The right's October 'Obama drama'

Barack Obama, then a U.S. senator, spoke at a 2007 ministers' conference about the LA riots, Hurricane Katrina, and improving the lot of African-American communities all over the country. Some conservatives thought he sounded "too black" or "too angry."

By Emily Theroux

"Attacking Obama for Jeremiah Wright Is So 2008."

That was the snappy headline posted in mid-May on Keith Boykin's blog, Fighting Words.  A group of Republican strategists funded by Joe Ricketts, a conservative billionaire, planned to hire an "extremely literate" pitchman, Boykin said, "to argue that Obama misled the nation by presenting himself as a 'metrosexual, black Abe Lincoln'" when he took a stand in April in support of same-sex marriage. The kicker? Attack ads relentlessly linking the president with his controversial former pastor.

Word leaked out, however, and a Ricketts aide issued a statement announcing that the scandalous plan had been scrapped.

The Rev. Jeremiah Wright

Boykin was incensed that anyone would admit they found "literate" blacks unusual — or characterize Obama as "metrosexual." The group  wanted to "do exactly what John McCain would not let us do" in 2008, Boykin noted. "That is, they plan to lead a campaign of good old-fashioned race-baiting."

"When asked whether Wright is off-limits in the 2012 presidential campaign, Romney said he hadn't 'read the papers yet,' according to Los Angeles Times reporter Maeve Reston. Perhaps that should come as no surprise since the presumptive GOP nominee has already tried to link Obama to Wright, as he did in a radio interview with talk show host Sean Hannity in February. And though the official Wright ad campaign will never see the light of day, the racist undertone will persist through November. This is part of a dog-whistle campaign to reach out to those crazy conservatives who think Obama is a radical socialist Muslim Kenyan with no birth certificate and no right to be president."

Willard "Mitt" Romney

A fellow BET blogger, Joyce Jones, quoted GOP candidate Mitt Romney's famous last words on the matter: "I repudiate that effort. I think it’s the wrong course for a PAC or a campaign. I hope that our campaigns can respectively be about the future and about issues and about a vision for America," Romney (who said he believed nevertheless that Obama's campaign had "focused on character assassination")  told the press.

Now, Mythological Mitt has repudiated something he’d insisted five months ago was beneath his stellar standards. Before embarking on a new plan of attack designed to hit Obama hard with the GOP’s perennial backstop when the going gets rough — the race card — the Romney campaign issued a preemptive statement  denying any involvement with his henchmen’s “October surprise.”
Mitt may have delegated this new hit job to right-wing media mavens, but the scheme has Willard’s Mitts all over it. He must have been cracking all kinds of stupid, robotic jokes last night, when The Drudge Report, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity teamed up to do his dirty work, by going flat-out, race-baiting “Goddamn America!” Jeremiah WRIGHT on his opponent’s unsuspecting a$$.


Drudge: 'Curious tape' will 'ignite accusations of racism'

Matt Drudge

Yesterday afternoon,  conservative newsbreaker Matt Drudge dribbled out Twitter-hints designed to foster a feeding frenzy on the right. “Curious tape dropping tonight. NOT from MOTHERJONES. Will cause controversy, ignite accusations of racism — in both directions!” read the first Drudge clue. “Internal debate at news network about airing tape tonight, on eve of debate… MORE” came out an hour or so later. (My guess is this debate was hardly a matter of professional scruples; Moe, Larry, and Curly were more likely grappling over which bastion of journalistic integrity got first dibs on impressing the Twitterati and the international press with it the night before the first Obama/Romney debate.)

Andrew Kirell of Mediaite chipped away at the teased Drudge story, finding several edits of what he suspected to be the tape in question, as well as a 2007 blog post by Lynn Sweet of The Chicago Sun-Times that included a transcript of Obama’s speech. The video, recorded on June 5, 2007, at the Hampton University Annual Ministers’ Conference in Virginia, had been posted online for the past five years.

