The New Republic

You really think it a stretch? It's the first thing I thought when I read Rove's comments. The first vision that popped into my head was that ad against Harold Ford.

- lgoldst65

June 25, 2008 at 2:08pm

I have to admit I had the same thought (and in relation to Harold Ford too).  However, it's quite possible the there's simply nothing much going on and Rove was scraping the mental barrel for negative images of Obama.

On the other hand -- referring back here to the James Bond assocation that a poster brought up on the other thread -- it doesn't seem to me to be THAT negative an image, if one assumes racial neutrality.  In many country clubs (I don't speak from experience) the guy with the classy date and the cool James-Bond-style image might be the kind of guy who's respected, even admired, even though some may be envious.

But it's curious, especially as he seems to have test-marketed various editions of the motif.  I wonder if it is meant to subtly play on nostalgia for the "restricted" history of the country club, and thus evoke a distaste for the invasion of "flash" associated with the arrival of non-whites as members.

- ironyroad

June 25, 2008 at 2:39pm

I definitely think it was a 'Barack's the type of guy...'

It's the Harold Ford thing all over again, sexy (white) woman seduced by black man.

Anyway, pathetic as an attempt at imagery, maybe Rove was trying to get country club republicans to finally rally to McCain? ('Obama will sleep with your wife!')

- mmathog

June 25, 2008 at 3:21pm

Anyway, more evidence that the American GOP is the MOST 'identity politics' driven party around. Every time someone (usually around here) accuses the Dems of being 'driven by identity politics' I burst out laughing.

- mmathog

June 25, 2008 at 3:23pm

One has to hand it to Republican operatives. They are exceedingly flexible. If the black people aren't grasping, lazy, militant (read: unpatriotic, an accusation that [unsurprisingly] easily slides of the tongue of so many draft-dodging, service-avoiding GOP hacks), ignorant (read:imbecilic; but not, apparently, in the spirit of the "incurious" Dubya) and undisciplined (read: oversexed and insufficiently commited to maintaining employment), then they (in this case, buppie Barack) are snide, BASPs (Blacks whose ancestors were indentured to or owned by Anglo-Saxon Protestants).

Next we'll hear Rove accusing Obama on not being a true black, but a relative of the former black indentured servant, Anthony Johnson. A man who became so prosperous after he worked off his debt, he imported his own black "servants" and , whose victorious lawsuit against  his "employee" John Casor, established slavery in Virginia. (This before Virginia enshrined the instituion into her law.)

Yes, the GOP sees Obama as a man circulates the swell's party circuit bragging about how he '"had ye Negro for his life."[and whitey of the same socioeconomic group].

I can see the anti-Willie Horton ad. Willie Horton, a man of the common folk. The black man we know. Comfortably familiar because Willie and his kind are in jail or otherwise caught up in the criminal justice system.  Obama, a rich, slick, hyper-educated BASP. Barack is the "Man" keeping the hard-working white folks down.  Who will protect us from them? John McCain, of course.

- tec619

June 25, 2008 at 3:30pm

Look, if miscegenation is still an exploitable issue on the national level, then Obama is not going to win anyway.

If it is not a big enough issue to be exploitable nationally-- and I suspect it is not-- then messing with the issue is stupid.

I really believe that racism has been way over-hyped in this campaign as an Obama problem.

If he has or had problems it is not his race, it is his politics, his short time on the national scene, his "exotic" background, plus his eyebrow raising associations, and the verbal gaffes of the candidate and his wife.

Race is to a great extent a big red herring.  Ethnicity, meaning really class, as exemplified by Jesse Jackson and Al Sharton-- that's an issue and a problem, and should be.  

In the case of Colin Powell, he has neither a class problem nor a fuzzy background problem.  And, if he had run in recent times, race would rarely be raised as an issue.  

Obama has a class problem in reverse of Jackson and Sharpton, in that he is associated with the elite, ruling class of Ivy League privilege, against which there is some resentment.  

