Frank Rich: The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama

[babylonsister]

The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama

By FRANK RICH
Published: February 17, 2008

THE curse continues. Regardless of party, it’s hara-kiri for a politician to step into the shadow of even a mediocre speech by Barack Obama.


Senator Obama’s televised victory oration celebrating his Chesapeake primary trifecta on Tuesday night was a mechanical rehash. No matter. When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableau before a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols, played the past to Mr. Obama’s here and now. Mr. McCain looked like a loser even though he, unlike Senator Clinton, had actually won.

But he has it even worse than Mrs. Clinton. What distinguished his posse from Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its age but its demographic monotony: all white and nearly all male. Such has been the inescapable Republican brand throughout this campaign, ever since David Letterman memorably pegged its lineup of presidential contenders last spring as “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

For Mr. McCain, this albatross may be harder to shake than George W. Bush and Iraq, particularly in a faceoff with Mr. Obama. When Mr. McCain jokingly invoked the Obama slogan “I am fired up and ready to go” in his speech Tuesday night, it was as cringe-inducing as the white covers of R & B songs in the 1950s — or Mitt Romney’s stab at communing with his inner hip-hop on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P. looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America. A cultural sea change has passed it by.

The 2008 primary campaign has been so fast and furious that we haven’t paused to register just how spectacular that change is. All the fretful debate about whether voters would turn out for a candidate who is a black or a woman seems a century ago. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama vanquished the Democratic field, including a presidential-looking Southern white man with an enthusiastic following, John Edwards. What was only months ago an exotic political experiment is now almost ho-hum.

Given that the American story has been so inextricable from the struggle over race, the Obama triumph has been the bigger surprise to many. Perhaps because I came of age in the racially divided Washington public schools of the 1960s and had one of my first newspaper jobs in Richmond in the early 1970s, I almost had to pinch myself when Mr. Obama took 52 percent of Virginia’s white vote last week. The Old Dominion continues to astonish those who remember it when.

more...

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/02/17/opinion/17rich.html?_r=2&hp&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

[ShortnFiery]

1. IMO, Frank Rich is consistently insightful. Thank-you babylonsister.

:hi:

[saltpoint]

9. I second both points.

:thumbsup:

[Ernesto Guevara]

12. Excluding the time that he called Gore a fearmonger who was trying to run for president

With his "high-school movie", An Inconvenient Truth.

RICH (5-28-2006): We are also treated to a heavy-handed, grainy glimpse of Katherine Harris, Michael Moore-style, and are reminded that Mr. Gore is not a rigid blue-state N.R.A. foe (he shows us where he shot his rifle as a farm kid in Tennessee). There's even an ingenious bit of fearmongering to go head to head with the Republicans' exploitation of 9/11: in a worst-case climactic scenario, we're told, the World Trade Center memorial ''would be under water.'' Given so blatant a political context, the film's big emotional digressions—Mr. Gore's tragic near-loss of his young son and the death of his revered older sister from lung cancer—are as discomforting as they were in his 1992 and 1996 convention speeches.

http://select.nytimes.com/2006/05/28/opinion/28rich.html?scp=2&sq=frank+rich&st=nyt

[Doctor_J]

2. Oops. You beat me by 1min

Mods - merge?

[cyclezealot]

3. The real test tho of American racism

I suspect is not if Obama can take 52% of the VA Dem vote. As positive as that is. But, if Obama could take 32.5 % of the white male Independent vote and 9% of the white male Republican vote. That is the real test of racism in America.

[Tarc]

4. A question to ponder

Will Team Obama ever resist the temptation to pick up the race card? Whether it is sending Jesse Jackson Jr. to threaten superdelegates, or to swamp the DU with the latest "white secretly fear a black president" gibberish, and so on...

Sure would be nice to see this candidacy address an actual fact or substantive issue once in awhile.

[Windy]

5. he does daily. You are just blind to that fact. the majority are not as the polls are showing.

the article by Mr. Rich is on target!

[Tarc]

6. We've listened much, and heard little

His speeches leave the impression of an army of pompous phrases moving over the landscape in search of an idea. Sometimes these meandering words would actually capture a struggling thought and bear it triumphantly a prisoner in their midst until it died of servitude and overwork.

[Doctor_J]

7. You contribute nothing to this thread with your divisive attack

Mr. rich and the rest of us are celebrating the beginning of the end of the cancer that is the GOP. Take your Repuke-enabling swill over to GD-P or better yet freeperville.

[babylonsister]

8. That ignore function is a beautiful feature, TOJ. It's saved my b/p! nt

[saltpoint]

10. Jesse Jackson Jr is swamping DU with gibberish? Who knew?

[classysassy]

11. Most republicans

and I believe quite a few whites have their race cards,do you have yours?

[Hand]

13. Hmm... Grand Old White Party... the GOWP...

I like it!!!!

[underpants]

14. Ouch! the truth cuts like a knife

The art about Allen is extremely painful for them I am sure.