Then-Senator Obama spoke eloquently and without a teleprompter, using the metaphor of “a baby born with a bullet in its arm,” to a mother who had just been shot in the stomach in Compton, to discourse about despair in the African-American community — over the L.A. riots 15 years earlier, over second-rate schools, low-paying jobs, and substandard housing. He riffed about Hurricane Katrina, black prison inmates, and college students. He cited programs that would create jobs and improve transportation and health care; about investing in minority-owned businesses and ending the Iraq War.

Obama spoke with the relaxed “urban” drawl he’s been known to use when speaking to black audiences, but what of it? The longer version of the tape featured powerful, stirring oratory, not anger, and included Obama’s shout-out to the Rev. Wright, only months before the pastor’s infamous videos appeared online. Someone going for a “dangerous,” “edgy,” backbeat failed miserably by adding cheesy boom-box bass effects to the beginning and end of the tape.



Tucker '07: 'This isn't a dog-whistle. It's a dog siren.'

Tucker Carlson

“This isn’t a dog-whistle,” intoned Tucker Carlson, who claims he “broke” the tale of the recycled Obama tape yesterday on his website, The Daily Caller. “It’s a dog siren.”

"The racially charged and at times angry speech undermines Obama’s carefully-crafted image as a leader eager to build bridges between ethnic groups. For nearly 40 minutes, using an accent he almost never adopts in public, Obama describes a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America. The mostly black audience shouts in agreement. The effect is closer to an Al Sharpton rally than a conventional campaign event."

This characterization is absurd. Calling a speech delivered by a black politician to a black audience "racially charged" seems like hyperbolic fear-mongering to me — unless, of course, Carlson is expressing that kind of aggrieved mindset prevalent in people who cry "racism" whenever a black man raises his voice.

As for describing "a racist, zero-sum society, in which the white majority profits by exploiting black America," welcome to not-so-distant American history, a dismal 400-year adolescence during which our white, European ancestors "settled" an already inhabited continent by virtually annihilating one free people via exposure to Old World infectious disease epidemics, warfare, massacres, broken treaties, mass displacements, and forced assimilation. European colonizers also "imported" another free people into centuries of the cruel, inhuman forced labor that is chattel slavery. Follow that up with another century of Jim Crow segregation, disenfranchisement, grinding  poverty, horrific and random lynchings of black men and boys, and an utter lack of recourse to a legal system that permitted white people to literally get away with murder.

And then just consider all the ways in which Caucasians have historically used the power structure of their dominant culture to exploit, brutalize, disempower, intimidate, humiliate, and dehumanize African-Americans by codifying such actions into law. This systematic form of oppression and marginalization is something that so-called black “reverse racists” (generally, people who say something true that genuine racists don't want to hear) cannot possibly visit upon white "resenters."

“THE ACCENT. THE ANGER. THE ACCUSATIONS. THE SHOUT-OUT TO REV. WRIGHT, WHO IS IN THE AUDIENCE“ was emblazoned across the top of Drudge’s site when he posted “The ‘Other’ Obama Race Speech.”

Sean Hannity of Fox News

"Tape of Obama pushing class warfare surfaces on debate eve," read Hannity's preposterous headline when he posted the much-maligned video on the Fox News website last night. "STATE of the RACE" the tape trumpeted in garish, 172-point crimson type, a proprietary addition from Tucker. The mainstream media, Hannity noted, had been ignoring this blockbusting Obama bombshell "for years," yet Tucker was flogging it as "an exclusive." Tommy Christopher of Mediaite burst the wingnuts' bubble with his withering review:

"The ultimate punchline in this long comedy bit of a story, though, is that the speech Hannity says 'so-called unbiased journalists have been trying to hide for years' was actually aired by Fox News. In the ultimate act of newsturbation™, you had Sean Hannity exposing the coverup of a speech his own network aired, interviewing Tucker Carlson about a speech he had also covered in 2007."

'Other Obama Race Speech' & Barack's intrinsic 'blackness'

Newt Gingrich

Newt Gingrich’s take on Obama was already cranked up and ready to roll. (I’ve added italics to the code words pointed out by Rachel Maddow in this extraordinarily condescending, openly racist diatribe. This guy needs to retire from public life. His rhetoric is disgusting.)

