5 posts tagged “obama”

[...] So, however rude and annoying Obama got in his repeated insistence that he would not dislodge the earbuds from his senatorial ears, I felt the strong urge to make him comfortable, happy, and part of the party. "Tell me what kind of music you like." I said, "Maybe we have a CD you'd prefer to the one that's playing." Obama obliged, listing six or eight band names I'd never heard of. If only I could recall some of them, but all I can say is that 1. they sounded like indie rock bands and 2. they were totally unknown to me. I felt foiled.

Then I got another idea. "Let me listen to a couple of songs on your iPod, and I'll see if I have some music that I think you would like, based on what you're listening to." Reluctantly, Obama obliged, handing his earbuds over to me. At this point a surreal, only-in-your-dreams moment occurred and I realized that Obama's iPod was somehow connected to a heavy cable that trailed off into the other room, which made it awkward to manipulate. I managed to get the earbuds in and, to my great astonishment, I recognized the song that was playing. Quite improbably, it was "Race for the Prize," the first track off the Flaming Lips' CD The Soft Bulletin. I got inordinately excited, all of the frustration and anxiety that had built up over Obama's musical intransigence and my inability to please him melting away in a wash of excitement. "The Flaming Lips! We listen to that band! We have this CD!" As I disentangled myself from Obama's iPod and rushed off to put The Soft Bulletin on the CD player, my dream melted into some other scene...

[...] Barack Obama said his last purchase was "probably" "Ray," the score from the Oscar-winning movie on the life of R&B crooner Ray Charles. [...]

At first listen, the Indigo Girls don't make any sense, not for the hyper-macho world of a presidential campaign, much less a summertime rally for a superstar like Barack Obama. But his sound people are piping in the feminist folk duo's music anyway to pump up a crowd of hundreds at this small-town coffee shop on the Fourth of July. They play "Hammer and a Nail," a 1990 declaration of female empowerment and emancipation. "You've got to tend the earth," the Girls sing, "if you want a rose."

Then Obama comes out, looking lithe and dashing, with his 6-year-old daughter, Sasha, in his arms. The soundtrack starts to make sense. "I'm a sucker for girls," says the man who wants to be president. "There is nothing more difficult than me being on the phone hearing about their soccer game, hearing about what happened to them in school and knowing that I am not there in the evenings to share a lot of their life." He turns to his wife, Michelle, who is sitting nearby on a stool. "She is smarter," he says. "She is tougher." [...]

[...] "I'm old school, so generally, generally, I'm more of a jazz guy, a Miles Davis, a John Coltrane guy, more of a Marvin Gaye, Stevie Wonder kind of guy," Obama said in the interview. "But having said that, I'm current enough that on my iPod I've got a little bit of Jay-Z. I've got a little Beyonce." [...]
 

"Barack Obama gets name-dropped in hip-hop,"
Peter Hamby,
CNN,
August 17, 2007

"You've been in a room once in a while with a rock star. He walks into the world, and he takes your breath away. I'd love him to be president, quite honestly. [...]"

[...] Rock stars may hide behind all sorts of masks -- be it makeup, a thuggish image or an alter ego named Sasha -- but when they perform, the best of them give the audience the sense that it's witnessing a very real part of their personality.

There's something charmingly old school about the notion of a rock star, a larger than life character that at once seems untouchable but also like an intimate friend. The Internet can't make a rock star -- at least not yet. Sites like YouTube celebrate accessibility and the notion that everyone should be equally seen and heard. Rock stars still benefit from the quaint notion that they are more subversive, more audacious, more fearless, more sensitive than everyone else. They speak truth to power. They speak for the disenfranchised. They are poets. It doesn't matter that some of the biggest stars are akin to private corporations with all the hierarchies, for-profit motives and mainstream popularity that implies. The myth of the rock star endures. And at some point, everyone turns into a groupie.

"I felt and still feel that everybody is right, no matter what he says ... And I gave a name ... to a mathematical point where all opinions, no matter how contradictory, harmonized. I call it a chronosynclastic infundibulum. I live in one."

"In our seminar, whether we were arguing about labor or religion or politics, he would sit back like a resource person and then he would say, I hear Jane saying such and such, and Tom seems to disagree on that, but then Tom and Jane both agree on this. I don’t mean he makes all conflicts go away—that would be crazy. But his natural instinct is not dividing the baby in half—it's looking for areas of convergence. This is part of who he is really deep down, and it’s an amazing skill. It's not always the right skill: the truth doesn't always lie somewhere in the middle. But I think at this moment America is in a situation where we agree much more than we think we do. I know this from polling data—we feel divided in racial terms, religious terms, class terms, all kinds of terms, but we exaggerate how much we disagree with each other. And that's why I think he’s right for this time."

