Say No to Hillary for VP - Sign the Petition!

Say No to Hillary for VP - Sign the Petition!

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The dap heard 'round the world

I lived to see it

This night is not about Hillary losing her quest for the nomination. This night is not about the corpse that is John McCain practicing his Toastmaster speaking project on C-Span.

This is about a man who made possible the improbable. This is about the best this country, indeed, this world has to offer. This is about reclaiming the American spirit of ingenuity, intellect and vision.

This is about Barack Obama and those of us whose hopes and dreams he embodies.

This is about a man who bested lifelong politicians and entrenched machines and every "ism" known to man.

This is about tomorrow, today.

This election is about us, and this moment is about the man who delivered to those of us who believe an opportunity to hope and matter again.

Thank you, Barack and Michelle.

To Sir, With Love

Dear Friend,

If you'd like to share your thoughts with DNC Chairman Gov. Howard Dean, fill out this form at Democrats.org:http://www.democrats.org/page/petition/chairman/fcnsny

Thanks!

My take:

Mr. Dean:I like to think myself more eloquent, but in this matter I find that direct works best. Should the Democratic party allow Sen. Clinton to destroy this party, I will actively campaign to divest this party of its most faithful constintuency - African-American voters. This from a woman who has voted in EVERY election, big and small since she voted for Bill Clinton in her first contest.

Sen. Clinton has undermined, marginalized, disrespected and outright diminished black voters in this campaign. She is allowed to run, but this is my party too, sir. I'm one of those locals who talks policy with my neighbors, volunteers at polling sites and encourages participation. Do not take lightly my commitment to this endeavor.

After today's news cycle with a begrudgingly apologetic Hillary Clinton explaining away her reference to "assasination", I should hope you would do everything possible to retain the integrity of this party. If you do not, this party will never get another dime or ounce of energy from me. And I will not stop there. I will actively campaign against this party.

Black voters - all voters - deserve greater leadership from this party. The Clintons may well be a dynasty, but Hillary is not bigger than the party. In fact, without the party - and its black voters - there are no Clintons. Mayhaps that is what you should be telling Sen. Clinton right about now.

Don't talk about it, be about it

That's what I did.

I phonebanked, raised money, canvassed, blogged and all-around did all I could to get out the NC vote for Barack Obama.

Leading up to the contest I was under a self-imposed media ban. I could not take it. If one more white guy told me about the intricate workings of the African American's voter's mind I was going to put a hit out on somebody. So, it was best that I turn it off.

But, now the real race is on and I've got some stuff to get off my chest.

Let's start with the Mammy Bitch Award. Yes, I said it, but don't be mad at me for calling it, be mad at Stephanie Tubbs Jones for making it true.

I understand that for some of the black "leaders", the safe bet seemed to be with the white woman. I did not call anyone out for being a traitor or any such foolishness *cough* Maxine Waters *cough*, because I have respect for colored people as individuals. But, Stubby and all those gums went too damn far. Every time I turned around there she was, allowing herself to be trotted out as the "black supporter" with all those black gums and loud guffaws and inane chatter and ridiculous soundbites. She made me want to pick cotton and shuck corn. She did it all - from repeating, verbatim, the Clinton spin regardless of how ridiculous it sounded to muttering, in all seriousness, jewels like, "I'm gonna ride with Hillary to the end! That's what politics is about, having your friends' back!"

No, you dumb bitch, politics is actually about the will of the people. You know, those minions who made you relevant. I don't know what HIllary promised you in exchange for your dignity and your soul, but I hope it's worth it for you. I would caution, however, that they say one can never come home again because it's true.

Whew. I'm feeling better already.

Now, let's talk about "bitter" and Hillary's base.

Apparently you can't tell the truth in American politics. Obama did not create the idea that poor, uneducated, disenfranchised citizens tend to be more religiously devout and distrustful of "high-faluting" concepts and those who espouse them. In fact, that little nugget of truth has made the Republican party the Republican party. These are the voters who rely more on "gut" feelings than reasoned logic, thus, they have been more susceptible to the political leaders who convince them to vote against their own personal best interests.

