots meeting place for the virtual, online groups and activities. Arguably it is this fusion of the online and offline activation that enables the campaign to harness the power of its grassroots fan base.

Regardless of who wins the nomination, this election will be historic for many reasons, including the Obama campaign's marketing techniques. For the first time, the democratic power of the Internet has truly been harnessed in a presidential election campaign.

Labels: Media, Politics and African Americans

By. Andrew Romano

Let's be honest. Barack Obama is not on the verge of clinching the Democratic nomination because of his policy positions--whatever his most evangelical supporters might tell you. If policy was all that mattered this year, Hillary Clinton would've won five or six of the last 11 contests instead of losing them all. When it comes to specifics, there's simply not that much space between the candidates.

Obama's success owes a lot, of course, to his message--the promise to pass Democratic policies by rallying a "coalition for change." But watching Obamamania over the past few weeks, I've become convinced that there's something more subtle at work, too. It's not just the message and the man and the speeches that are swaying Democratic voters--though they are. It's the way the campaign has folded the man and the message and the speeches into a systemic branding effort. Reinforced with a coherent, comprehensive program of fonts, logos, slogans and web design, Obama is the first presidential candidate to be marketed like a high-end consumer brand.* And for folks who don't necessarily need Democratic social programs--upscale voters, young people--I suspect that the novel comfort of that brand affiliation contributes (however subconsciously) to his appeal.

Seeking expert opinion, I tested my hypothesis on leading graphic designer and critic Michael Bieruit, who was kind enough to dissect Obama's unprecedented branding campaign--and show me how it's helping his candidacy. Excerpts:

(*UPDATE: A reader points out that "Reagan had one hell of a marketing strategy." No doubt. Every presidential candidate since Richard Nixon in 1968 (at least) was actively "marketed" to the American public--I'm not denying that. The point I'm trying to make is that Obama's marketing is much more cohesive and comprehensive than anything we've seen before, involving fonts, logos and web design in a way that transcends the mere appropriation of commercial tactics to achieve the sort of seamless brand identity that the most up-to-date companies strive for. Apologies for the misunderstanding. I definitely could have been clearer.)


What are the elements of the Obama brand?
To start, he has this way of writing Obama in upper and lowercase in a serif font and juxtaposing it with that "O" symbol he has--the blue ring with red and white stripes disappearing into it, making the white form inside the blue look like what I suppose is meant to be a rising sun. [See photo above]


That's his "logo," right?
Right. A lot of times when he's at a podium what you'll see is, centered right beneath him, at the very top of the blue field that usually says something like "Change You Can Believe In," it'll be just that little symbol, functioning in the same way the Nike swoosh does. People look at that and know what it means, even though it's just an "O" with some stripes in it.

Has any other campaign ever "pulled a Nike"?
Well, Bush did that the last time around with the letter "W," to some degree. You would see somebody with the letter "W" on a bumper sticker, and it would kind of work that way. But Obama has gotten there much quicker and a little more gracefully, if you ask me.

How else is Obama's design different than what has come before--or what rival campaigns are doing?
He's the first candidate, actually, who's had a coherent, top-to-bottom, 360-degree system at work. Whereas, I think it's more more common for politicians to have a bumper-sticker symbol that they just stick on everything and hope that that will carry the day.


The thing that sort of flabbergasts me as a professional graphic designer is that, somewhere along the way, they decided that all their graphics would basically be done in the same typeface, which is this typeface called Gotham. [See "Change We Can Believe In" sign, above] If you look at one of his rallies, every single non-handmade sign is in that font. Every single one of them. And they're all perfectly spaced and perfectly arranged. Trust me. I've done graphics for events --and I know what it takes to have rally after rally without someone saying, "Oh, we ran out of signs, let's do a batch in Arial." It just doesn't seem to happen. There's an absolute level of control that I have trouble achieving with my corporate clients.

Then if you go to the Web site, it's all reflected there too--all the same elements showing up in this clean, smooth, elegant way. It all ties together really, really beautifully as a system.

Is Obama's stuff on the level with the best commercial brand design?
I think it's just as good or better. I have sophisticated clients who pay me and other people well to try to keep them on the straight and narrow, and they have trouble getting everything set in the same typeface. And he seems to be able to do it in Cleveland and Cincinnati and Houston and San Antonio. Every time you look, all those signs are perfect. Graphic designers like me don't understand how it's happening. It's unprecedented and inconceivable to us. The people in the know are flabbergasted.


What does that say about his campaign?
My feeling, in my own narrow sphere as a professional graphic designer, echoes a little bit what Frank Rich wrote in his column on Sunday, where he was talking about Hillary Clinton's argument that Obama doesn't have the experience to run the country properly, and how you only needed to look at how her own campaign has been managed to see the flaw in that argument. I sort of see the same thing. I'm not sure that the commander-in-chief proves his mettle by getting everyone at his rallies to set their signs in the same typeface, but as someone who knows how hard that is, I'm very impressed.

