The Barack and Hillary Show Plays Selma
by BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford
"Black luminaries validated the candidates' vacuous presentations as if they actually contained something of substance worthy of the occasion."
It was a double-church drive-by, or a two-ring circus, or a game show in which the contestants choose their own questions but provide no answers, yet still win applause and get to play another round. Whatever the metaphor, the Barack and Hillary double-bill in Selma, Alabama served to emphasize the pitifully shrunken choices corporate Democrats offer to Black America.
The Brown Chapel AME and First Baptist churches are located only blocks apart, but Sunday's near-simultaneous celebrity performances showed the two Democratic "front-runners" are even closer than that, separated only by race and gender, with not a dime's worth of political difference between them. Forty-two years after the historic civil rights crossing of nearby Edmund Pettus Bridge on the road to Montgomery, the Barack and Hillary Show reveals that the last vestiges of the Black Freedom Movement are going - nowhere. African American political luminaries from around Alabama and the nation, eager to become part of the pageant, arrayed themselves in the box seats of their favorite's church venues, validating the candidates' vacuous presentations as if they actually contained something of substance worthy of the occasion.
"Barack and Hillary Show reveals that the last vestiges of the Black Freedom Movement are going - nowhere."
No political lines could be discerned between the Black entourages accompanying the senators - just as only corporate media-manufactured illusions blur the politically sibling, near-Siamese ties that bind Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Gwen Moore, the very progressive congresswoman from Milwaukee, lent her star to Clinton's firmament. Artur Davis, the local Black congressman whose record has earned him an overall "Derelict" rating on the Congressional Black Caucus Monitor's Report Card, arranged for Obama's appearance at Brown Chapel AME. Yet Davis' mentor and benefactor, Illinois Rep. Rahm Emanuel, chairman of the House Democratic Caucus and heavy-hitter in the corporatist Democratic Leadership Council (DLC), found himself a prominent squat among Hillary's groupies at First Baptist Church.
Rep. Emanuel could just as well have flitted between the venues, since the DLC's Republican-lite agenda ruled in both camps.
The Missing Bugler
Before glossing and fake-drawling over every bit of political substance, Obama first addressed the non-issues. In a failed attempt to match the dates of his African father and white Kansas mother's romance and marriage in Hawaii with the events of the southern-based civil rights movement, the Senator "testified": "So don't tell me I don't have a claim on Selma, Alabama... Don't tell me I'm not coming home." In this way, Obama confronted what BAR's Bruce Dixon has rightly described as "some foolish standard of black authenticity" promulgated by white corporate media, a false standard that amounts to "a racist calumny and slur of the first magnitude against all of black America." Dixon continued, in his February 14 article:
"Our people have never rejected leading figures because of light complexions, immigrant parents or advanced degrees. Black America emphatically did not reject Thurgood Marshall or W.E.B. DuBois, or Julian Bond or Adam Clayton Powell. Nor did the movement turn away immigrants like Stokely Carmichael or Roger Toussaint. Black opposition to Barack Obama on account of his parentage and Harvard Law degree is every bit as much a fabricated political issue as the wall to wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death and family issues are fabricated news. Both are served up to us by the same mainstream media, and for similar reasons."
Of course, if Barack Obama were not accepted as "Black" there would be no rush among African American politicians to align with him, since his political stance is indistinguishable from Hillary Clinton's. The brother "doth protest too much, methinks," as Shakespeare would say.
"Obama has never blown a bugle or commanded troops or outlined a strategy for victory."
Getting his church groove on, Obama dubbed the elders of the civil rights movement - the heroes and heroines of Edmund Pettus Bridge and other struggles - the "Moses Generation" that led the people to the borders the Promised Land. Obama's generation was personified by Joshua, who the Old Testament says picked up the leadership reins from Moses and conquered Canaan by repeatedly marching his troops around Jericho while commanding the priests to blow their horns. The walls of the city "came tumbling down."
Getting those walls to tumble is Black folks' unfinished business, with Obama playing Joshua. But Obama has never blown a bugle or commanded troops or outlined a strategy for victory. It is true that Selma is "home" to every African American, part of the collective legacy. But Obama gained national fame declaring at the 2004 Democratic National Convention, "There's not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America."
Apparently, home is wherever Obama hangs his campaign hat on a given day.
Settled in, Obama urges young Blacks to "recognize their history.... I worry sometimes that the Joshua generation forgets where it came from...." They want to "get some of that Oprah money." Everyone laughs. Obama flashes his famous smile, knowing that he has become a master of the political uses of money. The Senator's Hope Fund Political Action Committee has helped bankroll 18 fellow Democratic colleagues, most of them members of the corporatist DLC, an organization founded in the 1980s by white southern politicians fearing the regional party was becoming too Black - including, most prominently, then Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton, who accompanied his wife to Selma.
Obama not only knows money, he serves it. Among his first votes in the Senate was to limit citizens' access to state courts in suits against giant corporations. He and the bill's Republican sponsors called it Tort Reform, when in reality the measure abridges fundamental civil rights. This, from a former professor of constitutional law, who seldom corrects folks who mistakenly call him a "civil rights lawyer."
