We’ve Got Dreams to Remember
The thoughts that come to a person drifting in and out of a cough-syrup-induced stupor for nearly a week aren’t pretty. You start to imagine things, especially if you have talk radio or cable news on as background noise to fill the hours of post-nasal sleepiness.
This week, competing voices dissecting the Democratic primary election results seeped into my consciousness like the hot and cold sensations of VapoRub. At one point on Wednesday morning, I tried to wake up, but all I could do was flutter my eyelids while one of Lynn Cullen’s callers ranted on about the “monolithic unfairness” of black voters.
He was defending the reluctance of the white working class in Pennsylvania to vote for Barack Obama. He was also claiming to be a black businessman himself. There was just enough contempt in his voice for me to form a picture of him in my dreams.
“You should’ve seen what the black people interviewed on C-Span were saying about the former first lady the other day,” the caller said. I tried to reach for my cell phone to call Lynn’s show to offer a rebuttal, but I was paralyzed. The medicine I had taken to suppress my cough had worked too well. Then I pictured thousands of black people dialing C-Span to complain about Hillary Clinton. Inexplicably, the chorus to Otis Redding’s “I’ve Got Dreams to Remember” floated through my head.
My dreaming mind shouted what my lips couldn’t: What about President David Palmer on “24″? Surely, he must have done well enough in the Pennsylvania primary and in other states with large white working-class populations to get elected.
I felt that if I could only reach the phone to remind Lynn that it had been done before, she wouldn’t have to sound so depressed and despondent. I could see the cell phone through the flutter of my eyelids, but I couldn’t move.
“I’ve got dreams / Dreams to remember / Listen to me / I’ve got dreams / Dreams to remember.”
When I woke up, I realized that David Palmer — the principled black president played with noble rectitude by Dennis Haysbert on the early seasons of “24″ — really wasn’t in a position to leave an electoral treasure map so that others in the real world could follow. He was a work of fiction.
Still, what about those other black presidents — from Morgan Freeman’s Tom Beck in “Deep Impact” to Chris Rock’s Mays Gilliam in “Head of State”? How did they win hearts and minds in Pennsylvania?
Were they able to beat Gov. Ed Rendell’s machine in this state or did they win with the machine’s help? How did they overcome the reluctance of 18 percent of white Democrats who were brave enough to admit to pollsters that race mattered to them in Tuesday’s matchup between Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton? Only 69 percent of that cohort said they would vote for Mr. Obama against Republican John McCain if he were the party’s nominee in the general election.
Back in February, I criticized Gov. Rendell for suggesting during a meeting at the Post-Gazette that large numbers of Pennsylvanians would vote their fears based solely on race. It turns out that not only was Gov. Rendell correct in his frank assessment of the Pennsylvania electorate, but he may have low-balled the estimate of how many would do so.
I don’t believe Gov. Rendell is celebrating the reality he predicted, but he does recognize how irrational forces shape the kind of candidates who eventually win each party’s nomination for president. Ed Rendell is nothing if not a knuckle-cracking realist.
•
When I finally woke up, I thought about the long road the country still has before it.
Barack Obama has literally done everything in his power to transcend the source of racial threat to many white voters in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio. Still, he can do only so much without submitting to a full-body bleaching.
Those of us of a certain age remember a comic book series produced for Catholic schools called “A Treasure Chest of Fun and Fact.” National Public Radio recently did a story about one weekly series that ran from January to June 1964. It was the story of Gov. Tim Pettigrew, a presidential candidate nobody got to see until the last panel of the series:
“And so this man Pettigrew became the first Negro candidate for the president of the United States. He then went out across the land, this black man, to campaign for the highest office. Would he win? Well, the year was 1976. It was the 200th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.
“Could he win? Well, it would depend in part on how the boys and girls reading this comic grew up and voted. It would depend on whether they believed and, indeed, lived those words in the Declaration — All Men are Created Equal.”
I have dreams / Dreams to remember.
