As anyone who watched the debates knows, there ain't a whole lot of grey matter in either Obama or McCain. Obama is slightly ahead of McCain on that score and whatever grey matter he has most probably comes form his white mother. Would America have elected a man who was 100% black or mostly black? The answer is clearly no but America has elected a man who is half black, a mulatto in traditional parlance. In reality America has elected it's first mulatto, not a true black man except by American standards which considers a person who is 1/8 black to be black. If Obama had been born in South Africa back in Apartheid days, he would have been classified as a Colored, not as a Black or an African. So much for Obama's blackness!
If we examine him closely, we can see what is usually called an Oreo cookie, black on the outside, white inside. He may come from the Hood and tried some drugs but he really belongs to the Harvard crowd, fairly bright, arrogant & liberal, not very decent or moral, greedy white people. I don't think I ever heard him say a word about urban renewal in the entire campaign. His wife is described by a phrase my mother used to use, "an uppity one." Everyone in the clan knew what that meant!
How did this congenial black fellow get to be President? Well, things just seemed to play out for him. He tossed his hat into the ring, having two whole years in the Senate at the same time that the wicked witch of the West , Miss Hillary (Daisy) tossed her broomstick into the ring. 95% white Iowa decided to vote for a black man for some reason in the caucuses. Was this the death knell of white racism? No, this was a way to quash Hillary. And there you have the tale, Obama was a vehicle to quash Hillary. The rest is history. The wicked witch of the west was actually vanquished by this guy.
I had a lot of respect for him back then. The thought of even voting for him in November and sending him money entered my mind like some wild illicit temptation. Coolness of mind quickly returned but I still retained a soft spot for this guy who ultimately vanquised the wicked witch of the west. He didn't even put her on the ticket. But then he makes her Secretary of State and now I see in the news that she wants more power for the state. Power is her vice just like sex is her husband's vice.
You made a big mistake Barry! I always felt you would self-destruct. I admit I thought and hoped that it would happen before you got elected but it is inevitable. You've sown the seeds of your own destruction by tarrying with the witch Hillary. She will destroy you! Remember, Macbeth, King Lear & Hamlet. You're about to join them! "Double, double, toil and trouble.....
Inside Obama’s Dream Machine
An icon of hope, he won't 'kneecap' his foes. But Obama knows what it takes, and how to win.
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Barack Obama was badly in need of sleep, but he wasn't going to get any just yet. Late last Wednesday night, the candidate and his wife, Michelle, collapsed on the leather sofa aboard their campaign bus. It was the end of a 17-hour day rolling around Iowa trolling for votes. They had just come from a nighttime rally in Waterloo, where they double-teamed an enthusiastic crowd in an overheated school gym. On the bus, Obama nursed his raw throat with tea from a steel travel mug, his arm around Michelle's shoulder.
The long-awaited Iowa caucuses—portrayed by the pundits as a make-or-break test of a black candidate's viability with white voters, and of his ability to stand up to Hillary Clinton—were the next day. In less than 24 hours, he'd know if it had all been worth it, or if he had been wasting his time. A NEWSWEEK reporter asked him how he felt on the eve of the big event. "I feel calm," he answered. Calm? Not nervous about the results, or plain exhausted after 10 months on the road? "No. Because this is the campaign I always wanted to run. If it doesn't work, it's not because of the organization we built or the respectful tone that we set."
In public, Obama attributes his quick political rise to that "respectful tone," which he believes voters crave after so many ugly, dispiriting campaign seasons. (Which includes most races since 1800.) When he first began thinking about a White House bid, he told advisers that he would be willing to run only if he could do it his way, which meant defying the conventional campaign theology of hitting the other guy hard and first, sticking to simple sound bites and preaching only to the base. He has shown a willingness to stray from his script and risk engaging (or boring) audiences with rambling professorial explanations about the details of this or that policy. And he has tried to rewrite Karl Rove's campaign manual by reaching across racial and party lines to appeal to the broadest—rather than the very narrowest—base of supporters.
But along the way, he has had to resist continual pressure even from inside his own campaign to take a harder and harsher line against his rivals, Hillary Clinton in particular. On the bus the night before the Iowa caucuses, Obama recounted one difficult episode. Early in the campaign, he lectured his staff that he wasn't going to tolerate any bashing of his rivals—no slipping anonymous snarky quotes to reporters, no feeding nasty gossip to bloggers. (Of course, Obama staffers, like all campaign aides, can't resist swapping choice bits of gossip with eager reporters.) But last summer Obama's campaign was stalling after a series of lackluster debate performances. His staff pleaded with him to go after Clinton. Then, a sleazy anonymous oppo-research memo, sourced to the Obama campaign, started making the rounds among reporters. It suggested Bill Clinton had profited from companies that outsourced jobs to India, while Hillary raked in donations from Indian-Americans. The memo was crudely titled "Hillary Clinton (D-Punjab)."
The Clinton campaign was justifiably angry, and seized on the episode as proof that Obama had abandoned his vaunted "politics of hope" and had offended Indian-Americans in the process. Obama was furious with his staff. "Some of my roommates in college were Indian and Pakistani," he told NEWSWEEK. "I had to call some of my best friends and explain that my campaign wasn't engaged in xenophobia." Obama held a come-to-Jesus meeting with his senior aides at his Chicago headquarters and vented his anger. "If you're even going close to the line, you better ask me first," he recalled saying. "That was the most angry I've been in this campaign."
Obama's high-minded themes of hope and change—and not getting your hands dirty—can come off as earnest, even naive, in the world of hardball presidential politics. But Obama is also a streetwise Chicago pol who put together a campaign machine formidable enough to take on the Clintons and win. Polls had made it seem the contest would be close. Instead, Terry McAuliffe, Hillary's campaign chairman, conceded that even Bill Clinton was "very surprised" by Obama's 9-point victory over his wife. The win crowned Obama the front runner, and put to rest the doubts of many people, both inside and outside his campaign. It also suggests that if his unorthodox approach to presidential politics worked in Iowa, it may win over voters in other states as well. Iowa's Democrats tend to be older, whiter and more partisan than the national average. Yet Obama attracted significant numbers of independent voters—along with a fraction of crossover Republicans—and persuaded young people to turn out in record numbers.
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