Obama’s Minority Dream
August 28, 2008
And Our Doubts
DENVER — There’s nothing quite like the hot air inside the arena of a political convention. Despite the frigid air conditioning, the rhetoric is so thick and duplicitous, after four days, it’s hard to know what’s true anymore.
But the truth of the Mile High Democrats in 2008 is obvious when you go back to real-life, away from the world-wide TV studio that is the Pepsi Center.
That’s when you get a sense of the achievement we are witnessing when a person of color goes to the mountain tops and becomes the presidential nominee of a major American political party.
If you’re too young to grasp the historical significance, the Democrats have underscored the legacy, scheduling Barack Obama’s acceptance speech on the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech.
When Obama accepts the nomination, it will be his time to soar. The pundits will no doubt want to hear more about his $1,000 emergency rebates for the middle class, and how or why he’ll tax greedy oil companies’ outrageous profits. But those are the quotidian details that muck up the moment’s greatness.
Obama may not have a chance to soak it all in. He’ll be too busy trying to make sure it all sticks, to assure that it’s not just a dream. And that won’t be easy.
The Bradley effect
One of the open questions between now and November is how America’s racism will find cover in other excuses to not vote for Obama: His experience? Your love of Hillary? Your distrust of his political ambition?
But the central question is: Can America embrace the first real opportunity to send a person of color to the White House? How racist will America be this election?
Norm Mineta, the former secretary of commerce under Clinton, as well as the former secretary of transportation under Bush II, said the race issue is a real one.
Mineta, one of the first and most ardent Obama supporters, mentioned the so-called “Bradley Effect,” where in 1982 Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, an African American running for governor had an 8-point lead in the polls, then lost by a 2 point margin to Republican George Deukmejian. Voters obviously lied to pollsters, saying they could vote for a black man. But in the voting booth, they just couldn’t muster the ethics to do it.
Mineta said he knows of at least one Caucasian woman, a lifelong Democrat, who admitted she’d have a hard time voting for a black man.
“And I thought, in this day and age, people are still saying that,” Mineta said.
Could Asian Americans be prone to the “Bradley Effect”?
“I think there was black/yellow conflict,” Mineta said. “But I think we’re past it. We’ve worked too closely with the Hispanic and African American communities. APIs aren’t that large, just 4 percent of the population. We have to work with others.”
Time to get off the fence
Asian Americans helped Hillary win the California primary overwhelmingly. But despite some July polls that say Asian Americans now solidly back Obama over John McCain, I was surprised by the number of Asian American women who are still wavering.
“It’s hard for me to embrace Barack,” said Lusianna Ro, 36, a Chinese American Clinton supporter.
Then came Clinton’s do-the-right-thing speech, which gave us all a taste of what could have been. But then she gave the sign to her followers of what is, “Barack Obama is my candidate. And he must be our President.”
The next day, Ro was set. “She reminded everyone of the goals and ideals of the Democratic Party, and that the Democrats need to get behind Obama,” Ro told me. “I’m not sure she convinced me he’s the right person, but he’s the only candidate at this point.”
There still may be room for the Bradley effect. But even before Hillary’s speech, some Asian American women at the convention were already coming around.
“I’m a 100 percent behind Obama,” said Yvonne Lee, a San Francisco police commisioner attending the convention.
Women’s choice is her concern since a president appoints Supreme Court justices and Roe v. Wade could be at stake in the future. Affirmative action is also a concern. “We need someone who can balance the continuing challenges we face as minorities,” said Lee, concerned for her family and friends. “McCain is not going to get us there.”
Bringing it home
The best bit of rhetoric I heard all week was in a Denver Walgreens with other weary convention goers, some of whom held Obama signs and campaign gear. As we lined up at the cash register, an African American Denverite who appeared hard on his luck walked by and observed, “What a beautiful thing — when in America have you seen this kind of love for a black man?”
The man’s statement is the one truth that remains with me after a week of rah-rah.
When has America shown the love? When Michael Jackson’s “Beat it” went gold? When Michael Jordan three-peated? Maybe in the arts, or in sports, where race isn’t questioned, but never in America in something so real, so vital as presidential politics.
Now comes the trust part. Will Asian Americans help make it all stick?
