Read Online Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media by Ishmael Reed - Free Book Online Page B

didn’t she cry for the victims of Katrina?” he added.
    She said that she didn’t want to see the country “go backwards,” or “spin out of control,” the kind of vision of black rule promoted by D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation , and neo-Confederate novelist Tom Wolfe’s A Man In Full . (Unfortunately for Obama, this was during a week that saw post-election violence in Kenya, where Barack’s father was born.) Hers was the kind of rhetoric that was used by the Confederates whose rule was restored by Andrew Johnson. Give the black man governing powers and no white woman will be safe. This was Mrs. Clinton’s Willie Horton moment.
    Bill Clinton’s orchestrating his wife’s being more personal was a brilliant stroke: one that might doom Obama’s candidacy, but will doom the Democrats’ chances to win the 2008 election as well. As a Southern demagogue, Bill Clinton calculated that no black man can compete with a white woman’s tears, a left over from Old South thinking. Black men have been lynched as a result of the tears of white women. While Jesse Helms, another Southern demagogue, used a black man’s hand in an ad that criticized affirmative action, feminist Bill Clinton, who exploited a young woman who held him in awe—and cost Al Gore an election—used his wife’s tears, so desperate was he to achieve a third term and redeem his being impeached. But judging from angry black callers into C-Span’s The Washington Journal the day after the New Hampshire primary and the following day, and from my own non-scientific survey, many blacks finally get it. That they have been snookered by the Clintons. One angry man said that blacks supported Clinton during his marital problems and this is what they get for it. Another man said that he was going to vote for McCain as a way of protesting the Clintons’ treatment of Obama. On January 11, an irate black woman called in and said that she had been devoted to the Clintons since the 1990s, but after his attack on Obama, which she likened to “a knife in my chest,” and which she described as “low down,” she said that if Hillary were nominated, she’d either “vote Republican, or stay home.” Calling into the Journal on January 13, a black woman from Ohio said that many of her friends were upset with the “subliminally racist” campaign against Obama that the Clintons were conducting. These callers expressed the disgust that thousands of blacks feel about the Clintons’ dirty-tricks campaign against Obama, which included sending out mailers making false statements about his view about abortion, and deceptively attributing another mailer, critical of Obama, to John Edwards. This black backlash against the Clintons provides the Republican Party with a golden opportunity to recruit black voters for McCain, but I doubt whether they will seize upon it. After all, while Clinton might have an office in Harlem, McCain has a black daughter!
    A black PhD caller said that he found blacks in a barbershop to be more prescient than he. They said that once whites entered the voting booth, they’d vote for the white candidate no matter what they said to the pollster. Some commentators recalled treatment that Harvey Gantt and Tom Bradley received. Pollsters considered both to be shoo-ins for senator from North Carolina and governor of California because whites misled pollsters about how they really intended to vote.
    Later in the day of January 8, Larry Sabato of the University of Virginia, appearing on The Chris Matthews Show , commented about a previous segment during which Dee Dee Meyers and Pat Buchanan opposed Michael Eric Dyson’s argument that white racism was a factor in Obama’s New Hampshire defeat. He said, “I think its very naïve, given American history, to automatically dismiss the racial voting theory before it’s investigated.