"I'm assuming there's some rhythm to Barack Obama that the rest of us don't understand — whether he needs large amounts of rest, whether he needs to go play ... basketball for awhile. I don't qu-, you know, watch ESPN; I mean, I don't quite know what his rhythms are. But this is a guy who is a brilliant performer as an orator, who may well get reelected at the present date, and who, frankly, happens to be a partial, substi- , part-time, uh, president.  I mean, he really is like the substitute referees in the sense that he's not a real president. He doesn't do any of the things presidents do. He doesn't worry about any of the things presidents do. But he has the White House; he has enormous power. He'll go down in history as president —  and I suspect he's pretty contemptuous of the rest of us."

It was good old white-boy Newt who originated the term “Food Stamp President” and hatched the brilliant plot to falsely accuse Obama of removing the work requirement from welfare — the same “shiftless parasite” canard suggested by the sleazy Romney slogan “Obama isn’t working.” Obama's lazy, and sleepy, and other. For all Newt knows, this shiftless, inscrutable man could even be a zombie. He's not a real president. Everyone knows real presidents ain't got that rhythm, and they sure can't croon like Al Green.

Rachel Maddow

What do Romney’s hate-mongering surrogates think the tape reveals about Barack Obama? Surprise! Back in 2007, he was “way more black than he seems to you now,” said Rachel Maddow. The 2007  Time-Warp Obama went to black churches. He even talked black sometimes. Fancy that: He is more than a figment of Sean Hannity’s delusional imagination; he doesn’t always follow Insannity’s black-socialist-president script. He cares what happens in poor black communities still ricocheting from the effects of generations of discrimination that may never end (and he cares more about black people than he has ever been able to get away with exhibiting since he became president of all the people — even Tucker Carlson).

"This will be remembered as the day Sean Hannity, Matt Drudge, Tucker Carlson, and much of the right wing prepared to board their white resentment mothership, only to have it crash and burn," said Mediaite's Christopher.

As it turned out, the October surprise flopped badly, even on the right. A crack team of leftish bloggers and journalists helped the DNC tweet the race tape down as "lame" before it even went live. RNC chairman Reince Priebus declined to plunge right in and mix it up with Democrats.  Christopher's conservative colleague Noah Rothman pronounced it "The Obama Tape Dud" and said it only served to indict the 2008 press corps, which Rothman believes failed to adequately vet Obama.

"What do conservatives think they will accomplish in 2012 by consistently and incessantly submitting evidence which proves the press failed in their jobs in 2008? The tape in question is newsworthy. It should have been covered in 2008. But it was not and that election is behind us. Republicans would do well to focus on the issues of 2012, because the Democrats, the media and persuadable voters have moved on long ago."

Quin Hillyer of The American Spectator's Spectacle blog offered his conservative perspective: "(C)ertain allowances for edginess always have been allowed to black speakers before black audiences — a slight double standard, to be sure, but one that slavery and Jim Crow provide at least semi-reasonable excuses for, and one that is less damaging than actual policies (quotas, etc.) that enshrine discrimination into law."


The MittWit's life of desperation as the walls close in
Three months ago, Romney campaign spokesman Lenny Alcivar boasted that the Romney campaign would remain in what journalist Ben Smith dubbed "the Mittness Protection Program" by continuing to avoid vital questions about his policies or "core beliefs." Instead, Mitt would filter his utterances through conservative conspiracy websites like Drudge and  Breitbart.com, the memorial website of the late, great Andrew Breitbart, once a Drudge protege.

"When this election is over, one of the lessons that will be learned by the mainstream media is that they no longer have a toe-hold on how Americans receive their news. Never before – in a way that has taken Democrats off stride – have we seen the confluence of an aggressive online community, led by Breitbart, and an aggressive campaign team not willing to cede an inch of ground to Democrats. This combination has created a new political reality. We no longer allow the mainstream media to define the political realities in America. The rise of Breitbart, Drudge and others, combined with an aggressive Romney campaign, is a powerful tool in the arsenal of the conservative movement."

So how’s that Drudgy/Techie thing goin’ for ya, Mitt? Whoops! It’s almost debate time. Download a few more of those pre-programmed zingers, and do try to hide your desperation. It’s going to be a long, tetchy hour-and-a-half.