Obama Nation

Barack Obama has triumphed despite the snide undertone of smear campaigns and the racism which dare not speak its name with the innuendo “He is not like us...” “He is not really an American” “He is a secret Muslim.” Good on Colin Powell who was so annoyed by the negative smear campaign against Obama that he ringingly endorsed him whilst respecting his old friend John McCain;

"I come to the conclusion that because of his ability to inspire, because of the inclusive nature of his campaign, because he is reaching out all across America, because of who he is and his rhetorical abilities - and we have to take that into account - as well as his substance - he has both style and substance - he has met the standard of being a successful president, being an exceptional president," said Powell in his sweeping endorsement. "I think he is a transformational figure. He is a new generation coming into the world -- onto the world stage, onto the American stage -- and for that reason I'll be voting for Senator Barack Obama."

But Powell said he found the implicit religious bigotry troubling and tellingly remarked "He's always been a Christian. But the really right answer is, 'What if he is [a Muslim]?' Is there something wrong with being a Muslim in this country?"

The cheer leader for the smear campaign was Jerome Corsi who received a Ph.D. from Harvard University in political science in 1972 and has written many books and articles, including, Unfit for Command: “Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry”. This was the discredited smear against John Kerry in the 2004 Presidential Election by the Republican Front Organisation, Swift Boat Veterans for Truth. John Kerry it must be remembered, despite his privileged background, served his country in Vietnam, was decorated for bravery and had three purple hearts, unlike George W. Bush, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld who when they had a choice didn’t fight for their country. Given his previous form Jerome Corsi parades his “Ph.D.” on the front of his book ”Obama Nation” as if this makes the shallow smear by association contents more believable. In this attempted political hatchet job he tries to show why the alleged “extreme leftism of an Obama presidency would leave the United States weakened, diminished and divided, why Obama must be defeated - and how he can be.” Luckily the American People saw through this warmed up partisan pap masquerading as analysis and Jerome Corsi, Ph.D. or no Ph.D., is now a discredited busted flush.



After Barack Obama's historic victory, one of the greatest taboos in American politics has been put to rest. Almost 400 years after the first African slaves were transported to Jamestown, Virginia, the United States at last has a black president. When Barack Obama takes the oath of office in January, he should say a heartfelt thanks to the pioneers who led the way in the aftermath of the US Civil War.

For it was not until the 1860s, with the exhausted, slave-holding Southern states beaten and occupied by Union troops, that the first great wave of black politicians swept into Washington. Liberated from slavery by Abraham Lincoln, Southern blacks enthusiastically chose other blacks to represent them, sending a total of 17 black senators and representatives to Congress during the "Reconstruction" years of the late 1860s and 1870s.

Tragically, Reconstruction was a false dawn. When Northern troops pulled out of the South after 1876, the old white landowners reasserted their power. Blacks were steadily stripped of the vote, and the last black US congressman finished his term in 1901.



It took the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s to restore the vote to millions of Southern blacks. But although civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Jesse Jackson dominated the headlines, few were elected to Congress. They preferred to work on the streets than in Washington - and so, even today, Obama is only the fifth black senator in history.

It's hard to see what this will mean for the world yet. Obama himself has written: "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views." Is there any better symbol of how the American Revolution can correct itself than the realisation that the first 16 Presidents of the US could have owned the 44th President as a piece of property?

However before we get too excited we need to remind ourselves that the United States is still riddled with racist outcomes which President Obama will need to tackle. To give just one example: the American Civil Liberties Union found in 2006 that although the races use drugs at the same rate, black Americans – who comprise 12 per cent of the population – make up 74 per cent of all drug offenders sentenced to prison. Obama could very easily have slipped into this vortex when, as a young man, he occasionally snorted coke. If he had been arrested and jailed for it like one in five black men, he wouldn't be President; he wouldn't even be able to vote. This election shows a desire by American people to move beyond the sterile stupidities of racism, but it is the middle of the story, not the end. Obama and Black Americans have had to work against “voter suppression laws” which are a disgrace to democracy in states such as Tennessee and Kentucky which work to disenfranchise Black voters. And then there is the great distortion and fetish at the heart of America’s Criminal Justice system – the desire to devote huge resources so America can kill mainly Black and Hispanic prisoners after poor trials, poor defence and poor jurisprudence to ensure it is up there with China, Iran and Saudi Arabia as a State Killer. (http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/09/stay-granted-for-troy-davis.html )



But Obama’s world view will be more complex? A man with a background among the colonised has never before become the head of the world's largest empire. Obama's grandfather was detained in a British Guantanamo for six months during the bloody occupation of Kenya. As a child, Obama watched helpless as the CIA armed and funded the crazed dictator Suharto to commit mass murder of civilians. Yet how much has this informed Obama's policies, as a pragmatic politician working within a system riddled with undemocratic pressures? He certainly disagrees with many of the vicious extremes of Bush, from Iraq to torture. His plans for a massive investment in renewable energy to wean the US slowly off its addiction to oil will have transformed the country's foreign policy, ending its need for the Saudi tyranny and bursts of war in Mesopotamia. (http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/04/britain-in-iraq.html )

But the main effect of will be the demise of the Great American Warrior fighting false and meaningless wars – internal wars against Abortion, Gays, Immigrants and Gun Control, and external wars against Drugs, Terror, Muslims and its totally illegal blockade of Cuba which more than anything has kept Cuba as a communist state, albeit one with a health system and hurricane preparedness which puts the US to shame. America needs to rediscover partnership and give and take – it can not continue to be the spoilt child who only thinks of what it wants and then throws a tantrum when the other kids don’t want to play. Obama will also have the tackle the great poison at the heart of American Foreign policy which, surprisingly you might think, did not rear its head in the Election debate, the issue of Middle East “Rogue States.”