E-mail: emil@amok.com
See updates on Obama’s speech in Denver and Emil’s convention notes at
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5 Responses to “Obama’s Minority Dream”
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I just want to say how much I appreciate this article and the way it brings to light some of the challenges we face in this presidential campaign. Thanks a lot, Mr. Amok, for your candid and powerful message here.
Emil:
For a minute there, you had me worried.
Your opening salvo on “hot air” that followed the subhed about “doubt.”
But the rest of your report from Denver tells it like it is, which is to say, despite the surface whammo of this four-day television spectacle, there lurks still the gut-level racism and prejudice of far too many, including APAs like “AsianPresident,” the emergent “cogito, ergo sum,” any number of “black”-baiting posters, and our very own McCainite, awarthur.
I don’t know how many others extrapolated one line out of Obama’s “acceptance” speech tonight, but when he said the impending election is “not about me, it’s about YOU,” the electorate, that’s when lingering doubts on my part gave way to unqualified support.
It has NOTHING to do with race or creed or color, or even “ideology,” and ALL to do with issues and the realities of everyone’s life and hopes — everywhere, on this globe.
Given some of the specifics uttered tonight, realized, they would make this nation once more the United States of America that we can all love AND salute.
APAs, and the “Chinese-American” women you cite, would do well to study all the facts rather than the drivel issuing from most media before they vote.
And their vote should NOT be self-serving, as in one narrow interest, but in the interests of EVERYone else as well.
The dividers-and-conquerors, the haters and baiters, the zealots of me-me-me and the Hell with everyone else, are the outriders for those who would return the neocons and the superhawks to another term, which would likely witness the final nails in the coffins of both Constituiion and Republic.
I note Prof. Vuong is in Vietnam rediscovering roots with a gzaggle of students. Bully for them, and honor their history and their heroes.
But may I remind them that the “Han” themselves were the “victims” of the likes of Genghis or the Manchu “invaders,” just as they liken the “Chinese” in their history.
Also, the fact that they embraced the Hindi culture in reaction, should remind Viet patriots today that ANY “foreign” influence is just that, for good or evil.
In the Mainland case, the conquerors were eventually the conquered, as in culturally “assimilated,” and, with the rich and unique civilization of their own, the Vietnmese today can and should understand and recognize that “American” as well as “French,” and “Chinese” as well as “Hindi” are all part of the too often brutal and literally killing nexuses with neighbors and would-be “hegemonists,’ of this or any epoch.
For me, it is not race, creed, “color,” OR ideology that matters. It’s very simple: respect others as you demand they respect you.
With genuine mutual respect, there can be no “war,” or, at leasst, there exists the possihility of communication, negotiation, and, one hopes, the process or living and letting live, of “coexistence,” of peace, of addressing the common problems and needs of ALL humankind.
The candidacies of both Nader and McKinney,whatever the merits, are counterproductive here, especially in light of “the Bradley effect,” so, in our own little “minority” community, on line or in the voting booth, a vote for Obama IS, truly, a vote for change AND hope.
And a vote for McCain nothing less than perverse to our joined humzanity.
Frank Eng
P.S.: And did your jaw drop also with the litany and lineup of retired admirals and generals? Even our “warriors” have had “ENOUGH!: Of all the Bushitting and sacking of the national treasury, not fortetting the million-plus civilian lives lost and the multimillions enduring indignities I would not even wish on the perpetrators. Well, maybe a long prison sentence.
Forgive me, for I continue to sin . . .
But, I am constrained, nay, inspired, to alert one and all to today’s Info Clearing House piece by James Petras, wherein he addresses the “case” against al-Qaeda.
None of it, to me at least, is “new.”
But, guys, note well that in his opening ‘graph, Prof. Petras, authority on “pan-Americana,” drops the double-bomb of the “facts” of the “Georgian” invasion by the Russkis, AND, hear! hear!, an assertion of the ongoing and ceaseless “propaganda” war against China.
Which “war,” it seems to me, has been a constant in all that Olympics uproar, whether about THE “torch” or underaged gymnasts or digitalized effects, and the bland assujmption that Chinese added lead to toys and “poisoned” pet feed and threaten to bankrupt “us,” as in the U.S. of A.