Their existence is pretty well-documented. Obama did not create them. Quiet as it's kept he comes from them - why do people keep forgetting his white grandparents? So, there was no malice in the statement, only an example of his understanding of that part of the electorate.

HRC, on the other hand, has called her supporters everything but the Klan, but she is considered more viable by "blue collar workers." To date, she has noted her supporters are "less educated", "low wage earners" and my favorite "low class, hardworking whites". Cause, you know, us coloreds ain't never done a lick of hard work. Thus, the building of the white house and the industrial revolution, but I digress. The fact that these folks don't mind a woman who went to blue blood schools, married up and has amassed a fortune in excess of $100 million condescending to them can ONLY be attributed to the fact that she is white.

Which is cool. People can vote on whatever basis they want.

But, I find it important to point out that the white vote is an endangered species. We have maybe two more elections before the white vote becomes the minority vote. At that time does the Democratic party really want to be known as the party of poor, uneducated whites? We now stand at a juncture in history that allows us, for once, to get out front ahead of change. In an increasingly diverse, multi-cultural country with diverse interests but one common interest - the security and viability of America - doesn't it seem odd to anyone else that HRC would hang her hopes on a dying constituency?

And while I'm at I feel it necessary to say I never hated Hillary.

I wasn't going to vote for her, but I did not hate her.

But then she went and did what is, for me, the unforgivable.

No, it's not that she wrote-off the black vote or allowed Bill to condescend to us, even as he tried to bully us into voting for her.

It's not that she made the old school mistake of underestimating the black guy.

It's not even that she lied about her experience and overstated her record.

Nope, Hillary shot the shit with me when she voted against the hope that America has changed for the better.

See, Hillary's campaign makes perfect sense if we were still the emotionally-driven, divided electorate of the past.

Hillary took a hard, jaundiced look at America and figured we would need a woman President to ease us into a black President. She figured she could play the numbers, blues against reds, educated against uneducated, black against white, and build the kind of numbers that have always been amassed - enough to win.

She never accounted for the American people growing wise to political pandering, the destructiveness of racial politics and our distaste for disingenuiness.

She did not count on an electorate that has, finally, gotten hip to the divide and conquer strategies of the past.

That is, to me, unforgivable. And that's why I will not vote - as much as it pains me - before I will vote for HRC, for anything, ever.

Check the visual

Who in their right mind thinks 70 year old, pin armed, cancer riddled John McCain stands a chance against Barack Obama?The Republicans don't. Only 22% of REPUBLICANS believe John McCain can beat Barack Obama.I mean, seriously, McCain literally - no jokes - doesn't stand the greatest chance of PHYSICALLY running a presidential race, much less a full term. Have you SEEN John McCain?

Look at your granddaddy and subtract five years of usefulness and add a track record of bad health and that's John McCain.Then see Barack skip up on stage all long limbs and casually slim stance, wrinkle free skin and robust basketball playing. Then put his naturally tanned, healthy, tall, slim, attractive self beside John McCain and his notoriously bad temper in a national debate and call the political coroner.

A sign of brilliance is counting brilliant people among your friends

This is a brilliant eye witness account of one internet friend's voting experience in OH.

I have permission to share!

credit scottish_like.

1.
I have to leave town this week for poetry gigs out of state, so today seemed like a good time to try out the Board of Elections early voting option. I’ve never voted outside of designated voting days before, so I’m looking forward to putting on my “I voted!” sticker three days before everyone else. I drive downtown, put 45 minutes on the meter, and head over to the BOE to vote. It’s history any way this election goes – even on the Republican side, as far as I’m concerned – so it’s an exciting time. The sun is out and the cold is biting, but playfully so.

Then I see the voting line.

The voting line-that-is-a-mosh-pit is, literally, the longest line I’ve ever stood in for anything: coveted concert tickets, new roller coaster rides, the DMV…all pale in comparison to this line. When I see this line at 9:30 on a cold Saturday morning I immediately begin to hope, not for change in Washington, but that the meter maids will be lenient. This is the kind of line that kills cellphones and makes lifetime friends out of complete strangers. I am reasonably sure I saw a man propose to a woman in line at one spot, and after about fifty yards of shuffling feet and cracking knees, they’d had a wedding ceremony. By the time they reach the registration table they’ll be able to turn in divorce paperwork with their ballots.