[...] "In my district, people are going with Hillary," said state Sen. Robert Ford, a Democrat from Charleston. "I am sure there will be some young blacks who will be behind Obama, but elderly blacks are going with Hillary because they love Bill and they love Hillary for standing behind him for eight years." [...]

[...] "People down here don't know him, and South Carolinians in many ways are a difficult lot," said Cole Blease Graham, a political scientist at the University of South Carolina. "They like to see their politicians up close in the flesh, shake their hand and look them in the eye. "Blacks will determine the winner in South Carolina, and if it came down to it right now, it would be Clinton because of the lack of exposure Obama has here," said Graham. "If Obama can win some attraction from whites and overwhelming support from black voters, he can beat Clinton." [...]

[...] "South Carolina is one of the most racially polarized places in the country, and black people in South Carolina have never elected a black candidate statewide," said David Bositis, senior political analyst for the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies in Washington. "There are places in the South where people don't think anybody black can be elected to anything. So when they think about the presidential election, they don't think of Obama as someone with very good prospects." [...]

Quotes from Dahleen Glanton's Chicago Tribune article "Obama's Southern support not a cinch"

[...] "He has to campaign. Like any other candidate, he will have to prove a viability, prove that he’s going to articulate the issues and do so in a way that proves that he is an authentic Democrat and not a closet Republican." [...]

Rev. Joe Darby, pastor of Morris Brown AME Church in Charleston, one of the largest black churches in the state, quoted in Aaron Gould Sheinin's The State article "Obama campaigning in S.C. today"

[...] "There are some things you can't run away from. He's going to have to raise between $US50 million ($64 million) and $US100 million, and that money's not coming from black people. So black people are going to have to engage with that reality. He gives the impression that he dances on both sides, but when he gets into the goldfish bowl of an election campaign, he will be forced to define himself more concretely." [...]

Ron Walters, the director of the African American Leadership Institute and an expert on black presidential politics, in Gary Younge's Guardian UK (via Sydney Morning Herald) column "The real deal"

"If you're a black man in America today, you're treated like a black man, every day. [...] Toni Morrison called Bill Clinton our first black president. He was very comfortable around black people, played the saxophone, went to black churches. I don't see where Hillary inherits that. She's a whole different deal."

"If blackness is not consecrated by slavery and childhood poverty, you're not black enough? That idea is nonsense. Nothing in Obama's background justifies seeing him as a white guy's black guy. He has addressed black concerns as a community organizer in Chicago and a state senator in Springfield. [...] Bill went out of his way to make black appointments, court black voters, and she was at his side when he did it. And blacks are loyal to people who they think have produced for them."

Quotes from Georgetown law professor Patricia King and her husband, civil rights activist Roger Wilkins, in Ken Bode's Indianapolis Star op-ed "Who will get blacks' votes?"

[...] Consider this: Just 40 years ago, one could make certain assumptions about the average Negro, or black American. She was probably no more than one generation removed from the South; whether a Northerner or Southerner, he had first-hand knowledge of Jim Crow, or segregation; when it came to religion, he or she was most likely Protestant. But scholars like Vernellia Randal, a law professor at the University of Dayton, point out that those assumptions have fallen in the face of urbanization, migration and integration. [...]

Afi-Odelia Scruggs' Cleveland Plain Dealer op-ed "Obama's identity crisis"

[...] "I think it could very well be generational—that people like myself, who are older and more established and have these relationships, will stay with the people that we know. Whereas younger people, who don’t have these relationships, will say that this fellow seems to be an outsider too—and so, therefore, they are attracted to him." [...]

Ex-New York State Comptroller Carl McCall, quoted in Jason Horowitz's New York Observer article "Clinton, Obama Vying for Black Power-Brokers"

Update:

[...] According to Census Bureau figures, in 2004, African-Americans cast 14 million votes nationwide. Now comes this stunner: Because African-American men not only are fewer in number but also register and vote at much lower rates, black women cast almost three of every five of these votes - 59 percent, to be precise. White women also outnumber, out-register and outvote white men, but the disparity is smaller (53 percent to 47 percent). [...]

[...] Senator Obama's allure may be perceived as more generationally prospective, whereas the appeal of Senator Clinton - the former first lady married to the man novelist Toni Morrison once called the "first black president" - is deemed more historically retrospective. "He brings a lot to our heritage and culture, especially to our youth," said Victoria Haynes, a 47-year-old Denver native who worked on the campaign of newly elected Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter Jr. "She brings a lot of strength as a woman who came from behind her husband to lead as a woman." [...]

Thomas F. Schaller's Baltimore Sun op-ed "Black women face dilemma in Democratic primary"