Vet Obama? How About (White) America Vet Itself
So once again technology and the mainstream media have conspired to manufacture a political firestorm regarding another preacher, another sermon at Trinity United Church of Christ and another repudiation from Illinois Senator Barack Obama. Father Michael Pfleger's humorous (damn funny, actually) and sexist mocking of New York Senator Hillary Clinton obviously deserves comment, but the idea that such a story deserved to be the lead-in on morning news programs is absurd. When NBC's Today Show chooses to use the Pfleger YouTube video as its lead in, it's as if the show's editorial leadership is lazily using the Clinton campaign's talking points for the day.
One of Senator Clinton's major points throughout the campaign and one of the points she continues to berate uncommitted super-delegates with, is that Senator Obama is really an unknown entity that has not been properly vetted. As a Washington political insider for nearly 20-years, Senator Clinton argues that she--like presumptive Republican nominee Arizona Senator John McCain--has been properly vetted and thus would offer no surprises for the Republican Party to exploit in the general election. Fair enough. Electoral politics is largely a game of control--limiting the size of the electorate, gerrymandering congressional districts, relying on polling data as a means to discourage voters, and choosing national candidates who are well-known entities are all elements of controlling electoral outcomes and both national parties are complicit in these efforts.
And indeed the questions about unknowns in Senator Obama's past and present raises questions among Democratic party traditionalists--even in comparison to Civil Rights standard bearers like Rev. Al Sharpton and Rev. Jesse Jackson--as Obama's identity, his Electoral College strategy, and his compelling alliance of Black Americans, back-packer generation Whites and educated elites gives pause to party regulars who would rather exploit the usual fissures (i.e. whose speaking for poor and working class white folk, as if that hasn't been the same question the party has asked since the New Deal era?).
Had Father Pfleger been Tim Wise or Howard Zinn or Zillah Eisenstein (or any number of White scholars and activists who critique the phenomenon of White Privilege ) sitting on The Charlie Rose show, nary an eyebrow would have been raised. In part, because the core of Father Pfleger's critique--the notion that the Clinton family had long felt a sense of entitlement with regards to this nomination--is a well circulated concept. Father Pfleger simply made plain the way that political privilege (which the Clintons or Bushes or even Kennedys can't deny) and quite specifically white privilege--that sense of entitlement that few White Americans are ever asked to interrogate--may have impacted how Senator Clinton has chosen to run her campaign. And yeah I'm not denying that Pfleger's feigned crying bit was over the top and sexist at that.
Still, what is ultimately disturbing about this whole ordeal is that Father Pfleger's decidedly ghetto drag-queen style of performance, only resonates in the mainstream media because it reads as a curious oddity that can exploited as a spectacle(a white guy, acting black, critiquing white privilege, in a "suspect" black church) . Increasingly the mainstream media (Keith Olbermann, notwithstanding) has chosen to portray Senator Obama as if he too is part spectacle and oddity, that they are eagerly awaiting to vet in the name of ratings. Instead of vetting Senator Obama, mainstream media and (White) America more broadly would do better to vet itself to find the America that we have for so long chosen to ignore, mock and disparage.
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Comments
1.
professorf says:
This is a good read on Pfleger and a need for white America to vet itself. My sense is that this is being done but Americans are uncomfortable with what they are discovering, and/or unwilling to acknowledge what they are discovering. That the Clintons could draw such racial battle lines in this campaign surely surprised many and reiterates the recurring surprise factor whenever racism comes up in this campaign. Additionally, White America is having to recognize that it has failed to recognize one of the fundamental lessons of the last fifteen years that innovation will trump experience especially when those propelling such innovation are respectful of experience. Sadly what too many Americans are finding is that they are more willing to keep on doing things the way that they have been done without fully heeding the ramifications of this approach.
06/20/2008 at 7:53 PM