…reject reality.
This story is running on the front page of the Los Angeles Times website: A nakedly-partisan propaganda piece on an Obama supporter, who has made it “her personal mission” to see The One re-elected. It is full of unchallenged myths about Obama and flogs the Historical First Black President who is being thwarted, not by his own incompetence but by Nasty Mustache-twirling Republicans in top hats, spats and a burning desire to Bring Slavery Back.
Unchallenged is this:
Like many black Americans, Hall, 60, looks at the president and sees a reflection of herself: joys and triumphs but also challenges and adversity, a good part of it, she suggests, owing to the color of his skin. “When we look at President Obama, we can relate to what he’s experiencing because of the experiences in our own backgrounds,” Hall says over lunch at an Irish-themed restaurant, where she stands out as one of the few black patrons.
The sentiment may explain why Obama still enjoys commanding support among African Americans, even though blacks have suffered the worst of the deep recession that soured so many others on the incumbent.
“He came from where the majority of minorities came from, from meager beginnings,” says Reggie Smith, a local head of the United Auto Workers union, who laughingly recalls how he, like Obama, once drove a car with a rusted hole in the floor. “He can relate like no other president before, and that’s what keeps him strong in the African American community.”
Meager beginnings? Ok, so typical-white-person Grandma was merely a bank vice-president (because of the sexism) and maybe going to expensive private schools might have made it so he wasn’t able to dine at the fancier restaurants he could have, but what in his background makes him better relate to “regular folk” anymore than authentically dirt poor Rick Perry? Or Sarah Palin? Or Herman Cain?
For the next year, she has one overriding goal: to see that President Obama wins a second term, to show his victory was no fluke, to silence his critics and give him more time to implement the policies she sees thwarted, heedlessly and incessantly, by his Republican foes. […]
Obama won 95% of the black vote in his first presidential race and will likely match that next year. The question is whether 2008’s record black turnout can be repeated, or even exceeded, now that the heady days are long gone. Even Obama, speaking this fall in Los Angeles, conceded his reelection bid “will not be as sexy” as his first run.
But Hall, who keeps a grinning photo of the president dangling from her key chain, is adamant Obama will surpass that performance. “We’re not just saying” — here she adopts a mincing tone — ‘Oh, let’s elect an African American president.’ We already have a black president. What we need to do is give him support so he can work his plan.”
Note that the “reporter”, Mark Z. Barabak, never once asks Hall how come Obama, having both the Senate and the House in the first two years, couldn’t “work his plan.” More importantly, he never asks her to actually articulate what that “plan” is.
This is how it goes … Mainstream Media campaigning for Obama with such pieces while Democrats try to shut up everyone else.
Keep in mind that the LATimes has been sitting on a video of Obama at a Palestinian fund-raising dinner. They’re so in the tank for him they can’t see the escape hatch.
…reject reality.
You mean like how, in 2002 Obama opposed to the Iraq war because it was dreamed up by mendacious partisan hacks in order to distract the public from high unemployment, economic stagnation and a shrinking middle class, but today, he takes a victory lap for winning the Iraq war in order to distract the public from high unemployment, economic stagnation and a shrinking middle class? Ingenuously, of course.
I haven’t looked at the polls closely, but is his support among blacks stronger than their support for any Democrat President typically is, in statistically significant sense?
I wouldn’t think so, Ernst. Blacks are statistically 13-15% of the US population, depending on whose tables you use. Blacks historically tend to vote as a block for Dems—when they vote. We need to remember that only half of those of voting age vote DO vote.
One to many votes in that last sentence. Vote early and vote often.
I’ve been scolded pretty much continuously by my left-wing comrades to the effect that as a white guy, I was born into advantages in terms of income, education and upbringing that automatically elevated my earnings capacity and diminished the necessity for struggle. Nevermind that my parents were so poor that they had to, for years, rely on the church to make groceries meet mouths. Nevermind that I had to put myself through college.
Obama, born to a white woman, raised at first abroad and then by bourgeois white grandparents in Honolulu, educated at Columbia and Harvard, has never had to struggle the way this guy is saying he did. Never, ever. If anything, he’s been discriminated for, not against.
The Obama he’s referring to doesn’t exist.
So, you are saying Obama’s a spook? Racist.
More than that, slart, there’s no evidence Obama took a single challenging class in his college “career”. He was kicked along by “social promotion”, at least by the evidence we have, from his prep-school days all the way into the White House.
I wouldn’t think so either. On the other hand, political theory guy that undergrad me was, I had to bullshit my way through the required statistics course, so….
I hear ya. Lies, damned lies and statistics.
More like trig, calc and regression analysis! OH MY!
I had precious little in the way of analytical statistics. I just had intro to stochastic processes, which began with bernoulli trial statistics, completely leapfrogged mundane discussion of parameter estimation and regression and went instead directly to ergodicity and stationarity, as well as other things. ISTR we did some things with different probability density functions as well, but I’ve learned so much more since then than I learned in that class, it’s really hard to say for sure. But I did have a couple of years of calculus and differential equations in there somewhere. Trig was high school. Complex variables, from which all good trig identities spring, was later.
Please, Darleen. Asking questions? That would be raaaaacist. Somehow.
I don’t know if we know enough about Obama’s education to know whether he took difficult courses or not. Harvard Law is probably hard no matter who you are. My comments specifically addressed Obama’s purported struggle, and whether it even existed.
He probably didn’t have it all that easy as a kid, what with his parentage in flux, but those are white people’s problems.
Which brings up another thing: we had plenty of evidence to establish whether George W. Bush was a rocket scientist (which was never the claim), but we have little other than Obama’s emergence from Harvard Law to establish that he is a brilliant constitutional scholar. Which is the claim.
I can speak math too.
eanmay, edianimay, odemay.
I think that means “How can I be broke? There’s one check left!”
“The only plan is “There is no plan”…”
the more they pimp this loser as some kind of ghetto superstar in los angeles the more they’ll mostly just end up suppressing the hispanic vote I think
hispanics in LA don’t have jobs and they know this cocksucker hasn’t done dick for them
Hispanics don’t like blacks, as a rule. Trying to act like one of their homies isn’t going to cut it, esay.
The refusal of the Obama camp to release his college records leaves me free to say there’s no evidence he took any challenging courses what-so-ever.
Which it didn’t.
His only struggle has been the one over his identity. He’s a rich white privileged prep-school one-percenter who has been denying that fact and trying desperately to be an authentic black man from the ‘hood. His whole life since age 20 has been overcompensating for his life before age 20.
I don’t understand the point of mentioning that she happens to be one of the only black patrons in an Irish-themed restaurant. Is that supposed to reveal some institutional racism in America? Maybe they could set up an interview of a lone white woman in a majority black restaurant and see where that takes them.
What, they never heard of the Black Irish?
I routinely alternate between “Mark Z. Baraback” and “Hercules Q. Einstein” when attempting to impress the ladies. The “Z” stands for “Q”.
slart, Obama has been given an affirmative action pass all his life! Every aspect of his life and philosophy has to be examined from that viewpoint. He’s never been held to standards, and bought wholeheartedly the idea that any of his shortcomings were due to the raaaaacism of others.
Meh. Maybe. My point is more that life was much, much less daunting for young Obama than it was for e.g. young Herman Cain. Just to pick a random example.
Sounds rather tougher than it was for Barack raised-by-a-bank-president Obama.