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By Sarah Stillman
$19.90
By Garry Leech
$17.13
$22
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By Eugene Robinson — Are the news media being beastly to Hillary Clinton? Are political reporters and commentators—as Bill Clinton suggested but didn’t quite come out and say in a radio interview Tuesday—basically in the tank for Barack Obama?
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Exit polls, those surveys of voters as they leave their polling places, should be taken with a grain of salt. Having said that, CNN’s exit poll data from the so-called Potomac Primary shows Barack Obama crossing the demographic divide that has hampered him throughout the race. Seniors, white people, working-class voters and women—all traditional supporters of the Clinton campaign—came out for Obama in big numbers.
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With a win in the Maine caucuses, Barack Obama has scored four lopsided victories in a row and the map favors him for weeks to come. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, responded to her troubles by replacing her campaign manager. Clinton now has to hold back Obama’s momentum long enough to win the big states weeks from now, a strategy that did not help Rudy Guiliani.
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By David Sirota — For all the hype about generational and gender wars in the 2008 Democratic presidential primary, we have a class war on our hands. And incredibly, corporate America’s preferred candidate is winning the poorer “us” versus the wealthier “them.”
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By Ellen Goodman — Super Tuesday, Super Duper Tuesday, Plus-Size Tuesday, Vastly Engorged and Rotund Tuesday turned into a serious case of political bulimia. Never before have so many gorged on such huge portions of political expectations only to find themselves purged the next morning.
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By Amy Goodman — With all the talk of record voter participation, we should take a moment to think of the Americans, many of them African-American and Latino, who have been disenfranchised because they once committed a felony.
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Following Hillary Clinton’s surprise win in New Hampshire, some mainstream media outlets speculated that the “Bradley effect,” which posits that some white voters will avoid telling pollsters they voted against an African-American candidate, could explain Barack Obama’s election results in that state. Here, the Real News takes a closer look at that race-based rationale.
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By Joe Conason — The most likely motive for Bill Clinton’s reckless political performance in recent weeks, ironically and sadly, is to redress the terrible humiliations he inflicted on his wife in years past.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Only a week ago, a soaring Hillary Clinton was on a trajectory to close out the nomination. Now her campaign is struggling to refocus on what had drawn voters to her.
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By Eugene Robinson — Playing the race card against Barack Obama didn’t work out quite the way Bill Clinton had hoped. Neither did a reported last-minute personal appeal to keep Ted Kennedy, venerable guardian of the Camelot flame, from joining the Obama crusade. The question now is whether the Clintons understand how the country they seek to lead—and, regrettably, I do mean “they”—has changed.
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Flickr / Joe Crimmings
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By Bill Boyarsky — Although racial politics apparently still has a place in the national discourse, there are times when an emphasis on unity is necessary. According to Boyarsky, Barack Obama’s win in South Carolina last weekend reflects his appeal among voters across a broad demographic range and among the diverse volunteer squad rallying support for him in California.
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By Ellen Goodman — Barack Obama, once dismissed as not “black enough,” seems to have been embraced by South Carolina, but his personal journey, one Americans are increasingly familiar with, cannot best be described by a single hue.
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cnn.com
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CNN has posted a mea culpa of sorts on its Web site over a story, reported from a hair salon in South Carolina, that probed the alleged dilemma of African-American women voters. As one of many angry readers put it: “The article itself shows black women have brains and actually choose candidates based on issues and not just gender or race, but CNN doesn’t seem to give them that credit.”
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AP photo / Haraz N. Ghanbari
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“Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.” —Martin Luther King Jr.
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AP photo / Charlie Niebergall
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The subject of race has gotten major—some would say excessive—play in recent Democratic debates, but judging from this New York Times report, we can expect more on this matter from Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama in coming weeks. That’s because, as the paper put it, “If any election can prove that Southern blacks are not a monolithic voting bloc, it is this one.”
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By Eugene Robinson — In the coming general election campaign, voters will be faced with a clear choice on the major issues. It is the ongoing primaries that force us to figure out not just who the candidates are, but who we are as well.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — Clinton and Obama would court failure by ignoring the white working class, a group that has reasons to be discontented.
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By Marie Cocco — A truce has been called in the racial feud between Clinton and Obama, but not before it stained both with the residue of their own follies. The resulting peril for the Democratic Party is great.
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By Eugene Robinson — It turns out that Toni Morrison’s famous line about Bill Clinton as “our first black president” was just a bon mot. If the Clintons took it as a sign of African-Americans’ unconditional fealty, they were mistaken.
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kennyonfarrow.com
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In case you missed this weekend’s fireworks, Hillary Clinton went on “Meet the Press” and accused the Obama campaign of, among other things, distorting her Martin Luther King Jr. comments and agitating racial tension. Barack Obama dismissed the accusation as “ludicrous,” because, he said, he hadn’t even commented on Clinton’s remarks.
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By Marie Cocco — If there’s a reason women came out to support Hillary in New Hampshire, it might be the unabashed sexism she has had to endure.
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AP photo / Elise Amendola
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By Robert Scheer — Hillary Clinton, and now Gloria Steinem, have chosen to play the women’s card against the race card. Let me throw in a third one: Neither of those issues trumps that of economic class in considering the traumas of this nation.
