IX: Obama’s Triumph of the Will: The 2008 Primaries 319is bad enough, even if the press corps does not always report it. But the cynical race politics by
Obama and his passionate followers, is toxic, not just for this campaign but for American political
life.’ (Sean Wilentz, “Hold On--’3 A.M.’ Wasn’t Racist — Obama supporters cry wolf on race
again,” New Republic online, posted March 11, 2008)
CRAIG CRAWFORD: ANTI-CLINTON MEDIA BIAS
“BORDERS ON MENTAL ILLNESS”
Another commentator who was capable of seeing through the Obama racist smokescreen was
Craig Crawford, a veteran political operative and journalist who generally knew what he was
talking about. He made the following remarks one morning on MSNBC Obamavision in response to
the moronic anti-Clinton spurious spinning by Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski:
CRAWFORD: You know, I have sat down here in Florida for the last month. And I have
watched the coverage, and I really think the evidence-free bias against the Clintons in the media
borders on mental illness. I mean, I think when Dr. Phil gets done with Britney [Spears], he
ought to go to Washington and stage an intervention at the National Press Club. I mean, we’ve
gotten into a situation where if you try to be fair to the Clintons, if you try to be objective, if
you try to say, “Well, where’s the evidence of racism in the Clinton campaign?” you’re accused
of being a naïve shill for the Clintons. I mean, I think if somebody came out today and said that
Bill Clinton — if the town drunk in Columbia [South Carolina] came out and said, “Bill Clinton
last night was poisoning the drinking water in Obama precincts,” the media would say, “Ah,
there goes Clinton again. You can’t trust him.” I really think it’s a problem. You know what?
You guys make him stronger with this bashing. This actually is what makes the Clintons
stronger.
Crawford was right in recalling that Bill Clinton’s greatest gift during the 1990s was his ability
to position himself in the center, making his opponents seem like extremists and haters. It was in
this way that Clinton was able to defeat the Gingrich budget coup attempt of 1995 and later the
impeachment coup of 1999. Would this same method finally defeat Obama?
SHELBY STEELE: OBAMA NEGLECTED TO BECOME HIMSELF
The black conservative Shelby Steele has pointed out the tremendous internal stresses and
strains to which Obama is subject as he increasingly masks his own views and professes opinions
which are calculated to appeal to large groups of white voters. Steele classes Obama as a bargainer
who survives by making deals with the white power structure, but who avoids open challenges to
oppression. This makes Obama different from types like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton, who
operate by constantly challenging the moral justifications of the white minority; these latter are seen
as far more threatening. It is not a very profound analysis, but it does offer some useful insights.
Steele writes: ‘No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama
to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining),
and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a
man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.”^170 Steele observes that Obama has
embraced what he calls a black identity: “There is a price to be paid even for fellow-traveling with a
racial identity as politicized and demanding as today’s black identity. This identity wants to take
over a greater proportion of the self than other racial identities do. It wants to have its collective
truth-its defining ideas of grievance and protest-become personal truth.... These are the identity
pressures that Barack Obama lives within. He is vulnerable to them because he has hungered for a