Tony Norman can be reached at tnorman@post-gazette.com.
Copyright ©1997 - 2008 PG Publishing Co., Inc.
What is your point? Nobody should be voting for Barack Obama for any reasons. He is part of the problem, not the solution. If you want a black person as President, Cynthia McKinney is the one for all of us. She is REAL change, and REAL hope, not illusory corporate financed Republican-lite Obama.
I prefer “I have dreams / Dreams too remember.”
That extra o makes all the difference.
I prefer B-Movie Boxcar Blues.
I’m a registered Democrat and Pennsylvanian. I wrote in Dennis Kucinich this past Tuesday. Identity politics played no role in my vote.
I’d love to have given my vote to Clinton or Obama, but I see no major difference between them. Sorry. Only a Freaky Friday mind-body-values switcheroo between Dennis and Barack or Hillary would cause me to back either of them wholeheartedly. Not that I’ll be sick over it if either of them get in, but if I’m going to exercise my right to vote, I want it to be for a true progressive, not two overrated, timid, fast food “liberals.”
Shoot me.
In the general election, I know McCain isn’t getting my vote. If I give my vote to a Democrat, it will be merely a strategic move and not w/o reservations, and if a Democrat gets in, we need to criticize the hell out of them to make sure they do right by the people instead of just halfway. I want free not “affordable” universal single-payer health care. I want out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and for Iran to be left the hell alone. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.
It makes me sick that I am reluctant to give my vote to a 3rd party candidate in the general election. But I just don’t know if I can afford to make a statement then. McCain is who I’m worried about.
Am I letting the perfect be the enemy of the good? You tell me.
iwarrior- that comment is “spot on”. And, you don’t need anyone to review your position. There is WAY too much of that here.
“When I finally woke up, I thought about the long road the country still has before it.”
Go back to sleep and dream on, you obviously can only think in black and white, maybe you dream in color.
Or better yet, stay awake and read his book, “Dreams From My Father”, and try to explain how this book “transcends the source of racial threat to many white voters in places like Pennsylvania and Ohio”.
Try. It reads like the rantings of a “bitter” black man despite having white mother who “is just like all the other white folks”.
Anyone can pretend to be something they are not to get elected, like GWB, but once in there, they can do a lot of damage.
Obama is backed by the Rockefeller Globalists, and just like Hillary and McCain, any change he is going to be bringing is not for the better.
http://www.larouchepub.com/pr/2008/080424rockefeller_obama.html
iwarrior: I’m with you to a great extent. Whoever is elected will have to have his or her feet held to the fire. My choice from this field of midgets is Obama, BUT(and this is a very big BUT) America needs to drop the preposterous and self-limiting notion that change will be elected and will come from above.
In the past few months I have heard pundits predict the end of the Democratic party and the Republican party(the Greens destroyed themselves, the Libertarians stole their name from the left, and all the lefty “vanguard” parties and righty fascist parties are so disconnected from reality that they can’t have an impact…although the neocons are also
pretty disconnected from reality…but I digress…).
I hope all the pundits are correct. Political parties have outlived their usefulness and need to be tossed on the dungheap of history at our first opportunity.
iwarrior,
Don’t fret. Giving up any bad habit you’ve had for a long time is scary - smoking, TV, Democrats, fast food, Vicodin, alcohol to name just a few. I recently switched my affiliation from Dem to Green. It was tough, but I feel better about it every day. When the Dems refused to let Kucinich debate, I lost what little voice I had left in the party. Sometimes we struggle to kick bad habits, and sometimes we realize we’ve just outgrown them.
MiMiCcS, That you could read Obama’s pre-Illinois Senatorial campaign book, “Dreams From My Father” and take away the impression of “the rantings of a “bitter” black man despite having white mother who “is just like all the other white folks”. suggests that you had a denigrating agenda moving you to read the book in the first place.