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By Eugene Robinson — It was one of those moments that give you goose bumps—the cheering crowd, the waving placards, the candidate and his family looking Kennedyesque on the occasion of a stunning victory. Barack Obama took the stage Thursday night in Des Moines and proclaimed his vindication of hope: “They said this day would never come. They said our sights were set too high.”
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By Eugene Robinson — Is it foolish to think that a nation stained by centuries of slavery and racism is prepared to elect a black president? Rarely phrased so bluntly, that’s the central question posed by Barack Obama’s candidacy—especially for many African-American voters, whose doubts are informed by having seen many an oasis turn out to be a mirage.
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By E.J. Dionne, Jr. — With respect to Latino voters, politicians find themselves between a surge and a backlash. While popular anti-immigrant rhetoric could help Republicans take back House seats, it could well cost them the presidency.
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By Eugene Robinson — Why do you suppose so many people were so quick to blame Sean Taylor for his own murder? Relax, that’s a rhetorical question.
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AP photo / Katsumi Kasahara
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By James Harris — The New York Times columnist brings his liberal conscience and economic expertise to bear on the housing crisis and sheds light on the dirty secret behind many political victories by conservatives: “The consistent source of [Republican] success has been race.”
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By Nicholas von Hoffman — Why is it that so many voters continue to elect reactionaries who do their best to disenfranchise them? The answer, says Paul Krugman in his new book, is racism.
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AP photo / Katsumi Kasahara
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New York Times columnist Paul Krugman brings his liberal conscience and economic expertise to bear on the housing crisis and sheds light on the dirty secret behind many political victories by conservatives: “The consistent source of [Republican] success has been race.”
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s not surprising in the cutthroat world of Wall Street to see a big-time CEO such as Stanley O’Neal float out of the boardroom with a golden parachute. What is significant is that this grandson of a slave managed to become one of the “Masters of the Universe” in the first place.
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AP photo / Kirsty Wigglesworth
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Although his contributions to the field of genetics will probably continue to define his scholarly legacy, it seems that the final chapter of DNA pioneer James Watson’s career has been irrevocably marred by the reckless and inflammatory remarks he recently made about race and intelligence.
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abc.net.au
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While Russia is leading the race to claim the North Pole for itself, Britain has decided to expand its territory on the other end of the world, in Antarctica. The British Foreign Office says it has no immediate plans for the additional 1,000 square miles of seabed, but simply wishes to “safeguard for the future.”
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By Eugene Robinson — George Clooney is a big-time movie star. Cate Blanchett is a big-time movie star. But Tyler Perry’s new movie did more box office on its opening weekend than Clooney’s and Blanchett’s new movies combined—which makes Perry a big-time movie star, too, and also a phenomenon.
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By Eugene Robinson — The cliché does not mean much anymore. It’s time to start seeing African-Americans as Americans, period.
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By Eugene Robinson — I believe in affirmative action, but I have to acknowledge that there are arguments against it. One of the more cogent is the presence of Justice Clarence Thomas on the U.S. Supreme Court.
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By Eugene Robinson — How did thousands of African-Americans come to descend on the town of Jena, La., on Thursday for a march and rally that brought to mind the heady days of the civil rights movement? The answer says as much about what has changed over the past half-century as it says about what hasn’t.
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dallasnews.com
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Somewhere between 15,000 and 50,000 demonstrators marched Thursday on the small Louisiana town of Jena, where racial tension and prejudicial justice have captured national attention.
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By Eugene Robinson — The question of whether America is ready for a black president has already become a tiresome cliché in this campaign, but it seems that Barack Obama is having a hard time convincing African-Americans that white voters will say yes to a black candidate.
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By Amy Goodman — Last week in Detroit, the NAACP held a mock funeral for the N-word. But a chilling case in Louisiana shows us how far we have to go to bury racism.
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Kudos to PBS for hosting an excellent debate—or “All American Presidential Forum” as it’s known in public television land. The event featured a “panel of color” asking questions on a range of often-ignored topics. And did we mention equal time for all candidates? What a novel concept.
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By Eugene Robinson — It’s time for those of us who are old enough to remember when the U.S. Supreme Court was a major force for racial integration and justice to stop living in the past. We need to realize that, for the foreseeable future, any progress our increasingly diverse country makes toward fairness and equality will come in spite of the nation’s highest court, not because of it.
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AP Photo / Leslie Mazoch
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Renowned sociologist Dr. Troy Duster discusses the war on drugs, race, public policy and the 2008 election.
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AP Photo / Leslie Mazoch
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Renowned sociologist Dr. Troy Duster discusses the war on drugs, race, public policy and the 2008 election.
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By Andy Borowitz — The satirist pokes fun at the Republican candidates who are competing for that often-neglected voting bloc—the white male.
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By Ellen Goodman — I don’t doubt Oprah Winfrey’s marketing magic, although we don’t know yet whether she can do for politics what she’s done for publishing. Her endorsement of the candidate Obama may not be as successful as it was for the author Obama.
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By Eugene Robinson — Barack Obama doesn’t think anyone should cut his two daughters any slack when they apply to college—not because of their race, at least. In the unlikely event that the Obama family goes broke, then maybe.
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By Marie Cocco — Compared to the Democrats’ groundbreaking lineup of candidates, the 10 white men who gathered for last week’s Republican debate showed a determination to cling to the bad old days.
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By Eugene Robinson — This just in: Driving while black is still unsafe at any speed, even zero miles per hour. The same goes for driving while brown.
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Does Anything Change in Los Angeles With Election of New Mayor?
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