The facts, of course, are that Georgia, under OUR tutelage, “invaded” and assaulted South Ossetia, and that Bush and clmpany are the ones who turned a blind eye to the inspection of imports and that ehey care not about the treasury or solvency, only about their ill-gotten gains AND their preening and strutting and self-anointing “patriotism” that kills and maims and destroys at home as well as abroad.
And, no, Christian, I am not “defending” the PRC, whose performance these days ARE rather eyebrow-raising, but, alas!, in the wrong direction for “us,” as in Sichuan and/or the Olympics themselves.
I am simply trying to point out the obvious fact that our un”reined,” well, please tell me, WHO gives them orders?, CIA are, likely, the perpetrators, infiltrators, manipukatirs of much, most?, if not all the geopolitical mischief abroad on this globe todsy.
But they are and have been hoist on their own petard of hubris and idiocy AND juvey practice of games at play that kill and maim and destroy.
Their efforts have destroyed a sovereign state, such as it was, Iraq; proposes to ditto in Iran; promises to repeat the historic, over the millennia, failures in Afghanistan, the failure to begin to understand, much less come to grips with, another people and another culture.
In the other “Georgia,” we have strengthened Putin’s hand, just as we have made Ahmadinejad stronger.
In Pakistan, we bid well to open the Pandora’s box of “terrorist” access to nuclear weaponry.
And no amount of chauvinist rationalization OR popinjay saber-rattling will change things.
Only a careful and cautious assay, by real experts in the field and not the demagogue apologists for idiot adventurism can hope to do the job.
The world is diverse, polyglot to some, and it is changing, as Prof. Petras has long proclaimed about the Americas, zand we have NOT even begun to keep up with said changes, much less understand them before proceeding to undermine ourselves.
Hugo Chavez is not our enemy. Dick Cheney and his gazng are. Oh, did I forget to mention the Dubyous one?
Frank Eng
P.S.: Obama proposes “independence” from Mideast “oil” within 10 years. I hope the Secret Service vets his protectors very very carefully.
Most voters fail so far to carefully analyze Obama, other than from racial viewpoints, as a person who possibly may have psychological defects.
He is undoubtedly brilliant, in rhetorics and in intellectual capacity, with very few rivals in recent times in America.
Yet his very unusual upbringing, being half-black, surely left deep marks on his psyche, regardless how hard he tries to hide inside.
He became a man who knows how to hide his real feelings and very eager, able to attract goodwills from others near him. Yet does he have enough guts and self-assurance to face real crucial moments ?
Michelle Obama certainly does have.
Her influence became the most pre-dominant in crucial decision-making.
If Obama should win the White House, Michelle’s influence will certainly be far greater than Hillary ever was on Bill.
And how both of them think inside their minds and how will they eventually execute their duties will be anybody’s guess.
I am sure there are racist aspects for some voters not to vote for Obama, but the same is true for those that wont vote for McCain because he is the old, white guy in the race. Everyone talks about the white women boosting McCain over Obama based on race, but no one mentions the minority women voting for Obama based on his color either. They say it is because he is a brilliant speaker and an inspiration, yet, they really just want to vote for the black candidate. The whole argument is stupid. Basically your article says that racism alone is the real reason some white people wont vote for Obama and use other reasons, such as being a Hillary supporter or Obama’s experience as the hook. That is painting a ridiculously incorrect picture from your bias standpoint and passing it as possible truth. Some people, some being white, just dont buy Obama’s media fodder. He shouldnt have been the candidate simply because of the delegates. He didnt pull the popular vote to begin with…and he is just a little to good to be true. Many people question his lack of experience and judgement and background and they have EVERY right to do so without being labeled as racist. He is running for president, not Jr. Senator anymore. This country is so upside down with labeling everything racist that real discussions and questions can never be put forth. Apparently is ok to be anything but white in this country…there is no real unity. It is apparently two countries in the US-minority US and then there is white US, but white people for the most part are not the ones pushing the racism…you can see that from the election polls. Obama would not be were he is without the delegates from the “whitest” populated states in the country…funny how people forget that. People also brush aside that 60%-90% of black, hispanic and asian populations are voting for Obama simply because he is black, but say it is because he stands for change…gimme a break.