Barack Obama will probably make a decent US senator once he gets running for president out of his system. Fortunately for those who think the Senate can benefit from his undivided attention, the happy day approaches ever faster: his strategists have apparently decided that they can do without the support of gays and the religious left if offending those communities means the campaign can capture the crucial swing bloc of homophobic liberals. Or something like that.
The short of the story is that Obama has made gay-bashing an official plank of his campaign, and is explaining the decision by insulting everyone who disagrees with the tactic, most of whom will be found in the candidate’s erstwhile base. Predictably, he’s persuaded some influential Democrats from potential support or at least neutrality into active opposition: Americablog’s John Aravosis is now selling “Bigots For Obama” T-shirts.
Presumably there’s some sort of electoral calculus going on here, aside from Obama’s increasingly evident streak of self-righteousness. Maybe his advisors think he has to steal some of the African-American vote from Clinton by appealing to the unfortunate vein of homophobia in that community, or maybe they’re thinking ahead to the general election in the delusional hope that a nod to homophobia will peel off the imaginary sub-genre of Republicans who are homophobic but not racist. Whatever, Obama can’t have made more clear his lack of street smarts and character, and his strategists are apparently operating on math from another planet. Here’s hoping they all go away soon.
I dismissed Obama as soon as I read how he dismisses me and my entire generation: From the New York Times, 1/21/07: “In the back and forth between Clinton and Gingrich, and in the elections of 2000 and 2004,” he writes, “I sometimes felt as if I were watching the psychodrama of the baby boom generation — a tale rooted in old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago — played out on the national stage.”
As if he thinks he can summarize a generation in such a shallow, dim and divisive way, as if “old grudges and revenge plots hatched on a handful of college campuses long ago” is all there was to the ’60s and ’70s. Reminds me too much of some of what passed for 30- and 40-somethings’ political insight on Slate magazine’s political frays. Insight that doesn’t go beyond dismissal of a generation, when it is people, not generations, both that improve things and fuck things up. The Boomer generation was for the most part like everyone who came before – middle class, wanting careers and families and houses and cars and education and material goodies – while those who became activists and actually worked to better things amounted to no more than 10 percent of the Boomer population. And yes, to change things you have to challenge and confront and fight and compromise.
As if Obama isn’t doing that himself – although he’s missing the real target if he thinks Boomers are the target. The real target is the status quo: inequities, amorality, avarice, the corporate state, the concept of American exceptionalism and all the evil that springs from it, the sectarianization of the secular political arena.
Anyone who thinks he can further divide a badly divided nation and be an effective leader should think again. He won’t even get elected that way. He should be smart enough to know that politics is not generational but moral and ideological and progressive – one thing develops from another and gives rise to yet something else. Obama rode in on the coattails of the Boomers who marched and rioted for massive social and political change – civil rights, culture, foreign policy, the environment – and they themselves built on what people before them did. They also put down previous generations, as if they invented everything themselves, and that’s still a fool’s game – people were fighting for civil rights before Boomers were born, and rock came out of blues.
Anyone who talks like Obama has about an entire generation having to step aside and let a new one take over displays both a remarkable lack of insight and awareness of history as well as a kind of mercenary streak aimed at setting himself apart from the crowd of candidates. In the process he’s insulting the biggest and richest voting block in the country, a huge number of whom would be willing to vote for him otherwise – unfortunately for him, a huge number of these people favor equal rights for gays and have been voting anti-war and pro-rights and pro-environment since he was in diapers.
A guest contributor over at Glen Greenwald (Salon) dealt with this topic last week in a couple posts, including showing pictures of four black homosexual pastors he could have used.
Atrios supplied a telling quote on this issue too in which Obama sanctimously noted that people in the LGBT community should not cavalierly dismiss the “faith community,” as if the two groups are mutually exclusive.
He should read NYT marriage announcements that these days often include at least one same sex couple having some sort of religious commitment ceremony. This assumption that “values” or “faith” means some narrow class of people is simply offensive to many people of faith.
Along with some other people running, though admittedly Chris Dodd is looking interesting, many running really should stick to their day jobs.