BunnyBlinks

Yesterday’s speech was given to a general (not exclusively religious) audience, and so I wasn’t dreading the eventual onset of offensiveness that inevitably spills from the mouths of most other famous preachers. In fact, I quite enjoyed the romp. It was funny (check out the part beginning @ 3:05 in the above clip).

What got me most, though, was the music lesson (beginning @ 5:40). Sure, a musicologist would want to nuance Wright’s words a bit more, in an effort to be critical of the race-based generalities he discusses as if they were absolute truths. Still, it’s not often we get the chance to hear (ethno)musicology mentioned in the mainstream media, let alone the chance to hear time signatures discussed and solfege performed as if both were shared components of American cultural practices.

Wright’s pretty much right on this one, doncha think? I know James Brown liked to think he shifted the beat of his band to “the one,” but that doesn’t jive with where we clap, does it?

The Advocate: Let’s start with what’s hot — why the silence on gay issues? You’ve done only one other interview with the LGBT press. I know people wish they were hearing more from you.

Senator Obama: I don’t think it’s fair to say “silence” on gay issues. The gay press may feel like I’m not giving them enough love. But basically, all press feels that way at all times. Obviously, when you’ve got a limited amount of time, you’ve got so many outlets. We tend not to do a whole bunch of specialized press. We try to do general press for a general readership.

But I haven’t been silent on gay issues. What’s happened is, I speak oftentimes to gay issues to a public general audience. When I spoke at Ebenezer Church for King Day, I talked about the need to get over the homophobia in the African-American community; when I deliver my stump speeches routinely I talk about the way that antigay sentiment is used to divide the country and distract us from issues that we need to be working on, and I include gay constituencies as people that should be treated with full honor and respect as part of the American family.

So I actually have been much more vocal on gay issues to general audiences than any other presidential candidate probably in history. What I probably haven’t done as much as the press would like is to put out as many specialized interviews. But that has more to do with our focus on general press than it does on… I promise you, the African-American press says the same thing.

I can’t help but think of my previous post on tags and labels, as well as this Slog post from Christopher Frizzelle. How many different magazines would he have to grant interviews to for everyone to feel equal? I understand there’s a desire in the LGBT community for a fair-minded president, but guess what: there are other communities who share the same desire. Isn’t Obama doing all of us a service when he directs his comments on LGBT issues (whatever those might be) to a Baptist Church, or to national audiences at a Democratic primary debate in New Hampshire and the 2004 DNC, rather than limiting himself to Hillary-style preaching to the choir while hoping no one else hears about it?

The three-page interview ends on the same theme. Has this guy been reading my mail, or what? It’s weird, really, and certainly unexpected to have a presidential candidate reaching out to me this way, as a member of that slowly but steadily growing constituency group comprised of people who will no longer think a certain way simply because of who we are (nor decide who we “are” based on somebody else’s checklist).

Do you have any regrets about the South Carolina tour? People there are still sort of mystified that you gave Donnie McClurkin the chance to get up onstage and do this, and he did go on sort of an antigay rant there.

I tell you what — my campaign is premised on trying to reach as many constituencies as possible and to go into as many places as possible, and sometimes that creates discomfort or turbulence. This goes back to your first question. If you’re segmenting your base into neat categories and constituency groups and you never try to bring them together and you just speak to them individually — so I keep the African-Americans neatly over here and the church folks neatly over there and the LGBT community neatly over there — then these kinds of issues don’t arise.

The flip side of it is, you never create the opportunity for people to have a conversation and to lift some of these issues up and to talk about them and to struggle with them, and our campaign is built around the idea that we should all be talking. And that creates some discomfort because people discover, gosh, within the Democratic Party or within Barack Obama’s campaign or within whatever sets of constituencies there are going to be some different points of view that might even be offensive to some folks. That’s not unique to this issue. I mean, ironically, my biggest … the biggest political news surrounding me over the last three weeks has been Reverend Wright, who offended a whole huge constituency with some of his statements but has been very good on gay and lesbian issues. I mean he’s one of the leaders in the African-American community of embracing, speaking out against homophobia, and talking about the importance of AIDS.

And so nobody is going to be perfectly aligned with my views. So what I hope is that people take me for who I am, for what I’ve said, and for what I’ve displayed in terms of my commitment to these issues, but understanding that there’s going to be a range of constituencies that I’m reaching out to and working on issues that we have in common, even though I may differ with them on other issues. And that’s true, also, by the way … well, I think that’s going to be true so long as I’m reaching out beyond the traditional Democratic base.

Remember (he seems to say), there are other people in this country, and they don’t always agree with you. Why don’t you invite each other over for a conversation instead of yelling unintelligibly from your sound-proof boxes? It might not be as bad as you think. Moreover, you might quickly learn that your neatly compartmentalized community isn’t as heterogeneous as you once thought.

