Cross-posted at votehope2008.org
Two great articles from very different perspectives this weekend take on the question of the "Obama tightrope" -- that delicate dance Obama is performing as the first ever truly viable non-white presidential candidate in the history of American politics. This tightrope is something that I think many activists, particularly in the progressive blogosphere, could stand to grasp better.

First, Amina Luqman writes one of the best accounts I have seen lately about Obama's dilemma in a column in the Washington Post, where she describes her own reaction to Obama's performance at the recent presidential debate on "The State of Black America." Her analysis is brutally honest, but at the same time optimistic and hopeful, and is a kind of perspective that I have found sorely lacking in the mainstream media coverage and blogosphere debates around Obama:

There has been a lot of talk in the blogosphere over the last couple of weeks about the movement and its relationship to the 2008 Presidential Primary. It was sparked by the Obama campaign's post, "Obama: What a Movement Looks Like," on two of the biggest and most active lefty political blogs, MyDD and Daily Kos. There are tons of comments, and I have read through most of them. I think this post by Jerome Armstrong sums up some of the worst of the bad thinking that is out there on the blogs with regard to this issue:

No, it's the fake self-proclaimed "movement" that exhausts me of Obama. I say fake, not because "movement for change" and "building a movement" are such vacuous slogans, but because the continual touting of having such a movement in the Obama campaign email slog is a sure-as-heck signal that there really isn' a substantive movement behind the numbers.

There was a response diary and thread posted, but it's clear to me that this is a conversation we need to keep having. Specifically, I want to address the dismissing of Obama's supporters as not "part of the movement," or the assertion that he is certainly not "a movement candidate."

Cross-posted from votehope2008.org

For too many years, those of us who live outside of small states like Iowa and New Hampshire have not had much of a say in the important process of determining the Democratic Party nominee for president.

But that's all going to change in 2008. With California's primary now set for Feb. 5, the Golden State will actually be among the first to cast votes - in vote-by-mail ballots that will hit mailboxes as soon as the first week in January.

A new independent grass-roots effort supporting Barack Obama, called Vote Hope, will be capitalizing on that fact by running a field campaign to bank 500,000 early votes for Obama in California. This represents more Democrats than voted total in the Iowa and New Hampshire primaries in 2004.

Can someone please tell me how this is not transformational?

http://my.barackobama.com/page/community /post_group/ObamaHQ/CtQQ

Barack Obama is sending boxes of field materials to hundreds of thousands of volunteers who are organizing themselves on the Internet for a neighborhood canvass in JUNE.

It's easy to ignore Rush Limbaugh. After all, everyone knows he's a racist jerk. And everyone knows his listeners are racist jerks, and they're not our people anyway so why do we have to pay attention. Why should we care? If we get mad about something he says, aren't we just giving him the attention he wants?

Most of the time, we can ignore him. But no matter how tempting it may be, we can't ignore "Barack the Magic Negro." Here's why: a web poll by a Sacramento affiliate of CBS news shows that 91% of people don't think the song is racist. And sure, it's just a stupid web poll. Of course, Rush has instructed people to go inflate the poll. But it doesn't matter. This kind of thing influences people's general opinions, particularly something as difficult as racism. In my own circle of highly educated, progressive and mostly white friends, there is not universal agreement on the racist nature of this song. And there is a strong tendency by them to just roll their eyes and ignore it.

I'm saying that as progressives, it's our job to explain why this is racist, and then to call it out. If we don't, we're being passively racist ourselves.

Bumped--Chris

The discussion Chris began on diversity in the blogosphere is an important one, and I'm happy to see it being brought up here.

While diversity as a progressive value is assumed, and the overly white and wealthy make up of the progressive blogosphere is a noted problem, there seems to be some confusion around what the right solutions are. People are struggling with this for a variety of reasons, one of the main ones being that progressives are still not comfortable confronting, dealing with or talking about issues related to race. I think exploring this issue requires some level of stepping back and looking at the bigger picture.