Responding to Obama's Critics

This post started out as a comment on Paul Papadeas’s comment on my previous blog post, but then it got long and I thought I ought to just throw it up on the main page. Why throw out all of this amazing writing, right? Right?

I’ve actually been wanting to write about Obama for some time now, particularly why I support him, but haven’t done so yet. Laziness, maybe. But Paul’s comment got me thinking of all the reasons I do like Obama, and why I think he’d be a fine choice for President. Also: there’s not a lot of anti-Obama stuff out in the MSM, and, helpfully, Paul’s gathered a bunch of it all in one place, so I have something to argue against, which is a pretty easy way to lay out one’s support of something. So here is a link to Paul’s comment. Scroll down; it’s the fourth one. And below is my response. So anyway, thanks Paul for starting up an Obama discussion.

So! About halfway through your comment, Paul, you provide a list of links to web pages with anti-Obama sentiments contained therein. I think the only person on your list who can reasonably be said to have laid a glove on Obama is Paul Krugman. I’ve read a few of Krugman’s columns on Obama and his main problem with Barack is that Krugman thinks Obama’s emphasis on unity between red and blue states is exactly the wrong tack to take after eight years of this awful administration. In that, I think he may have a point. There's a debate to be had there.

But as for ZNet writer and “black militant” Paul Street to accuse Obama of truth-twisting simply because Obama said, "Don't tell me I'm not coming home to Selma, Alabama. I'm here because somebody marched. I'm here because you all sacrificed for me,” even though he was born four years before the Selma marches and six before the Montgomery Bus Boycott, is ridiculous. If Paul Street wants to deride Obama because of his too-safe "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature for example, fine, but it’s difficult to go after Obama as just another lying politician. Yes, Obama was born in Hawaii in 1961, hardly a hotbed of racial unrest, and yes it was years after the Selma marches, but for Street to ignore the metaphorical point Obama was actually making about how far he’s come and why, reveals Street to be a partisan with his own agenda, and appallingly dismissive of the civil rights movement.

Looking through Paul Street's indictment of Obama I'm struck by how lazy and un-indicting it actually is. Take this:

"Around the same time that [Obama] was making historically idiotic claims about owing his existence to the Civil Rights Movement..."

If Street really means to suggest that had Martin Luther King, Abernathy, Bayard Rustin and thousands of others involved in the Civil Rights Movement NOT put pressure on the federal government to enact the Civil Rights Act, we would still be seriously considering a black man as a presidential candidate in 2008, then he just threw a sandwich board over his head that read, in big red letters, "NOT TO BE TAKEN SERIOUSLY." Actually, in the 21^st century, “black militant” does that pretty well all by itself.

I don't believe Street's lazy denunciation of Obama is in any way illuminating to those on the fence about Obama's candidacy.

I think you ought to give Obama a second look, Paul. I don’t think you’re being altogether fair. I have more and I’ll post it up later; I don’t want these posts to be so long that no one reads them.