It sure doesn’t hurt that he stays calm when talking about the attacks levied at him. I’ll admit to usually arguing this point a little less eloquently in debates with my more stubbornly issue-based-voter friends, perhaps a bit like Claire on “Six Feet Under” when she calmly explained to her brothers in this brief (NSFW) clip, “Newsflash! Other people exist!”

There will undoubtedly be more occasions when we wish he would’ve phrased the truth a little differently. I hope by then we’ll have learned to get his back when he stumbles. If we don’t, we’ll lose yet another election, plain and simple, if not fair and square. Saying different things to different groups is easy, and they’ll all love you for it. But for how long? What happens when word gets out you’re speaking out of both sides of your mouth? Do you brazenly laugh in the faces of the special interests who support you? I choose respect over condescension any day.

I don’t feel like dignifying the non-issue-based attacks on Obama with a response. Frankly, it saddens more than disgusts me to watch the Clintons so quickly embrace the tactics of their former political rivals as they’ve assumed their prime placement on the establishment’s mantle. Josh Marshall (TPM) puts it well:

And seeing Hillary go on about how Obama has contempt for folks in small town America, how he’s elitist, well … no, it’s not because I think she’s either. I never have. But after seeing her hit unfairly with just the same stuff for years, it just encapsulates the last three-plus months of her campaign which I can only describe as a furious descent into nonsense and self-parody. Part of it makes me want to cry. But at this point all I can really do is laugh.

I don’t really want to speculate how this will be spun on the morning “news” shows. I will, however, leave you with a post-debate linkroll.

• Hillary regrettably followed this advice.

• Obama takes the high road on cookie baking.

• Hillary lied because she was tired? Let’s hope she’s not tired at 3am.

• The Weather Underground? Really? Please.

• “Editor & Publisher” sums up the ABC/Disney moderators’ performance here, mentioning the debate audience’s booing of Charles Gibson. Let’s hope the voters outside the auditorium do the same. Hey, I’m a Packer fan. We don’t boo the refs when we lose a round. We only boo them when they stand in the way of a good, fair, spirited game.

• From Sam Boyd at The American Prospect’s “Tapped”:

“THESE QUESTIONS ARE A DISGRACE.

A woman asks if Obama “believes in the American flag” because he doesn’t wear a flag pin.

Charlie Gibson says that questions about the flag are “all over the internet” — along with Pamela Anderson’s sex tape, cats with bad grammar, and Rick Astley. Journalism at it’s finest.”

Update: 4/17/08:

• Althouse, this morning, sees no reason to remove her tongue from its usual position in her cheek: summarizing the largest strand of complaints about the debate in the overnight blogosphere:

“It was bad of ABC to trouble Obama with questions about his attitudes and character instead of offering him opportunities to expound policy.”

I get her implied point. Politics can indeed be brutal. Still, “questions about his attitudes and character” are one thing, but questioning his patriotism? and name-dropping to imply guilt? In a follow-up question, Hillary herself all but admitted there was no substance to these attacks, but that she intended to play Swiftboat style, if only because that’s how the Republicans roll:

“I know Senator Obama’s a good man and I respect him greatly, but I think that this is an issue that certainly the Republicans will be raising.”

Well, fine. We’ll beat back their politics of character assassination after we triumph over hers. Her desperation can hardly be missed. She wasn’t like this when she was ahead:

“I’m not interested in attacking my opponents, I’m interested in attacking the problems of America,” Clinton said. “And I believe we should be turning up the heat on the Republicans. They deserve all the heat we can give them.”

That was then. Now she wants to serve them the Democratic party’s head on a platter. I can’t stop her if she wants to drag her own name into the gutter. Let’s just hope she doesn’t take the rest of us with her.

“Now, Senator McCain and the Republicans in Washington are already looking ahead to the fall and have decided that they plan on using these comments to argue that I’m out of touch with what’s going on in the lives of working Americans. I don’t blame them for this—that’s the nature of our political culture, and if I had to carry the banner for eight years of George Bush’s failures, I’d be looking for something else to talk about, too.”

Speak the truth and you risk offending someone. Then again, what’s the alternative? Senator Clinton, your pandering is duly noted. Until you stop fighting for the status quo, we have every right to be bitter.

Update: 4/16/08. The hypocrisy made clearer.

Update: 4/17/08. I added this link on the word “conservative” above. I used to think McCain the more respectable type of “conservative,” largely due to his work with Feingold on campaign finance reform, and to his noble weathering of attacks from the religious right in 2000. Like Hillary, however, he’s now proven he’ll say anything to win. I hope that, with the Bushes and the Clintons exiting the national political stage, McCain feels safer returning to his maverick roots, and we can embark on the real debate this country so obviously needs.

Oh, Hillary. It didn’t have to end this way.

Yes, of course, some of that stuff is awful, but political fighting is harsh, and if women are going to be in it — really in it, as Hillary is — they’ll have to get knocked around. I’m not going to wring my hands over this. It’s part of progress. Males are savaged too. It means they’re taken seriously.