Five of the last ten presidents were Ivy Leaguers, in Ford's case, Yale Law.  Two went to service academies, which in the case of West Point and Annapolis, at least, think of themselves as akin to the Ivy League, and in any event are elite schools.

Nixon went to Duke, which is pretty elite and I think is nowadays considered near-Ivy or Ivy equivalent.

So, that means eight of the last ten presidents had elite education credentials, though not all of them were perceived as elites (Not Nixon, Eisenhower.

What I'm getting at is, what we often call race is really about class.  Elite status usually isn't a problem in presidential politics if you have some sort of people touch or make a point of eating pork rinds in public.

Obama connects with people because he is charismatic, but has a somewhat haughty and aloof air, that Jack Kennedy, for instance, never gave off, those his pedigree had by his generation become pretty gold plated.

What works well in American presidential politics are either elite credentials combined with an air of noblesse oblige (both Roosevelts, Jack Kennedy, and Robert Kennedy who was probably on his way to winning the White House.)  Or, guys who came from nowhere and earned their way into the elite schools:  Ike, Nixon, Ford, Clinton, and, to date, Obama.  

But Barack needs to work on his arrogance problem.  Which is why they are keeping him away from the press and making expensive American roots infomercials.

- ChanRobt

June 25, 2008 at 4:11pm

Triple play, blacks invading 'our' clubs, taking our (white) women, and being arrogant elitist while he's about it.  And the Johannson crap hits the news cycle at the same time? Hmmm.  Rove doesn't care which one(s) you buy into, he doesn't need all of them.

- dbhuff

June 25, 2008 at 4:14pm

tec619, you are really working hard here.  Blacks have an easily exploitable problem in this country because of a high crime rate, males abandoning families, and young blacks filling prisons way beyond their proportion of the population.

There may well be a hundred reasons for it that "aren't their fault".  But, if these weren't the facts, the Republicans could hardly leverage a perception that did not exist against blacks.  

Blacks themselves, most prominently Barack Obama himself, are starting to say that excuses are running low and they've got to get their own acts together.

Besides, the demographic rise of Hispanics in this country will within a generation or so make the entire black/white dichotomy exceedingly quaint and irrelevant.

When the Latino population is thirty or 40%, nobody's going to be paying much attention to the problems of blacks.  That's just a coming political reality.

- ChanRobt

June 25, 2008 at 4:15pm

ChanRobt:

Nixon attended Duke Law because he received a full scholarship. He was offered undergraduate scholarships to Harvard and Yale colleges but, I believe they were not full scholarships.  So he attended, cheaper, closer, Quaker, Whittier College.  Dick and his family were quite poor, and he couldn't afford the price of a cross country train ticket.  If he couldn't afford to travel to Boston or New Haven, he certainly couldn't afford an elite Quaker school, such as Swarthmore or Haverford. (Funny that. A really poor, non-Appalachian white man.)

I don't know if Nixon applied to UC Berkely (which is "tuition-free" except for "fees") or Stanford.  Nixon was the valdevictorian of his high school class and the UC system accepted the top 15 percent of state students at the time of his graduation.

- tec619

June 25, 2008 at 4:58pm

Channy:

I didn't say blacks didn't have a "pathology" problem.  I'm simply saying that the Republicans don't hesitate to exploit race and class sterotypes. Though they are quite sensitive to charges of class warfare.

My real point is (How did you miss it?) they are so shameless that they are willing to turn ghetto black sterotypes on thier heads.  We go from the "easily exploitable" sterotype to Obama as an elitist WASP. Or BASP, as I put it.  A group so rare, I've only just cataloged it.   :-D

Obama the elite, looking down his nose at white (hard) working-class, Americans.  Ha, ha.  (Thanks upper-middle class, Wellesley and Yale Law graduate, Hillary.)

- tec619

June 25, 2008 at 5:08pm

Look, Tec, it all reminds me of ancient Roman politics.  Patirician senators vs patrician senators.  Some ran as patricians, others as champions of the plebians.

