“Poverty”
“Inequality”
Actually, this isn’t quite true. “Poverty” appears twice–once in reference to the Congo, and another time in reference to children without fathers in the home.
Inequality doesn’t appear at all.
I don’t plan to support Clinton, so I don’t even plan to go to her website and check…but if I were to check I’d probably see the same pattern.
Pre-emptive critiques that some may make in response:
If he talks about poverty he won’t win.
Platforms don’t matter.
Is there anyone out there better?
You are expecting too much from him.
List others that I’ve missed. If I get a chance I’ll respond in either another post, or in the comments.
I guess my comments are based on what the candidates have actually done while in office versus policy proposals. Obama has 2 best selling books. It seems as though you could consult those for policy frameworks. Your argument seems to based on a WP article that was pretty much designed to make provocative arguments. Your research seems to be based on googling for the words inequality and poverty. Should I expect a little more from a Doctor? My critique is that you haven’t made a convincing argument for a strike, or even a reason to use baseball as a metaphor for selecting a candidate. It all seems a little arbitrary.
It’s arbitrary, but it isn’t capricious. A policy platform represents the candidates opportunity to differentiate him/herself from his/her opponents. It gives a snapshot of what issues he/she thinks of as important. As I noted in another comment, if a candidate said that he was interested in gutting Affirmative Action we’d put a great deal of stock in that. I can think of no candidate who would put policy proposals he was interested in, in his book instead of in his platform.
There are undoubtedly other ways of getting at his policy stances, but this way takes very little time, and very little brain power.
Further in as much as we have a number of candidates to chose from in any given election we have to have some means–if we plan to vote–of differentiating them from one another. The baseball analogy works in as much as it is very early in the campaign season and candidates should have multiple opportunities to win support.
But finally, what I believe has hamstrung us over the past several years is lowered expectations combined with the conservative ascendancy. At some point we should expect our candidates to actually speak about the issues we care about…and care enough about our own vote to demand that speech.
Back up.
The place where candidates reveal their policy platforms is in their campaign literature. The degree of emphasis the candidate places on issues within their campaign literature is a better proxy for the importance they place on the issue than almost any other source.
You are talking about what Obama has written in popular books…but for some reason this is ABSENT in the most important and accessible document he’s generated for his campaign. The place where everyone goes to figure out what he stands for, what policies he will implement.
I have no plans to talk about how realistic Edwards’ policies are…because at this point I have absolutely nothing to compare them to. Why would I? No other major Democratic candidate is dealing with these issues substantively.
The biggest problem that we have to face…that ALL of us have to face…is that we aren’t hard enough on the people we want to represent us.
If you want to represent Obama here, feel free to do so. What I’d be particularly interested in are his views on poverty and inequality and what he’d do to eradicate them. And while we’re at it I’d like to know why his discussion of poverty and inequality is present in his book–to the degree that it is–and not present in the most important literature he has. As it stands what you are basing your support for Obama on a series of loose premises that can’t really be sustained by argument.
I took a few hours and bought “The Audacity of Hope” and read the Race and Opportunity chapters. The discussions of inequality and poverty are there. There is no reference that I can find to “acting White”. The solutions are mostly a laundry list which hopefully as the campaign advances will become detailed plans.
My issue continues to be that you (among other African-American bloggers) took the 1% that was force fed you through a media that you admit you don’t trust, and failed to look at the other 99%. Could this be what actually has hamstrung us over the past several years?
Issues of poverty, race, and class are complex. I read a lot about Edwards having plans for these issues. He didn’t bring them up at the debate. Does that earn him a strike? Moreover, are his plans realistic? I have high expectations that you will provide some analysis beyond text searches.
Lastly, in reading the chapters I could hear echos from speeches that I’ve heard. Obama’s discussion of infant mortaility in the book was mentioned in the Democratic debate. School funding and Affirmative Action were part of his Selma speech. At Al Sharpton’s National Action Network conference, he talked about poverty and inequality, what he has done to address these issues, and what he plans to do as president. If you listen, I think you can hear your issues discussed.
These speeches are readily available. Please tell me again, what has us hamstrung?
Valid points. I would say that you can evaluate Edwards plans by themselves and actually did just that in a previous post.
I’m not interested in representing Obama. I’m interested in having a more substantive conversation based on more than a few phrases out of a Washington Post article.
Is this fair? Also, you did ask for speech transcripts. So, at least initially you were interested in seeing more information. (Back Up?)
I would guess that Obama not mentioning inequality and class prominently in his website have much to do with him framing issues less traditionally than most candidates. I get this from reading a profile in this month’s Atlantic magazine, along with those 2 chapters of his book that I skimmed. However, I can understand how it can be interpreted that he doesn’t consider these issues a priority.