The specific choices are also made in really good taste and I'd say to certain degree they also philosophically align with what his position is.

What do you see as the "philosophical implications," to use a highfalutin phrase, of Obama's design choices?
There are a couple of levels. There's the close-in parlor game you can play about what all these typefaces actually mean. Gotham was a typeface designed originally for GQ magazine, so it's a sleek, purposefully not fancy, very straightforward, plainspoken font, but done with a great deal of elegance and taste--and drawn from very American sources, by the way. Unlike other sans serif typefaces, it's not German, it's not French, it's not Swiss. It's very American. The serif font that he often uses to write Obama is delicate and nuanced and almost, not feminine exactly, but it's very literary-looking. It looks very conversational and pleasant, as opposed to strident and yelling. It's a persuasive-looking font, I would say. But that's putting these things on couches and pretending they have personalities.

Right. It's sort of hard to imagine in a voter in Cleveland (or a Newsweek political blogger from New York, for that matter) interacting with Obama's design on that level. How does it affect those of us who aren't graphic designers?
Well, I'm teaching this class at the Yale School of Management, and we were just talking about brand management and politics--exactly this thing before we got on the phone. And one of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he's such an unprecedented figure in American politics--so much so that everything he's trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal. Someone said, "Well, why shouldn't he have revolutionary looking graphics--graphics that make him look like grassroots, like an outsider? Things drawn by hand, things that look forceful and avant-garde." But I think he's using design in a way to make him look as normal, as comfortable, as inevitable as a brand can look in American life. Those are really deliberate, interesting choices. Whether or not a sans serif font like Gotham looks more "American" than a Swiss font like Helvetica, that's in our imaginations to a certain degree. I think it's much more incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control.

How much have brands like Target or Apple or Volkswagen--these high-design, but essentially accessible brands--paved the way Obama?
I think they're all very much of a kind. I would name those three brands as ones that share a lot with the way this candidate is presenting himself. They're meant to look transparent, open, accessible and democratic to a certain degree. Non-intimidating. You don't feel that this stuff is all being hatched in corporate boardrooms with ad agencies and marketing experts at the table. They all sort of look as if people like you are talking to people like you. Of course, there's a lot of forethought put into all this stuff. But in the end, being able to project an identity that people are willing to credit with being authentic is a hard thing to do. But those brands, and the Obama brand, are managing to do it.

With all three of those brands, though, design has in some sense become a form of content. I wonder if something like that is happening with Obama--that people find the seamlessness of his brand compelling and comforting, and they gravitate to him because of it, as opposed to any specific policy differences with Clinton. I'm wondering if you see that reflected in Obama the same way you do in, say, Target or Apple vs. Wal-Mart or Dell?
Oh yeah. There is a difference in the way the experience is delivered between Wal-Mart and Target. Target is gambling on the proposition that people want something that's got more style, that seems more accessible, that's less strident, that's less one-dimensional, that offers a higher comfort level--and they're willing to go with it. There are interesting policy distinctions that you can make between the Democrats and the Republicans and even between Hillary and Obama. But as has been said, the differences are not so pronounced that you're going to be driven inexorably to one over the other. So I think that the affiliation with a brand seems to be transcending these other things. For good or for ill, that seems to be the way the race is playing out this year.

What about Hillary?
She's been morphing her Web site* specifically to look like his all the time, so that seems obvious. McCain, to his credit, looks all the more militaristic and blunt and harsh in a way, so I appreciate him sticking to the authenticity.

Do you think there's a risk that such a strong reliance on branding and design encourages the perception that Obama is all style and no substance?
There's always that risk, particularly in America--the suspicion that if something looks good, it can't possibly work. If someone's really beautiful, they can't be smart. I don't know why. It's like, in Italy, they don't seem to have that problem, oddly enough. A lot of that had to do with the fact that good-looking, well-designed stuff used to cost a lot -- it used to be a class divider. But now, with the brands you were mentioning, with Target, with Apple, they've become much more democratic and egalitarian in terms of access. Certainly, he's been attacked for being good-looking with no substance. But that's what you would do if you were losing

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Labels: African Americans, Deep Thoughts, Politics and African Americans

By NEDRA PICKLER

Democratic presidential contender Barack Obama said Friday the head of the Justice Department's voting rights division should be fired for saying voter ID laws hurt the elderly but aren't a problem for minorities because they often die before old age.

John Tanner's remarks came during an Oct. 5 panel discussion on minority voters before the National Latino Congreso in Los Angeles. Tanner addressed state laws that require photo identification for voting, saying that elderly voters disproportionately don't have the proper IDs.