You will not be surprised to hear that this doesn’t include the Middle Eastern “rogue state” which has attacked each and every one of its neighbours including destroying the EU funded infrastructure of Gaza, dismembering Lebanon, occupying the sovereign territory of Syria, occupying East Jerusalem and the West Bank which it is settling and applying collective punishment to the civilian population (in defiance of the “quaint” Geneva Conventions), which has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty and which has developed nuclear weapons. And did I mention that its previous Prime Minister, Ariel Sharon, had personally led a terrorist massacre of women and children? During the raid on Qibya, Jordan in 1953, a total of 69 Palestinians were killed and forty-five houses, a school, and a mosque were blown-up. The act was condemned by the US State Department, the UN Security Council, and by Jewish communities worldwide. And the previous Prime Minister Ehud Olmert’s father was Quartermaster of the Irgun terrorist organisation (you know the guys who killed both the British and UN Peace Envoys and hanged three British soldiers including a Jewish lad from the East End). Current Prime Minister’s Tzipi Livni’s father was the leader of the Irgun group which carried out the King David Hotel massacre which killed 91 people including 17 Jews. And did I mention that another previous Israeli Prime Minister, Menachim Begin, was the Irgun leader who gave the order? But less of rogue states with terrorist links whose support by the US is entirely contrary to America’s strategic interests. But perhaps Barack might suggest to Israel’s leadership that if it is to survive and prosper it will not do so by military means and it is now a time for change?


Sears Tower from Grant Park, Chicago

Barack Obama’s rally and speech in Grant Park, Chicago on the 5th November inspired more than the American electorate and I am sure, unlike his predecessor after 9/11 he will not squander the goodwill and longing for partnership the rest of the world feels. I spent some time in Chicago in 1982, staying up the road from Grant Park in the wonderful University Club at the corner of Monroe and Michigan and with an office in a law firm high up in Sears Tower, then the highest building in the world so I have some insight into the Chicago he moved to and Chicago law firms which he and Michelle Robinson worked for.

Whatever about “State Street being a Great Street” Chicago was "My Kinda Town" and I came away with an abiding affection for the place. But unlike New York the Windy City was no melting pot. Chicago was the city which bound America together and where it did real business in the products of the Great Plains at the Chicago Mercantile exchange. 22,000 ton “Lakers” ships could come up the St Lawrence and the amazing Great Lakes from the Atlantic Ocean and connect by barge with the Mississippi, Ohio, Missouri, Red and Arkansas Rivers through the wonderfully named “Chicago Navigation and Sanitary Canal.” All railway lines led to Chicago including the great express trains; the “20th Century Limited” from New York, the “Superchief” from Los Angeles and the “Spirit of New Orleans” from the Mississippi Delta.


Downtown Chicago


And from the 1920’s black people and many others fleeing from the failed agri-economies of the southern states, the dustbowl and the Great Depression arrived in Chicago looking for work in the stockyards and abattoirs which once encircled the downtown “Loop.” So Chicago was a black majority city but black people did not exist in the city government which was carved up by the Democratic Party machine under Mayor Richard Daley and others which played to the white ethnic groups who shared the spoils of patronage, the Irish, Poles and Italians. That was until 1983 when Harold Washington united the fractious black groups with Hispanics to redress the balance until, sadly, he died in office of a heart attack in 1987. The lesson of Harold Washington’s campaign was well learnt by the young Barack Obama who has widened the dragnet of inclusion and reaching out to the uncommitted but has done it with an iron discipline and focus. He was, like all successful candidates, indeed lucky, no more so in having George W. Bush as his campaign manager spectacularly arranging a financial collapse and engineering “socialist” solutions which the Wobblies could only have dreamt of! But Obama has made his own luck and I’m sure will capitalise on it, as he said himself in Grant Park;


Harold Washington - Mayor of Chicago 1983 - 1987

“If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

As Lincoln said to a nation far more divided than ours: "We are not enemies, but friends… though passion may have strained it must not break our bonds of affection.

This is our time - to put our people back to work and open doors of opportunity for our kids; to restore prosperity and promote the cause of peace; to reclaim the American dream and reaffirm that fundamental truth - that out of many, we are one; that while we breathe, we hope, and where we are met with cynicism and doubt, and those who tell us that we can't, we will respond with that timeless creed that sums up the spirit of a people: yes, we can.”

http://daithaic.blogspot.com/2008/11/government-of-people-by-people.html

Never has the motto of the United States “E Pluribus Unum” had more meaning. And as for Jerome Corsi Ph. D. and his seminal work ”Obama Nation” do rush down to your discount bookstore to snap it up now for 50 cents, as it certainly won’t be reprinted!