Lastly, I constantly listen, read, and think about issues that confront my Detroit home. I think Obama deserves a hearing, and 8 months before the 1st primary, I look forward to seeing how he develops. I just get a little frustrated when the criticism seems superficial.
Peace and go Tigers!!!
I’m not very concerned that he is not talking about these issues. If Obama doesn’t talk about “inequality” and “poverty,” should we assume that he expects us to believe that these issues, particularly as they influence the Black lower-class and underclass, would be addressed better by him than any other candidate? I suspect you might caution me that we shouldn’t make assumptions about what Obama would do if these assumptions wouldn’t be based on his clear public statements. And, part of me wants to nod my head to that. But there’s another part of me that knows smoke and mirrors are a part of the game, and I have to trust my instincts at some point. My instincts tell me that whether Obama talks about the issues that matter most to me or not, inequality and poverty among the Black lower-class and underclass, he will show these issues more love, perhaps underneath the radar, than any other candidate.
Help me out here Les. I got mine. I want to help other brothers and sisters get theirs, especially those out their struggling in the type of streets I came up in. If I don’t, then I’ll die a sell-out. To me it really is that simple. And, I have a tendency to assume that just about every other Black person who is able to, no matter what type of socioeconomic profile he or she is working with, is more likely to look out for lower-class and underclass Blacks than a similarly situated White. Is there really a reason to believe that Obama is not the type of Black man who would help Black people more than the average White politician with the same amount of power?
I read this comment a couple of posts ago:
“Like you I was extremely critical of the mixed messages that come out of politicians mouths , but now I have come to believe that I have been expecting too much of them. Barak, like all the other candidates, is trying to package himself in a way that will please a majority of Americans. Simply put, that’s the only way to win. Just making Black folks happy about your message is a pretty sure way to lose, just ask Al. Jesse, Shirley, etc. Pandering too hard to any one group is a recipe for disaster.”
I believe it is this type of thinking that has us hamstrung (and by us I don’t mean black folks cause I’m a white boy), what’s worrisome about most of these candidates is that they are simply trying to win. Winning the presidency does not mean you’ll have a chance to impose your policy agenda wholesale, especially if the congress is controlled by the other party. While I do believe that there are opportunities to make serious change, even the position of “Leader of the Free World” has its limitations.
I think it is important to focus on elections, especially those that are nationwide, however I don’t believe that is how real change happens. I believe the best example of this is found in one of this year’s candidates, on the republican side. Tom Tancredo, a veteran Colorado member of the House of Representatives, has stated numerous times that he doesn’t expect to win, he’s simply there to force the other candidates to take a stance of illegal immigration. Now this guy’s pedigree is downright scary, he’s got serious ties to right-wing white nationalist groups.
Now don’t get it twisted I don’t admire the guy, but I do admire his approach. But his real strength is that he represents a tendency in this country that is becoming increasingly mass, that of the anti-immigrant sentiment. This tendency is being flamed and organized by folks whose agendas go much further than keeping illegals out, they are plotting all out race war, Yugoslavia type ish.
Doc you talk about the conservative ascendency, well I think these folks have much to do with it. They are not all or nothing, and they don’t try to do something so foolish as win the presidency, at least not seriously (yet), they’ve spent decades remoulding their image and making their overt politics mesh more with mainstream tendencies in order to shape and direct them towards a more radical right-wing agenda, and they’re doing one helluva job.
When there is a real movement of people towards left tendencies, I believe you’ll see more of this stuff of the democratic side of the aisle, candidates running to raise issues and to put forth real platforms, not just trying to make themselves into nice looking packages, knowing that they won’t win but using the national stage to further their agenda.
If Obama loses, many lefties will sulk home with their tails between their legs thinking, “We lost, now we’ve got to wait four more years.” When Tancredo loses, his camp will be celebrating another small victory in what they know is a much larger battle than a mere presidency, because he will have spoken for a growing group of people that want candidates to be tougher on immigrants. Even if he doesn’t succeed in making immigration a serious issue in this campaign he will still have served his movement well in that they can go back to the drawing board and work on new tactics and strategies. Not necessarily good electoral politics, but brilliant mass organizational politics, he’s more interested in furthering the movement he’s a part of than futhering his political career. We could learn a lot from this guy.
In reverse order:
E.C. what I do in your position is two things. First I see whether there is raw data to go on…something I can operationalise and falsify. In the absence of that data I try to find proxies. In the absence of that data I make assumptions based on racial solidarity. In the presence of data, racial solidarity is still there. In this case there is not much on paper separating Obama from Hilary, but I’d vote for Obama if he was the candidate. Hilary I wouldn’t vote for under any circumstances. But racial solidarity isn’t enough to establish support for Obama over Edwards…because data exists that privilege Edwards.