In my search for the end of the line I run into a family that I help at my day job at the public library. They stand at a coveted midpoint in the line, well into the building and warm. We shake hands, exchange greetings. As I step away to continue looking for the end of the line, the mother of the clan waves her hand at me to join them in line where they are. I beg off politely and keep moving. You don’t ditch history.

The line snakes through every crevice of the building, then back outside, then back in. I got into line twenty feet from the registration table, but ended up being shuffled back out the doors and around the back of the building, into an alley. Election workers walk the line, imploring people not to leave, to stick with the cause, assuring everyone they would get to vote. Thirty minutes in line and the cold is setting in firm. The line is moving at a good clip, but it isn’t shrinking. People keep getting in line despite the fact that it puts them in an alley behind the building standing on ice patches in some spots. The line has become a magical thing, what the Cheetos-adled denizens who play Dungeons & Dragons would call a +10 Pitcher of Unending Democracy.

The building across the street has three aerial antennas on its roof, like Calgary crosses at noon. I’ve driven by that building my whole life and never before noticed them. I try not to read too much into the vision.

2.
There are the typical characters you’d expect to find in a line like this: the joker with the most obvious punch line ever (“Can we stand in line? Yes we can!”); the hyperactive five year old who is cute for twenty minutes but becomes grating at twenty minutes and one second.

Two bodies behind me is the catch of the day: The Entitled. He is the one that, when faced with a line of committed voters stretching around a municipal building on a Saturday morning in a historic election cries “This is bullshit!” The Entitled is used to walking in and out of his own polls on his own steam, conveniently, without issue. The Entitled is arguing with a woman in front of him about his right to loudly give political commentary framed mostly with curses about standing in line. The Entitled has no class. You don’t curse history.

An unmarked car with a horn on its roof blasts the soundtrack of the Obama-infused video that overtook the internet, “Yes We Can”. It plays it over and over. And over. And over. After a while it switches to the theme from “Rocky”, then “Eye of the Tiger”. Apparently YouTube and Rocky Balboa are to be the coffee and donuts that election workers have been suggesting we’d receive, like lollipops handed out after a doctor’s visit. The snacks would never materialize. Sly must be a Republican.

I can’t believe I came anywhere near this building without my PSP.

3.
All of the buttons, signs and banners in sight are either local politicos or Obama’s. Not a Clinton sign in sight. Did she write off Columbus? Not have the money to spread until Tuesday? Was there a democratic gang fight before I showed up and the loser’s side had to take their signs home? I look for bruises and cuts, but none are to be found.

4.
If Obama’s black support in Columbus mirrors what it has in most of the country, Clinton’s lost this town hands-down. The line is predominantly black, like we’re Detroit or something, and it’s something to see. A plaque on the wall notes that the building has seen over 6.3 million visitors on its steps in the one hundred years it’s been there. I think we broke the record today just in black folks.

Barack Obama has done something that no politician at his level has done for a great many years: they have made the black vote feel important again. Please understand that I am not saying voting is unimportant to black people or that a candidate has never benefited from our vote. I am saying that, at the presidential level, the black vote is typically courted briefly, then bypassed, and quickly so. In most cases it is written off completely, with little or no attempt to address our existence, let alone our issues.

Contrast that tradition with the educational results of this election. Ask a hundred black people on the street what percentage of black voters Obama and Clinton have received in this election and you’ll find well over half of them know a rough idea (a ratio of approximately 80/10 respectively). Ask this same group of people what percentage of black voters John McCain has, or any Republican for that matter, and you’d be hard-pressed to get your number of respondents in double digits. It certainly isn’t because black people don’t vote Republican. It is because they do so in numbers so small they’re hardly worth talking about. Republicans and talking news heads know this, and the lessons to be derived from the pie charts that are afforded the Obama/Clinton contest are never drawn for McCain and his ilk.

By contrast, Obama has not only garnered the black vote; he has created a substantially larger black voting block than has ever existed. And while there are a number of reasons why that has occurred, the more important thing to note is the behavior of politicians and leaders now that this group exists. The black vote has become increasingly powerful this election in size and direction, more powerful than ever before most say…and Obama is, almost without fail, netting it in numbers never before seen even by strong black runners of the past.