I’ve just finished the book, and found it to be the story of a young man of mixed races who kept finding that living/traveling in America and Africa, growing up in Hawaii, with secondary schooling in the northeast - wherever he went; there he was - despite the biases and mythology concocted around race. He excelled in many areas of education but still found that more was expected to offer him “equality” with white AND black peers. He wasn’t bitter, in my opinion, he was confused and irritated that the same standards didn’t apply for everyone. To call him bitter is to ignore the efforts he went to to bridge gaps and work for a better system. Bitterness is close minded and resistant to possibility, not actively engaged or interspective - characteristics that personify his writing. Bitterness does not look for common ground - Barack Obama’s search for Common Ground, is the pervasive theme of his whole book.
People are generally the same inside whatever nation they call their own; they want to be accepted and appreciated, they want their challenges to be their own - rather than those foisted on them by the fears of others, and they want to prosper and grow to their own potential and aspirations.
Barack Obama has admirable potential and aspirations. He may not be his own ideal yet, but what person is?
Politics is an arena of uneasy alliances, being backed by corporations is the ONLY way a person can even get into the arena - As long as individuals want someone else to do the work of government, rather than by community consensus (an improbable reality given the ME FIRST ideolgy of today) money will be the most likely “decider” as to who is at work. Election reform is not yet supported by the majority - so the cards are stacked by the corporations.
Barack Obama is speaking of a re-invested electorate, a more open forum of discourse, a willingness to hear divergent opinion, and a diplomacy first sort of leadership. Those precepts have been evident throughout his personal history - they would offer America a definite change to the past Presidents’ personaes… and certainly more than John McCain’s or Hillary Clinton’s personal records promise.
But to return to the point - NOTHING about Obama’s book speaks of bitterness… it is all about transcending such limits.
iwarrior,
This just in from Robert Greenwald:
It is deeply detrimental to the longterm interests of democracy when Democrats praise and support FOX News. This would be true regardless of who that Democrat is, but it’s particularly heinous when Terry McAuliffe, the former chairman of the Democratic National Committee, is singing their praises.
“Let me congratulate FOX,” McAuliffe said this past week, “because you were the first ones to call [the Pennsylvania primary] for Hillary Clinton.” McAuliffe, who is also chairing Clinton’s Presidential committee, actually echoed the FOX mantra by calling them “fair and balanced.” What is so dangerous about McAuliffe’s praise is that FOX is now using his words as a TV ad to prove just how fair and balanced they are.
Now the Dems are embracing Faux News! There’s something seriously wrong with this party! I will never go back to a party who praises a corporate news station with regular commentaries by Karl Rove. NEVER!!!!!
Attention all Dems! Your ship has been commandeered by Repugs! Abandon ship! I repeat! Abandon ship! Head for the Green hills to regroup! The party’s over!
Thanks ruthru, elmeztisogordo,sLiMsHaDy for the comments. You guys would not believe how much flak I have gotten for writing in Kucinich. I’ve been accused of betraying blacks, women, and…white people (!) by doing what I did. Then there are those who felt I “wasted” a vote.
I’ve said it before here (sorry for not being around much), I want to like Clinton and Obama, but neither of them have done much to instill enough confidence in me to support them. Whichever Dem gets in, I’m raising holy hell. If anything, as others have alluded too, this whole race for me has really been eye-opening in terms of how much work we the people need to do to instigate change. We can’t depend on a messiah, and I myself have been guilty of that sort of wishful thinking. Progress would come so much easier if we got a Nader or a Kucinich or a McKinney in the White House, but sadly (very sadly) I don’t see that happening right now. So it’s up to us to act like good editors or producers, or hell, drill sargeants, and draw Progress out of the Occupant.
Aw crap, I may vote Green anyway. If a Dem is expected to win handily in my state, that’s what I’ll do. If it’s gonna be close or a Repub is expected to win (c’mon Penns, do go for McCain if Obama gets the nod, pleeeasse…) I’ll vote for Dem to block McCain.
Wait and see. These are dangerous times.