Organizing for America | Donald DePasquale's Blog: What If You Reversed Information about Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin?

What If You Reversed Information about Obama/Biden and McCain/Palin?

By Don DePasquale - Nov 3rd, 2008 at 3:48 pm EST

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Ponder the following:
What if the Obamas had paraded five children across the stage, including a three month old infant and an unwed, pregnant teenage daughter?
What if John McCain was a former president of the Harvard Law Review?
What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?
What if McCain had only married once, and Obama was a divorcee?
What if Obama was the candidate who left his first wife after a severe disfiguring car accident, when she no longer measured up to his standards?
What if Obama had met his second wife in a bar and had a long affair while he was still married?
What if Michelle Obama was the wife who not only became addicted to pain killers but also acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?
What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard?
What if Obama had been a member of the Keating Five? (The Keating Five were five United States Senators accused of corruption in 1989, igniting a major political scandal as part of the larger Savings and Loan crisis of the late 1980s and early 1990s.)
What if McCain was a charismatic, eloquent speaker?
What if Obama couldn ' t read from a teleprompter?
What if Obama was the one who had military experience that included discipline problems and a record of crashing seven planes? And was never given a command position.
What if Obama was the one who was known to display publicly, on many occasions, a serious anger management problem?
What if Michelle Obama ' s family had made their money from beer distribution?
What if the Obamas had adopted a white child?
You could easily add to this list. If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?
This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in
another when there is a color difference.

Educational Background:
Barack Obama: Columbia University - B.A. Political Science with a Specialization in International Relations.
Harvard - Juris Doctor (J.D.) Magna Cum Laude

Joseph Biden: University of Delaware - B.A. in History and B.A. in Political Science.
Syracuse University College of Law - Juris Doctor (J.D.)

vs.

John McCain: United States Naval Academy - Class rank: 894 of 899

Sarah Palin: Hawaii Pacific University - 1 semester; North Idaho College - 2 semesters - general study,
University of Idaho - 2 semesters - journalism, Matanuska-Susitna College - 1 semester,
University of Idaho - 3 semesters - B.A. in Journalism

Education isn ' t everything, but this is about the two highest offices in the land as well as our standing in the world. You make the call. All too true--up to a point. However, I don't think it's *only* racism. McCain and Palin in their different ways have appealed to deep feelings among (mostly) white lower-middle-class and working-class voters who are scared of change and complexity. I don't know how big the overlap is between what Paul Krugman is calling the "rump" of the GOP and the extreme fundie-christianist Right, but I would guess it's at least 60-70%. Fundamentalism is equally a reactionary response to intense fear and stress in people who have usually been raised in either an authoritarian or a chaotic way--both much more common far down on the income scale, for all ethnic groups.

It's not just that Obama is black; it's that he's "foreign"-sounding, pro-choice (this is huge), pro-change, pro-civic-responsibility. It's that he favors negotiation over violence, allows for nuance and complexity, and above all that he disturbs the vertical identification of these people with wealthy whites. Racism is of course the central scaffolding of this identification, but not its sole component. These "dirty whites," as I call them--European Americans whose white-skin privilege, always tenuous, has been sullied in their minds by the encroachments of nonwhites--have always used this sliver of privilege to maintain the magical belief that they too can scale the economic heights.

Look at not-Joe the not-Plumber. Obama carefully and politely explained to him that unless he made over $250K a year, his taxes would go down rather than up. Not-Joe balked because he has a completely unrealistic fantasy that he can start a plumbing business and be making that much a year *in personal income*. Obama's comment that "sometimes it's good to spread the wealth around" has been taken up by the Palinites as evidence that he is a "socialist," when by the standards of 1960, when the income tax was considerably more progressive as well as better enforced in the upper brackets than it is today, he is a very moderate Democrat.

How to explain this craziness? As someone born in Europe but resident in the US, I think the other component is the core American ideology that anyone can "make it" into the upper middle or upper class if they try hard enough and have the talent. However, the tacit understanding up until roughly the 1970s was that most if not all of the ladders to the top would be reserved for white people. Those old enough may remember the bitter struggles over first school integration in Northern cities (a battle completely won by white-separatist forces) and then over affirmative action (again, won by those forces, aided by some black frontmen like Ward Connerly).

Despite these disgusting victories, about half the black population has managed to make it into the middle-income brackets, while Latinos are increasing rapidly in numbers and economic clout. And now here is Barack Obama, the quintessential American success story--as he himself often and proudly points out. Obama has done what the core ideology says Americans should do. He has worked incredibly hard with great determination and self-discipline to become what he has been and is. But he's not white! The Palinists can't blame his ascent on affirmative action, because they (or their parents) helped get rid of it. Thus, as they struggle day to day to pay the bills and survive their typically exhausting and stupefying and poorly paid jobs and hold their families together, he stands as a living reproach to them: educated, articulate, self-possessed, successful, with a picture-perfect family. And they hate him for it.

Adam Cornford
Precision English
Writing, Editing, Translation
http://www.precision-english.com
(510) 708-3277

"Poetry is a weapon loaded with future" --Gabriel Celaya

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