DLT I think the only reason why many of us believe that Obama cares about inequality in the absence of policy proposals that compare to Edwards is because of racial solidarity. It’s akin (note I didn’t say “exactly the same” because it isn’t) to the sentiment some black people had for Clarence Thomas in the absence of information. I can understand your frustration at the lack of substantive discussion. The frustration you feel is the frustration I feel. But rather than being frustrated with black people who blog, I am frustrated with Obama because I know his history, and it seems as if he’s borrowing far too much from Bill Clinton. And while the black middle class fared pretty good during Clinton’s presidency, he also gutted welfare and placed more black men in prison than anyone before (and perhaps since).
Rob you slipped by me. I think you’re on the money. We’ve got to start putting forth policy options, instead of candidates. The right has done this successfully for the last 25 years at least.
Exactly, and policy options come not from “getting out the vote” but from watching and listening to the strivings of people who desire change in their communities, change in their schools, change in their workplaces, in short opportunity for them and theirs. I know Obama’s got some history with that, but again when you think you can change all that by JUST winning the presidency then you’ve already started to divorce yourself from those people. If Obama, or anybody else for that matter, wanted to address poverty, inequality, class, etc. then they would force the issue and make the other candidates take a stand, put forth policy, and then make the winner put up or shut up. People want real talk not beatin’ around the bush sound bytes.
A lot of me thinks that Obama began to care more about his career right about the time his name started getting associated with 2008. I don’t think that he has bad intentions or doesn’t think that he can’t make significant changes, but I think he’s gotten a bit messianic, for lack of a better word. And again what we need is not career-minded politicians, but rather politicians that are willing to take an election for the team, maybe it will be ruinous to their career or their future presidential hopes, but they’ll take it on the chin because they know that they’re part of something larger that they’re helping to take shape and develop. At least then they could lose with integrity.
But then again maybe it’s our own fault, when we aren’t organized and mobilized like the right is all we’re going to get is cookie cutter politicians.
I don’t know how that happened but I just posted a comment that was in response to your last comment Doc, it just got posted as comment #4 instead of comment #10
Wow, we really weren’t ever having a conversation. You’re comparison to Clarence Thomas is just silly.
I saw Obama’s speech to the National Action Network last month (C-Span). In that speech he outlines his civil rights accomplishments and stated that if the audience could find any candidate better on civil rights they should vote for them, but Obama said that he was confident that none of the other candidates can approach his record.
Dr. Spence,it’s almost as if a candidate pronouncs the words Katrina, inequality, and poverty in the same sentence, he’s declared substantive. Words make you feel nice, but guess what?
This is the same Edwards who in the 2004 VP debate had no idea about the AIDs epidemic in the African-American community. But, that was the past. After all, Obama attacked our children?
African-Americans will forgive their white politicians for their ignorance everytime. You know why? Because they remember to say poverty and inequality in the same sentence. The sad thing is that our forgiveness is so automatic we don’t even realize we’re doing it. Edwards get a strike? Not on our watch. Maybe what hamstrings us is our desire to be courted versus our motivation to hold everyone accountable.
You discuss being hard on our candidates. It’s more than examining a web site. Can any of these candidates approach Obama’s record in supporting Affirmative Action, death penalty reform, health care expansion, education, …
More importantly are you willing to actually take some time and find out?
DLT I do not believe that you know what Obama stands for policy wise, not in comparison to Edwards, not in comparison to Clinton.
I do not believe that you have a sense of what black bloggers are saying, nor do I believe that you know where they stand as a group on Obama.
I make both of these statements because while I see you critique what “black bloggers” do, and take a critical stance against my position…you haven’t done so using anything approaching measurable observable facts. Not votes–which are public record. Not policy stances–which are public record. Not ANYTHING.
Take the “poverty”/”inequality” thing for example. If I was being disingenuous, all you’d have to do is go to the website REPLICATE my method and prove me wrong. OR you could come up with a similar method THAT CAN BE REPLICATED and say “well I did this…and came up with a different result.”
What you’ve said in effect is…”I’ve read some books. I’ve heard some speeches. I’ve read some magazines.”
Which means absolutely nothing without facts. I could say I’ve hung out with him in his crib and drank brew and that would carry the same amount of weight.
You’re right. We haven’t been having a conversation. It’s not possible to do that if only one party is bringing facts to the table. A good place for you to start would be by comparing Edwards and Obama’s record on ANY issue you care about.
Other than that you’re just sniping from sentiment.
I apologize for my criticisms of you and African-American bloggers. They were heavy handed. I’ve read and heard your work in the past, and I respect it.
This conversation started from a newspaper article referencing an Obama speech. As such, I think it is relevant that the speech be considered in a wider context. In a previous post, you asked for a reference to a speech transcript. I believe that what a candidate is willing to state publicly matters.
