Reprinted by permission of Ray Abernathy. Ray's website is available at: http://www.rayabernathy.com
Had a great weekend. Spent the better part of Saturday walking in the crisp sunshine in Central Park. NYC was mixing it up. In one small, shared green space an African American father played catch (baseball) with his son, two fat middle-aged white dudes tossed a frisbee and a dozen swarthy Latinos (half of them no doubt ILLEGALS) went at a sweaty game of soccer. Thousands of walkers, runners, and bikers in every shape, hue and size imaginable streamed by. An old white horse with a purple feather in his cap and purple toe-nail polish clip-clopped sprightly along, pulling a white and purple carriage, quite unaware that the political party against slaughtering horses for table meat was beginning to eat itself.
Came on home Saturday night. Took Max on a long run through Rock Creek Park Sunday morning, then watched both the Colts and the Cowboys get slammed (yeeeaaaaah!) while we fixed Coq au Vin (OK, OK, I peeled the onions and fixed the drinks). With George Bush out of the country, I went to sleep sitting upright, reading “The Essential Writing and Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.” and thinking, “Is this a great country or what?”
Then on Monday morning we were bounced back to reality by the sound of Hillary’s hand grenades thudding against the side of the White House and rolling back under our feet.
Actually, it was mid-morning before someone forwarded Tom Edsall’s Huffington Post commentary, “Bombs Away: Democratic Race Becomes War of Invective.” My head was down as I crashed a couple of speeches for the upcoming MLK birthday celebration in Memphis, wallowing in Dr. King’s poetic prose. When I looked up to check my email, out glared Tom’s jarring second graph:
The Democratic contest entered a dangerous new stage as Clinton initiated an all-out assault Sunday, directly accusing Barack Obama of failing to be consistent in his opposition to the Iraq war. Clinton also stood by at a South Carolina rally as one of her prominent campaign surrogates, Black Entertainment Television founder Robert L. Johnson, raised the issue of Obama’s past cocaine use and suggested that the Illinois Senator’s views on race are as naive as Sidney Poitier’s in the 1967 movie “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.”
As Edsall pointed out, while we were romping through the woods with Max on Sunday, Hillary was ramping up her war machine on Meet the Press, pummeling Obama for changing his position on the war in Iraq (as if her own feet aren’t firmly planted in the sands of situational shiftiness). Fair enough. Issue-based, half-truth hardball, with voters challenged to sort it all out is now the norm in American politics. But lending tacit approval to a race-based assault by a surrogate, even a black surrogate, follows a bit too closely in ruts already dug deep by Obama’s snide debate remark, Bill’s “fairy tale” jibe, and Hillary’s own ill-advised suggestion that Dr. Martin Luther King’s leadership took us only as far as the back door of the Johnson White House.
I’m a John Edwards supporter, so I should say, “A pox on all their houses.” But there’s far too much at stake here, and this kind of slicing and dicing will carve out one of three disastrous outcomes: Hillary pounds her way to the nomination over Obama’s prostrate body, with alienated black voters then taking a powder in the general election; Obama slugs his way to the nomination with his character already assassinated and older female voters so not forgiving; or, voters get tired of both frontrunners and Edwards inherits a foul wind. Either way, the GOP is enriched and/or Michael Bloomberg is emboldened.
Can we please all just back off, before we lose it all? Again? And Bro Bill and Bro Robert, can you just hold hands and walk off into the twilight for a couple of months?