In America, you can be born an elite, or you can earn your way into it.  But, you made a good point with your Nixon facts.  He was as much a man of the people as Harry Truman.  But, he took a different philosophical path.  (I'm setting aside his obvious pathologies.)

Obama clearly eanred is way into the elite, although he didn't exactly come from nothing.  He was essentially brought up in the American university level academia class.  Not rolling in money, but part of one of the main "influencer" classes.

As Maureen Dowd pointed out in her very pro-Obama column today, he isn't country club, but he is faculty club.  And sometime his hauteur does show.  

Look, nobody really wants or expects a president to be ordinary.  You just hope, in our democracy, that a president doesn't harbor contempt for the people.

There is an often observed paradox that Left leadership, whether in the West, or in the Soviet Union, is peopled with many who talk a good line about the welfare of the "masses" and see ordinary people as just that.  A mass of proles to be herded about by a government that knows what best for them.  And what's best for those controlling the government.

The American Left, of which I believe Obama is a member, are no more immune to such attitudes than European Leftists or the old Soviet commissars.  Which is why Middle American mainstreet types are always wary of them.  

The urban poor are always ready to hand over their lives to the Left.  Not so the yeoman middle to right.

- ChanRobt

June 25, 2008 at 6:36pm

By the way, Tec, the Clintons were more shamelessly and transparently racist when opposing Obama than any Republican has been.  

And, for all the criticism of the Willie Horton ad, did not Dukakis support the policy that released the man on a furlough and did the man not commit armed robbery and rape during that furlough?  Why was it so much beyond the pale to criticize Dukakis for a liberal policy that would allow a murderer out for the weekend?

- ChanRobt

June 25, 2008 at 6:39pm

Finally, Tec, it is Obama's own words that have gotten him the elite stamp.  When he thought he was in safe company he uttered that whole thing about resentful blue collar rural types clinging to their guns and bibles.  

You can't make up stuff that good.

- ChanRobt

June 25, 2008 at 6:41pm

Finally, Tec, it is Obama's own words that have gotten him the elite stamp.  When he thought he was in safe company he uttered that whole thing about resentful blue collar rural types clinging to their guns and bibles.  

You can't make up stuff that good.

- ChanRobt

June 25, 2008 at 6:41pm

Channy:

" [I]t all reminds me of ancient Roman politics. . ."

I hope you are referrring to when you studied the classics or read Gibbon's "The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" or some other title on your leisure time. If your remark is based on your actual expereince, you are obne hoary, dusty s.o.b.  

I agree with  your characterization  that Billl and Hillary's tactics were shameless(ly) but not transparent(ly).  But Bill/Hill used coded language, etc. To you and I the nuanced language is transparent. However, to the target hoi polloi,  it is "stimuli" that they reflexively react to.

your observation of the paradox of leftist leadership is trenchant (and tendentious), but  I don't entirely disagre with it.  A Social Democracy is a far cry from totalitarian socialism (i.e., communism).  Communism exhorts the notion of a totally classless society. A society that  neither ants, nor wolves nor any other social creatures have achieved. (There will always be heirarchies, less you have anarchy. And those at the top will always get more. it is always thus.)

Too much patriacrchy by government is not salutary. But unbridled capitalism, (which is not constrained by morality and whose positive effects are often incidental) and its excesses isn't answer.  (Excesses? What excesses? Well, corruption, such as rent-seeking, monopolistic and oligolopolistic structures, wealth distribution, capital emplyment and wealth concentration, etc.)  And such a system ignores "the people" at its peril.

Lastly, to some extent, Obama's religion and guns remark was taken out of context. I consider a rare inarticulate moment for him. You know what he was trying to say. I proffer the same criticiusm of working class whites who the GOP distracts from the economic dislocation they are suffering with the  "the fags are marrying" b.s.  Don't you find it strange that during tough economic times, values diminish in importance? What, God and values not that important? I so. Wal-Mart doesn''t accept payment in bible verses.

- tec619

June 26, 2008 at 11:54am