Media Matters has a short posting about why the WP article is misleading. Of course, they are offering opinions and information, but you might find it useful.
http://mediamatters.org/items/200705030008?f=h_latest
I think this discussion evolved from the WP article to a contention that Obama doesn’t prioritze issues of race and poverty because they aren’t explicitly stated on his web site. I think my argument was that a web site is only one of many components that can be utilized to evaluate a candidate. I can’t find anything on Obama’s web site to dispute your contention, and I can’t get you to accept alternative media to accept my argument. So, I’ll leave the argument there.
I did a search through the bills Obama and Edwards proposed and co-sponsored, along with their NAACP/ACLU ratings on civil liberties. Both of them are impressive. Obama’s NAACP/ACLU rating is slightly higher than Edwards. This is possibly due to Edwards favoring the death penalty and voting for the Iraq war.
I felt as though I might cherry pick the issues in favor of Obama. I am perfectly willing to discuss issues with you. Please pick a topic that you care about, what you would hope a presidential candidate would do, and we could go from there.
Thanks for the link to MediaMatters, which does clear things up, as well as for creating the space for conversation. In hindsight saying “Strike one for Obama” gets at what I wanted to, but in a much more aggressive way than that necessary for reasoned conversation at the outset.
I’ve probably said this somewhere here. I would write Obama checks, get people to the polls, and vote for him if he became the candidate. I would not do any of the above for Clinton.
At this stage of the game though we are comparing democratic candidates to one another rather than to the GOP candidate. On paper they are more similar than they are different…but in many ways what appear to be minor differences when compared to the GOP are major when they are in-house comparisons.
Take a look here for example. I’m willing to bet that the differences between Obama’s and Edwards rankings here would be minor (again particularly in comparison to the GOP candidates, and perhaps even in comparison to CLinton). There are some questionable conservative ratings (he votes with the Eagle Forum 33 percent of the time).
I would like at this point to cast a vote for a democratic candidate that I can agree with FULLY. Votes are important to take into account…and his speeches/pamphlets/books are not spilled milk. But for me what those things do (the votes in particular) is make him an attractive candidate if he happens to come out of the primaries. And when I hear about speeches that have him triangulating (talking about personal responsibility AND structural issues, when it is apparent to me that one doesn’t matter), combined with the fact that he has no substantive anti-poverty plan, it moves me to support Edwards.
If Candidate A has an antipoverty programs that contains jobs, health care, education, tax policy components, and Candidate B has similar policies but refers to them as their education and economic plans, do both Candidates have equivalent antipoverty credentials?
(This is a question only. I don’t have the answer)
I’m struggling with the value of speaking strictly with the terms inequality versus the underlying policy. Think of it as a response to “No Child Left Behind”.
Also, I think the triangulation around personal responsibility is in every Democratic candidates vocabulary (Edwards references it as well). I don’t even think it’s triangulation (picking the position in the middle). I think it’s more defining a social contract to justify government resources. Similar language is utilized for immigration (learn English, be productive, don’t get in jail, …).
this is an excellent question, and one that i’d answer in the negative in probably a number of circumstances outside of this one. (and i’m not answering in the positive here necessarily…)
Thank you Dr. Spence and DLT for a thoroughly stimulating and insightful exchange. In Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents, Richard Neustadt described the inherent weakness in the office of the presidency. Specifically, there is a gap between what is expected of the President and what he can deliver. The POTUS (President of the United States) has multiple constituencies compelling him in different directions. To be practicable, a policy must have three elements: proper timing, movement with the tide of history, and support or aquiescence of powerful interests. Historically, the problem of poverty and inequality has only been dealt with substantively during dire circumstances. Arthur Schlesinger Jr.’s Crisis of the Old Order recounts how slow the government was in responding to the exigencies of the Depression. Even FDR’s sweeping policy proposals were considered fairly measured by liberal theorists. However, they were probably the best that he could do at the time. And biographer Randall Woods details the political gymnastics that LBJ had to execute in order to pass social reforms. Even these policies planted the seeds of their destruction because as folks moved up the economic ladder they became more conservative. When times are hard Americans become liberal and when prosperity abounds we become conservative.
America is founded on two institurions, capitalism and democracy. Inequality is the driving force of the market and equality is the engine of democracy. The Money Men by H.W. Brands discusses how democracy and capitalism exist in an uneasy state of equiibrium. Unfortunately, G.W. Bush dropped the baton after Hurricane Katrina, a propitious, rare moment when the underbelly of our national myth was exposed. I acknowledge that by making poverty a central focus of his campaign, Edwards has shown courage to match his ambition. But in their private lives, before national attention, Obama was the one actually in the trenches with the common folk. So, in keeping with the baseball theme, I’ll have to call that a ball:)
After further review, the count is 1-0. Play Ball