"The principles of civil rights have to be fought [for] each and every day," shouts the candidate, fully churchified. But as U.S. Senator, Obama counseled other Democrats against filibustering Bush Supreme Court nominees John Roberts and Samuel Alito, and defended his colleagues who voted to seat Roberts (although Obama ultimately voted against both). Yes, fight for civil rights every day, but not so loudly as to seem strident and unreasonable in conservative white company.
"Obama counseled other Democrats against filibustering Bush Supreme Court nominees John Roberts and Samuel Alito."
Later this year, the U.S. Supreme Court, with Roberts and Alito sitting, will rule on Seattle and Louisville, Kentucky cases that will determine if school districts can consider race when assigning students to schools. Obama not only did not blow his horn when he had the chance, he cautioned other Democrats against talking too long on the High Court's composition. He ain't no Joshua.
Obama preached about "gaps" and "disparities" - for example, the "health disparity" that leaves 46 million Americans without health insurance. The Senator didn't mention his own proposal on health care - thankfully, since it isn't right to lie in church, and to claim that Obama's plan bears any resemblance to "universal" health care would be a lie. Like the DLCers he flocks with, Obama advocates retaining the for-profit nature of American health care, and mandating that poor people pay for it, somehow. His plan is only "universal" in the sense that mandatory auto insurance is universal.
Then there was the "hope gap" that has led to "so many young men in prisons [and] dropping out." But Obama suffers from his own "substance gap," offering no frontal assault on mass Black incarceration that has ravaged every aspect of African American life, and proposing nothing that would unduly upset suburbanites who fear their tax dollars might finance an overhaul of inner city education.
Instead, the Senator hit his stride with a rebuke of supposed Black cultural failings. He praised the "discipline" of those who through lunch counter sit-ins "instilled a sense of moral clarity" in the "Moses Generation" - the obvious inference being that what the current generation is lacking is "moral clarity." Not a word on trade policies that have emptied whole regions of the manufacturing jobs that brought much of the "Moses Generation" and their predecessors to the cities - policies that Obama supports. Rather, the problem in the ghetto is "too many daddies not acting like daddies."
Celebrate Good Times, Come On!
Bad-mouthing Black behavior is not a public option for Hillary Clinton, in or out of church. However, as the wife of the first "Black President," Senator Clinton knows how to make the congregation feel good about being visited - while saying nothing at all. At least Clinton managed to mention the Iraq war, even if obliquely, something Obama failed to do. She reviled a Bush regime that seems oblivious to the plight of soldiers and their families "when we have our young men and women in harm's way and when they come back the government does not take care of " them properly.
Had Clinton explained her position on ending the war in Iraq, it would have become plain that she has no intention of doing so, and has until recently sometimes sounded more gung-ho on "victory" than the Bush regime. Obama is no better: a class-A imperialist who complained that the U.S. was "coddling" Iraqis (half a million "coddled" to death, so far); would give Bush until March 31, 2008 to withdraw "combat" troops (as so designated by the Pentagon); and would maintain U.S. bases in Iraq thereafter if "the Iraqis" request it (there will always be an Iraqi faction eager to "host" the U.S. military for billions of dollars in bribes).
"Neither Clinton nor Obama stood up when it counted."
Senator Clinton was also more forthcoming than Obama on the Katrina catastrophe - although, again, only peripherally. "...96,000 of our citizens are still living in trailers and mobile homes," she railed from the pulpit, without mentioning how she would effectuate the return of hundreds of thousands of exiles scattered to the four winds - or even to acknowledge their very existence.
Clinton posed as a crusader for voting rights. "In the last two elections we have seen the right to vote tampered with...not just in Florida... the precious right to vote is under siege." The Senator promised to "reintroduce" the Count Every Vote Act, a worthy measure. But neither she nor Obama stood up when it counted, at the start of Senate business in 2005, to object to certification of the presidential election results due to blatant vote suppression and theft in Ohio and Florida. Only California Senator Barbara Boxer rose to the occasion.
It was Barack Obama's first chance to prove that Selma was, indeed, "home." He failed, and he has kept on failing.
Both Obama and Clinton came to town to celebrate themselves and the circumstances that have made them frontrunners for the Democratic nomination. The Black Freedom Movement, they would have us believe, was designed to create the conditions in which white female and Black and Latino male corporate candidates could be seriously considered for the presidency. The civil rights movement gave "Obama a chance...gave Bill Richardson a chance... and gave me that chance, too," Clinton exulted.
And so we, too, are expected to be exultant - to believe that the wounded, beaten and trampled at Edmund Pettus Bridge, Bloody Sunday, March 7, 1965, and the countless dead of the "Moses" and pre-"Moses" generations suffered and struggled for the privilege of witnessing vapid self-congratulation from the Democratic Party's corporate wing.
Please don't say "Amen."
BAR Executive Editor Glen Ford can be contacted at Glen.Ford (at) BlackAgendaReport.com.
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