Beneath Barack's lovely prose...

"...another of those tricks I had learned: People were satisfied so long as your were courteous and smiled and made no sudden moves. They were more than satisfie; they were relieved such a pleasant surprise to find a well-mannered young black man who didn't seem angry all the time.''
This extract from Barack Obama's Dreams from My Father which I have just re-read, now finding things more significant than I did at the first reading when, frankly, I was simply seduced by the beautiful prose and the man's impressive eloquence.
This time round, it is a frightening story of racial anger.

I think my biggest cringe was at mention of a girl who took a job nannying for a family in Hawaii. Apparently the girl was black and the family was not. Hence, for the girl, the job was deeply degrading.
When her employers dared to love her and think of her as part of the family, apparently the insult was all the worse. Oh, my.

I don't want to, but I find myself harking on about racial anger.

Why does being black make a job more degrading than it does for a white or hispanic or Asian? Is a job not a job?


I tell ya, a man bringing these views to the Whitehouse is quite a worry.
What a bloody mess,
This is the last thing I expected when the primaries got up and running last year.

Divide and rule? No, rule and divide.

She's not going to give up until someone "puts a stake through her heart", the pundits declare.
Well, there may be a snide Republican inference in this turn of phrase, but to hell with it, in a way they are right.
Hillary is not a quitter.
She knows the game too well.
Everything is stacked against her and the anti-Clinton school has done its work well, to fill an otherwise rational voting public with associations such as "ambitious", "divisive" and "Bill will be running things".
Speak to the people echoing these sentiments and they have no further reasoning. They are just parroting what their media long has parroted to them.
All of these are bits of marketed bigotry wich are not too far removed from the sort of hatred preached by Obama's terrible Reverend Wright.
It all works very well. The public is malleable and does not think too deeply. People love to hate.

Ironically, and nicely controlled by the spin doctors, is the hate agenda of the Obamas. Not Barack, perhaps. It is hard to tell, since he speaks many words but manages artfully to say almost nothing. But Michelle Obama has had orders to keep her mouth shut - which she has been doing. Michelle Obama is the scary one with the hate agenda. She, too, goes to Reverend Wright's church of racial hatred.

Racism is not a white phenomenon. Guilt and the compulsion for political correctness, not to mention some finger-pointing from non-whites, has whites thinking it is their own sin. Not so. It comes both ways.

Now check out the Michelle Obama bios. Here's a Wikipedia extract:

Michelle graduated from Whitney Young High School in 1981[5] and went on to major in sociology and minor in African American studies at Princeton University, where she graduated cum laude with an Artium Baccalaureus in 1985.[2] As part of her requirements for graduation, she wrote a thesis entitled, "Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community."[6] She obtained her Juris Doctor degree from Harvard Law School in 1988.[7] While at Harvard, she participated in political demonstrations advocating the hiring of professors who are minorities. [8]


I find this worrying.
I am afraid that, once in a position of power, Michelle Obama will show America what "divisiveness" really is.

Policy and person

Hillary Clinton had made her first official policy speech - right here in chilly, spring-challenged New Hampshire. Oh, my, it is cold and nasty right now - one sleety snow storm soon to be followed by an even more extensive and miserable nor'easter bringing a foot or more of snow.
Wicked weather does not get in the way of the NH Primary. Hillary chose to give her policy speech at the New Hampshire Institute of Politics at Saint Anselm College in Manchester. Of course, it gained lots of serious press coverage. The highest-profile presidential aspirant is rarely short of press coverage. A fleet of journalists and cameramen is on tour with her. She is big news.

She offered a 10-point plan to reform the government but the headline the media extracted, and rightly so, was her adamant stand against people who leave their roles in political administration to become lobbyists.
She expanded on this at our meeting, saying that one of her priorities was to get te best-quality people working in the White House and to get rid of that seedy business of "no-bid contracts". Of course, she was speaking of Halliburton. She added: "Really, it's a stunning record of cronyism and corruption, incompetence and deception and it has shaken the people's faith in our government," she said.
She added that it was hard to get accurate information from the incumbent government which "stonewalls and misleads".

I was talking to one of the "I'm A Health Care Voter" people after Hillary's event and she was whining that Hillary did not answer the questions people had asked. Was this woman at the same meeting as I was? It just goes to show the way people read into things what they want. One finds it a lot in journalism. People are capabable of the most perverse misinterpretations of perfectly simple things - and they will ring and accuse you of writing quite the opposite of what you have clearly written. They are usually argumentative and negative people who operate from some stubborn mindset. This woman was of the ilk. I was gobsmacked.
Like most journalists, I am acutely aware of politicians who evade answers with artful sidetracks and I had just been marvelling at the thorough way in which Hillary Clinton had, indeed, answered the questions - including a deeply challenging question on farm subsidies. This is a crucial and complex issue. Hillary took her time extrapolating on the situation and its sensitivity, recognising small farmers as the core to the quality of life of rural America. Apparently there are 34,000 family farms in her state of New York. She suggested alternative conservation subsidies for such farms to help farmers to stay on the land "and be stewards of the environment" while allowing other countries also to grow crops.

She pulled no punches on the pro-choice issue - citing the Chinese government's enforcement of abortion and the Rumanian enforcement of a five-child policy as historic examples of the obscene folly of government control over women's bodies.
"No American wants police state interference with these personal decisions," said she.

At the end of these community events, it is traditional that the candidate presses flesh and chats informally to the people. I went to a lot of these events at the last NH Primary, but this was the first time I saw people being kept behind a rope. Hillary strolled the perimeter of the rope, rather like the Queen on walkabout. Then again, it was more the rock star scene since people were thrusting books and campaign posters at her for autographing, which she did in good cheer. I eased my way to the front and proffered a hand. As it happens, she has a lovely handshake - a warm, soft-skinned and dry hand with a grip that is neither weak nor fierce. I introduced myself and said I hoped that, when she was president, the outside world would be exposed to some less rabid Americana on ubiquitous Fox News. Clearly, it was a comment out of the ordinary and she asked me to repeat it, pulling my hand towards her as if to hear better. I repeated. Still holding my hand, she threw back her head and laughed, exclaiming "Yes! Yes!" before moving on, closely followed by the phalanx of secret service men.
Of course, it was a pretty silly comment of mine. I'm cringing about it now. Fox is not a government institution. It belongs to a yet more powerful force, Rupert Murdoch, my boss. I know Rupert's modus operandi. It is not naive. It responds to market and in the US the rabid right, especially under the Bush Administration, is a bubbling cauldron of a responsive market. For those of us not of the right, the O'Reilly/Hannity vehemence in Fox content often is hard to stomach - but we pay Fox its due for technical expertise, most particularly in coverage of major news crises when it is peerless.
I also know that Murdoch has expressed his approval for Hillary Clinton in this presidential race. And, I have no doubt, that if she or the Democrats win office, the global news station will moderate its content accordingly to meet and reflect the tenor of the country.