Newsmaker

Why must we be forced to watch a horse race? When you think about what this term implies you realize how off base our news coverage is. We frankly should not even care about polls. News stations should not even report polls. Why do news stations report polls? Do the polls actually have any bearing on how we vote?

A poll tells us nothing about Obama or McCain. I have watched hours of political news over the summer and learned nothing important. I know some many irrelevant things now. I know the trend of polls in Ohio, the names of the campaign managers, and the internal predictions of each act on the polls. But I still haven’t learned one damn specific detail about how either of these guys is going to do anything they say they will.

I must take that back. Last week I read an op-ed by Obama’s economic adviser in the Wall Street Journal. So I actually know what the effect of Obama’s tax policy would be on me. But this information was not repeated once on network news.

It is day two of the Democratic convention and it has been a bust. It was a bizarre mix of the inability to read Teleprompters, electronic feeds breaking down, and misguided speeches promising warm and fuzzy notions of sugar plum and fairies dancing in my head.

Government affects our lives. But unless the political parties explain to us the effect of their policies on us we have nothing else to vote on except personality, patriotism, and sadly race.

What is worse than this unspecific bull crap emanating from the convention is the media coverage. If the Democrats can’t tell us what effect they will have on our lives it is up to the media to tell us. That is their job. They are supposed to investigate for those of us who do not have time. They are our shortcut, our heuristic, our insight into the sprawling beast we call government.

Watching the convention has been like watching the opening ceremony of the Olympics. The news does little more than point the cameras at famous people and talk lucidly about grudges between people. MSNBC, which has been the lightning rod for criticism this year, isn’t even covering the convention. They only televise a few of the speeches – otherwise it’s just a bunch of talking heads raging at each other focusing on highfalutin issues that tell use nothing about what the candidates intend on doing. Though I am sure MSNBC would argue that they aim for a more educated and decided audience. Both Fox and CNN should be commended for at least showing more speeches but again they do little to explain what this means for us. Frankly Fox probably does this best, although in a very biased way.

The Democrats have not even had the chance to go on message because the media has only been covering the disappointment of the Clintons, the effect of the Clintons, the anger of the Clintons. The Clintons aren’t running for president. The policy difference between Obama and McCain should be what drives former Clinton supporters’ decisions of who to vote for. But if they are never exposed to coverage of policy differences they are left up the creek without a paddle. So is the falling of cable news a slave to profit.

I hope Clinton’s speech last night will shut up the media. The election is far too important for us to be wasting time on personal feuds. The media has a job to do and they need to stop reporting on high school style psychodrama and start telling us what effect an Obama or a McCain presidency will actually have on our lives. I, like most Americans, would like to vote on the issues and so far the convention has made it clear that the Democrats have no intentions of telling us what effect they would have on us so we must turn to the press. The media owes it to this country to forget the horse race and do their damn job.

Watching from the sidelines this semester as Evan struggled through his racism crisis, I have frankly tried to stay out of it. The one time I didn’t, I got ripped apart by a young man in CTB who proclaimed that Evan and I were both racists working to destroy America.

But watching Evan go through all this crap, and subsequently watching him do some wonderful reflections and reporting on race on our campus. I found I was finally able to finger point the full impact of the issue of race in our own country. It comes down to both how we respond and how our media responds to the words stated by different races.

If Hillary or McCain say a pretty sentence it’s just that. Obama says something nice the media is a buzz with how eloquent he is. The implication being that it is such a surprise for a black man to form such complete and coherent sentences.

But this Reverend Wright stuff is most amazing. It is at its core a pretext for racism. It is being fed to Americans as an excuse to not vote for a black man. Wright’s claims about the neglect of the black community are largely true. Some are far fetched. For example, his claim that the government created AIDS to destroy the black community would fall into that category. A claim I support based on the fact that Regan did not even understand AIDS until some time around 1985.

Wright is angry and expresses his anger in broad and flagrant language, and that’s his prerogative.

But the media’s focus on Wright is to hold Obama to a different standard. A John McCain supporter, fundamentalist John Hagee, recently called the Catholic Church the whore of Babylon. That is ridiculous and outlandish; yet I have only heard about it every now and then. Meanwhile Obama has had to disagree with, disavow, and disown Rev. Wright. When McCain was pressed about Hagee’s comments he merely responded, “I welcome his support.” The media made no fuss.