"That's a shame, you know, creating problems for elderly persons just is not good under any circumstance," Tanner said, according to video posted on YouTube. "Of course, that also ties into the racial aspect because our society is such that minorities don't become elderly the way white people do. They die first.

"There are inequities in health care. There are a variety of inequities in this country, and so anything that disproportionately impacts the elderly has the opposite impact on minorities. Just the math is such as that," Tanner said.

Tanner declined a request for an interview Friday to explain his remarks.

Justice Department spokesman Erik Ablin said Tanner had worked for the department's voting section since 1976, the last two years as its chief. Tanner's tenure also includes a stint in the White House counsel's office during the Clinton administration.

"Mr. Tanner is an attorney who works to protect civil rights on a daily basis," Ablin said, adding that the official had won numerous awards from African-American groups. "Nothing in his comments deviated from his firm commitment to enforce the law, and it is unfortunate that they have been so grossly misconstrued."

In a letter to the Justice Department, sent Friday, Obama called Tanner's remarks a disgrace and asked Acting Attorney General Peter D. Keisler to dismiss him.

"Such comments are patently erroneous, offensive and dangerous, and they are especially troubling coming from the federal official charged with protecting voting rights in this country," Obama wrote.

Ablin said the Justice Department "continues to have full confidence" in Tanner, effectively rejecting Obama's demand that the voting chief be dismissed.

It is well documented that black Americans — particularly black males — have shorter life expectancies than whites. But blacks do live to become senior citizens.

A black person born in 2004 had an average life expectancy of 73.1 years, about five years less than for whites, according to the National Center for Health Statistics.

Obama also criticized Tanner for clearing a Georgia law that requires voters to show government-issued photo IDs at the polls. It was upheld by a federal judge last month.

Opponents say photo ID laws will disenfranchise minorities, the poor and the elderly who don't have driver's licenses or other valid government-issued photo IDs. Supporters of such laws say they are needed to prevent voter fraud.

The Supreme Court has agreed to consider Indiana's photo ID law this term. Indiana's law is similar to Georgia's.

Labels: Politics and African Americans

By CHRISTOPHER DREW and RAYMOND HERNANDEZ
In 2000, after losing a Congressional race, Barack Obama was looking to revive his political fortunes. And he soon found a springboard — a group of black entrepreneurs also trying to break out.

Month after month, Mr. Obama, then an Illinois state senator, showed up at the Chicago group’s meetings, listening to members’ concerns about the difficulties they faced in getting government and corporate business, and asking them what he could do to help.

And help them he did. Members of the group, the Alliance of Business Leaders and Entrepreneurs, say Mr. Obama checked into their problems and helped start a drive that enabled minority investment executives to win millions of dollars in business from the state’s giant pension funds.

If Mr. Obama was able to deliver by helping the executives overcome some of the historical barriers facing minority-owned companies, he also would subsequently benefit from his ties to the group. Several of the businessmen or their wives would help clear the debts from his Congressional race, and six of the group’s members are now among the top fund-raisers for his presidential campaign, according to campaign finance records.

All told, employees at more than 30 of the 42 companies listed on the group’s Web site and their relatives donated more than $300,000 to help Mr. Obama win his seat in the United States Senate in 2004 and set fund-raising records early in the 2008 presidential race.

In his presidential campaign, Mr. Obama has been running on a platform of reducing the influence of money in politics. But with Mr. Obama, as with every politician, money has been the blood flow of his campaigns. And at a critical point in his career, he greatly expanded an early pillar of his fund-raising network while trying to help the black entrepreneurs secure work with the state.

The senator’s courtship of the Chicago group and its members is a little-known chapter in his political development that shows the inextricable link between money and politics and the different interpretations people attach to it.

Jay Stewart, executive director of an Illinois watchdog group known as the Better Government Association, said that in helping these and other executives as a state senator, Mr. Obama also benefited from the kind of special-interest-driven politics he now decries.

“Raising large chunks from special interests was common in Illinois,” Mr. Stewart said. “Obama did that too. Now he’s talking about chasing away special interests; that’s great. But that doesn’t change the past.”

Mr. Obama says his involvement with the alliance reflects his longtime passion for ensuring that minority businesses are treated fairly, and there is no indication that he helped the businessmen simply to secure their donations.

“The suggestion that these pioneering leaders would need my help or anyone’s help in order to succeed is troubling, to say the least,” Mr. Obama said in a statement. “I’m proud that I’ve spent my career fighting to ensure that minority-owned businesses would have a chance to compete, and I will continue to do so as president.”

Mr. Obama also recently pointed to his work on the Illinois pension issue as a model for what he would do as president to promote minority-owned companies.

In that push, Mr. Obama met with three state pension boards and introduced a bill on the executives’ behalf. He also worked closely with the state’s top legislative leaders to encourage the pension funds to increase the share of their investment portfolios managed by minority-owned firms. That share has risen to 12 to 20 percent now from 1 to 3 percent in 2000.

