Tag Archives: President Obama

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Opening Argument – Perils of the Race and Gender Cards

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

Playing the race card is not really Barack Obama’s style. Although happy to use his racial identity as an asset, he seeks to transcend it by getting beyond obsessing about racial grievances. This is not easy in a party that has long wallowed in the politics of group grievance. It is especially difficult when running against a woman who has so assiduously used the gender card while profiting from her own victimization at the hands of the same unfaithful husband who now joins her in tag-team distortions of Obama’s record.

Gloria Steinem took Hillary Rodham Clinton’s I-am-woman-vote-for-me approach to the limit in a New York Times op-ed by suggesting that it would be better to elect a white woman than a black man because women got the franchise 50 years later and have "no masculinity to prove."

So perhaps Obama should be forgiven for piling on a bit after other black leaders implausibly accused Clinton of showing disrespect for the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. when she pointed out that King needed President Johnson to push civil-rights laws through Congress. Obama was ill-advised to call Clinton’s statement "ill-advised" and "unfortunate." But would forbearance have cost him black votes?

"All the habits of verbal thuggery that have long been used against critics of affirmative action [and of] radical feminism," David Brooks observed in his New York Times column, "are now being turned inward by the Democratic front-runners."

Is it too much to hope that this embarrassing identity-politics brawl proves to be a learning experience for liberals about the dangers of reflexively attributing racist, sexist, and other bigoted motives to people who disagree with or displease them?

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Opening Argument – Honesty: Hillary’s Glass House

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

Hillary Rodham Clinton is supposed to be smart. But how smart is it for a woman with such a bad reputation for truthfulness and veracity to put those character traits at the center of the campaign?

The irony of her potshots at Barack Obama’s character has hardly gone unnoticed. Nor has the idiocy of her December 2 press release breathlessly revealing that "in kindergarten, Senator Obama wrote an essay titled ‘I Want to Become President.’ " (Emphasis added.) This, the Clinton release explained, gives the lie to Obama’s claim that he is "not running to fulfill some long-held plans" to become president. Hillary was not, it appears, joking.

At a campaign stop the same day, Clinton added: "I have been, for months, on the receiving end of rather consistent attacks. Well, now the fun part starts." Indeed.

I will not excavate Clinton’s own kindergarten confessions. Nor will I compare the honesty quotient of her campaign-trail spin with the dreadful drivel dutifully uttered by Obama and other candidates to pander to their fevered primary electorates.

Instead, let’s take a trip down memory lane — from the tawdriness of the 1992 presidential campaign through the mendacity of the ensuing years — to revisit a sampling of why so many of us came to think that Hillary’s first instinct when in an embarrassing spot is to lie.

Gennifer and Monica. Former lounge singer Gennifer Flowers surfaced in early 1992 with claims — corroborated by tapes of phone calls — that she had had a long affair with then-Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton, who had arranged a state job for her. Bill Clinton told the media, falsely, that the woman’s "story is untrue."

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Opening Argument – The Great Black-White Hope

by Stuart Taylor, Jr.

National Journal

Whether Barack Obama would be a better president than Hillary Rodham Clinton, or John McCain, or Mitt Romney is an interesting and debatable question. But it is beyond debate that an Obama win in 2008 would be by far the best thing that has happened to African-Americans, and to race relations, in more than 50 years.

Obama embodies and preaches the true and vital message that in today’s America, the opportunities available to black people are unlimited if they work hard, play by the rules, and get a good education.

Electing a charismatic, intellectually supercharged African-American president who preaches hope and opportunity would do more than anything else imaginable to tell young black people what they need to hear: This land is your land. And more than any other, it is a land of opportunity.

This is not the message that African-Americans have been getting over the past few decades from the media or from the "leaders" aptly described in the subtitle of the fine 2006 book by NPR senior correspondent Juan Williams, Enough: The Phony Leaders, Dead-End Movements, and Culture of Failure That Are Undermining Black America — and What We Can Do About It.

One thing we can do about it is to focus attention on can-do black leaders and thinkers such as Barack Obama, former Rep. Harold Ford, D-Tenn., Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala., Colin Powell, Cory Booker, Donna Brazile, Bill Cosby, Oprah Winfrey, Tiger Woods, and Thomas Sowell.