I think this represents the ways in which white people are used to understanding prejudice. In read quotes from PA voters, the ones who were most at odds with Wright, indicated that what they just didn’t get was how Reverend Wright carries on like he does. As one woman said, “when I go to church my Priest does not jump up and down and carry on like that.”

Let’s face it, white Americans, we just don’t get very animated. Wright’s most ridiculed and most frequently quoted comment was that September 11^th was punishment. Now, when I first heard this coming from my TV about 3 months ago, I thought is was just Pat Robertson again. Remember, the quiet white guy down in Florida filled with soft spoken hate speech. The things he has said are in fact more outlandish and far fetched then Wright. Yet he recently has been accepted in the main stream. This has been fueled in large part because of his new found stance against global warming. The point is Wright’s extreme language has played on the news for months now, and we hear nothing of the white lunatics, who are hanging out under the GOP tent.

The biggest issue is how race is used in this country. There are two ways to mobilize people: either along class lines or along social lines. Social lines come in a few forms that often inter mix. In America, populist Democrats (Obama and Edwards) mobilize based on class; while populist Republicans and some Democrats (McCain, Bush, both Clinton’s) mobilize publically along social lines, which includes race, religion, or most commonly in America elitism. As Bill Clinton most recently commented in Clarksburg, West Virginia: “The great divide in this country is not by race or even income, it’s by those who think they are better than everyone else and think they should play by a different set of rules.” I like to call this type of social moralizers like the Clinton’s and the Bush’s anti-arugulaist (Although Bush the First with his hatred for broccoli would be an anti-broccolist).

My point is that most American will not vote based on race unless given a reason to. The most immediate political issue to all voters is economics. As a result a politician must either tell them their economic situation is because of a particular race (a tactic that fell out of style some time after WII for obvious reasons) or as is the case in this election scare voters with race.

In this election Hillary has tied race to class and allowed racist voters to vote on race, while claiming it is class. I saw this most despicably with her most recent appearance on Fox News’ O’Riley Factor. While on the show, when asked about Reverend Wright Hillary claimed Wright’s comments offend her as an American. The issue is she is offended as a white American. When you divide people along social lines you ask them to forget about the economic issues to instead focus on differences.

What’s most alarming about this strategy is it is exactly what Reverend Wright does and what Obama’s campaign claims to be trying to move away from. Recently when talking to my father about the mess I asked him, “but isn’t Wright correct that Black’s are screwed over by America?”

Must to my surprise my dad said, “Andrew you’re missing the point. Wright is like Stokely Carmichael, he jumps on the backs of those trying to bring people together for change and pushes his own agenda that has no substance just rage.”

He went on to tell me a story of a Vietnam War protest he attended. They marched to the UN in NYC. When they got there MLK gave what he remembers as an amazingly beautiful speech about how the cause of African American’s and White American’s was the same and the inequality of blacks had mirrored itself in the unjustness of the Vietnam War. Soon after MLK got off the stage Stokely Carmichael, a leader of the Black Panther’s, trotted on and started a chant, “What do we want? Black Power! When do we want it now?”

My father remembers feeling used. He remembers suddenly the cohesion he felt with blacks around him just minutes ago, as he stood with and for civil rights and an end to the war, suddenly slipped away. He was divided from them by the words of one man. One America was being divided into two America’s.

Just as Stokely Carmichael undermined the vision of MLK and excluded whites from the process of building one America for all people, so does Reverend Wright do the same to Obama. If we truly plan to build a society without racism, we must not just be for retribution, but more importantly, for healing and forgiveness.

We claim now to live in a post-racial and post-sexist society. This vision is pushed upon and does not reflect the reality on the ground. The media’s focus on Wright and their fear of Wright’s style is a manifestation of our continued inability to accept difference.

Hillary Clinton’s use of Wright to divide Americans along social divisions is as bad as Wright’s attempts to do the same. At the end of the day a poor white man and a poor black man have far more in common then a poor white man has with Clinton or McCain.

Racism in our country is not just a product of social difference and social misunderstandings, but is also a product of deliberate action on the part of politicians to divide and mobilize us in ways that most benefit themselves at the ballot box.

I sincerely hope that Hillary’s defeat has, at least in some part, been a rejection, by the American public, of her use of Reverend Wright and therefore race as a tool to mobilize votes.