Other alliance members said Mr. Obama also looked into whether they could get state business in other areas, including legal work on bond issues and the printing of official notices. As Stephen H. Pugh, a lawyer who belongs to the group, said, “He wanted to understand what our needs were and how government could help.”

Mr. Obama, Mr. Pugh said, “would be our representative — our advocate — to bring our views back to state government.”

The alliance was founded in 1992 to help Chicago’s top black executives and entrepreneurs share business tips and push for greater opportunities. According to the group’s Web site, the companies — which also include architecture, engineering, transportation and communications firms — average 65 full-time employees and annual revenues of $19 million.

The goal was always “to open up doors,” said John W. Rogers Jr., the chief executive of Ariel Capital Management, one of the investment firms that received state business. “It was, as the Rev. Jesse Jackson has eloquently put it, to force other industries to have their ‘Jackie Robinson’ moment.”

During its early years, the group’s main political patron was State Senator Emil Jones Jr., who later became the State Senate president and one of Mr. Obama’s chief mentors. In 1993, Mr. Jones took the first crack at opening up the pension business, persuading the Legislature to pass a bill encouraging the multibillion-dollar funds to use minority-owned firms “to the greatest extent feasible.”

But by the time Mr. Obama, then a junior state senator, began meeting regularly with the group in 2000, little progress had been made. As a result, said Hermene Hartman, the alliance president, the pension issues got “a lot of attention” in the discussions with Mr. Obama.

The investment firms were also among the largest and most prominent companies in the group, and some of their executives were among Mr. Obama’s closest friends.

Mr. Rogers, who also sits on the boards of the McDonald’s Corporation and other major companies, played basketball at Princeton University with Mr. Obama’s brother-in-law. James Reynolds Jr., the chief executive of Loop Capital, a brokerage firm, had been a top fund-raiser for Mr. Obama’s Congressional race.

Mr. Rogers said the investment managers also solicited support from Michael J. Madigan, the powerful Democratic speaker of the Illinois House. In 2001 and 2002, Mr. Madigan and Mr. Obama — at times joined by the investment executives — made formal pitches before three of the state pension boards.

And after Mr. Jones became the State Senate president in 2003, he assigned Mr. Obama to a committee looking into the pension questions to help raise his political profile.

During this period, campaign finance records show, executives from Ariel, Loop and two other leading Chicago investment firms, Holland Capital Management and Capri Capital, sharply increased their donations to Mr. Obama’s State Senate campaign fund. And once he began his campaign for the United States Senate, they quickly became a fund-raising core that has carried over into the presidential race.

Mr. Rogers, who is one of three people at his company who have each bundled at least $50,000 in donations for Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, said that his financial support for the senator had “no connection” to his company’s efforts to win state contracts, but that it reflected the broader excitement over what Mr. Obama’s success meant for blacks in America.

Pointing to his parents’ struggles to break into the legal business in Chicago, Mr. Rogers said that pushing for greater opportunities was “in your blood, and when you have a peer come along like Barack, who is your own age and lives in your neighborhood, you can’t wait to help him.”

Mr. Reynolds of Loop Capital, who is also one of the bundlers in Mr. Obama’s presidential campaign, did not return calls for comment.

In the end, Mr. Obama dropped off the State Senate committee in late 2003 as his United States Senate race heated up, and just as the panel began a series of hearings that produced the most substantial changes.

Still, William Atwood, the director of the Illinois State Board of Investment, said Mr. Obama regularly asked about minority participation in the pension funds when their paths crossed. “He would ask: ‘How are we doing? Are we making progress?’” Mr. Atwood recalled.

The changes have generated several million dollars in fees for some of the investment firms, although the complete totals could not be obtained. Loop Capital, for instance, saw its brokerage fees related to one of the pension funds shoot up to $2.4 million last year from just $5,700 in 2001. All told, Loop Capital received $5 million in fees from managers for that fund over those six years.

Still, things have not worked out as well for some of the investment managers. Both Ariel and Holland were given several hundred million dollars to invest. But one of the funds dropped Ariel and two dropped Holland last year after their investment returns lagged behind those of other firms.

Mr. Rogers, the Ariel chief executive, said his firm’s value-oriented stocks tended to lag in fast-rising markets, and other state funds say they are sticking with Ariel for now because it has produced impressive long-term returns. Officials at Holland declined to comment.

But Mr. Rogers also complained that the Illinois funds, which are free to hire minority managers from anywhere in the country, have given much of their business to out-of-state firms owned by women and Asian-Americans.

And while Mr. Obama recently told the Urban League that if he was elected president he would use the same model in helping black-owned businesses nationwide as he did on the pension issue, Mr. Rogers said, “Actually, it is a model of how hard it is to get sustained traction.”

Labels: Politics and African Americans