In no other quarter than black leadership are the implications of this phenomenon more interesting. To look back on the interviews, quotes and platforms of many black so-called leaders a year ago is, in some cases, jarring. My personal favorite is a Minister Louis Farrakhan CNN clip done in early 2007, in which he’s asked about Obama (then not the powerful symbol that he is now).

Farrakhan: I like him very much. I’m not saying that I’m going to vote for him, but I like him. Because he’s fresh.

CNN: Do you think that Barack Obama is the answer to George Bush?

Farrakhan: No. I think he’s capable of being an answer, but who will provide him with the money so he can contend with Mrs. Clinton and her big bank? Or Giuliani and McCain and their growing bank? So the people that bankroll you, they’re the ones that ultimately call the tune.

CNN: So what are you saying?

Farrakhan: I’m saying no matter who sits in the White House, if you don’t uproot the structure that corrupts them you still don’t have a president. You have a figurehead.

CNN: Do you think Barack Obama can do that?

Farrakhan: No. Absolutely not. He knows some of the ugliness of politics ‘cause he’s been in it long enough. But the real wickedness of the face of politics…you’re looking right into the very face of Satan himself. And Satan doesn’t intend to be uprooted by an upstart from Chicago. Or Mrs. Clinton from New York.

This isn’t the worst rail to be found. Far worse things were said by other black leaders, even just a few months ago, when Hillary still had a shot. But I find Farrakhan’s statement one of the most compelling as a snapshot of black leadership at the time because it is shot straight, devoid of typical political mongering and reasonable. It contains hope, yet remains pragmatic. It is critical, yet fair for its time. It is a great barometer to measure the sentiment of its time.

And yet it almost seems unfair to pick on all of the fence-riding black leaders of a year ago (or less, if you ask Representative Lewis). No one could have predicted the groundswell of support that Obama would receive from all corners of our society. No one could foresee that Obama would become the political “Teflon Don”, or that he would generate record levels of funding from everyday people, or pick up 80 percent and more of the black vote with or without direct black leadership’s support. If anything, black leadership’s overall distance from him early in the campaign while the support from voters was building is telling, and should be looked at as a Socratic moment for the black community. We should now ask the question, “What makes you our leader?” We should take away from that dynamic – and its cousin, the mutating platform of political convention fast-approaching from the future – that maybe black leadership status should require more than a suit and tie, more than titles and television appearances. Maybe it should require check-ups of their knowledge of the issues of the day or written tests about what they did for black people last summer or a report card of their voting records. We should take away from this “fairy tale”, to use Bill Clinton’s words, that leadership that does not know what its supporters know or believe or desire is a poor leader. That, and that every great fairy tale has some seed of truth.

I had to add the words “Barack Obama” to the spell check dictionary in my software to get rid of the swarm of red snakes throughout this recollection. Change is on the horizon indeed.

5.
You’d think a polling place with a line like this only has a couple of booths, but that’s not the case. There are about twenty machines in the voting room proper, and staff at all corners logging people in to vote. No one is being turned away from voting, and even ID is not required. People have simply been moved to participate in the political process at never-before-seen levels, and no matter the outcome of the race, that’s something we should all be proud of.

6.
I get to my car at 11:30, almost two hours to the minute after parking it on Sixth Street. I can see the orange slip of a parking ticket flapping in the breeze, tucked firmly under my driver’s side windshield wiper. I pull it out and check the time on the ticket. 11:03. If I’d gotten to my car twenty minutes sooner I’d have gotten away scot-free, with my democracy and my wallet intact. I sigh and get in the car, then chuckle. I think about all of the people who died without ever having experienced the right to vote for centuries, and people who still live today in places with laws that disallow voting for some communities. I think about the people who were beaten or kicked or spat upon in marches, some that were threatened by police if they didn’t turn around and march away, all to build a case for voting rights. A parking ticket is a small price to pay for the right to vote. I take the voting sticker off of my shirt and I place it on the parking ticket. I figure it’ll be something for the people at the DMV to talk about for ten seconds when I mail it in.

Besides: if I ever meet Barack Obama, whether he becomes president or not, he can afford to give me my twenty bucks back.