Barack And Bubba Break Political Bubble
May 22nd, 2008, 1:59 pm · 1 Comment · posted by Joaquin
Barack doesn’t get Bubba.
That could be the headline from the thrashings Barack Obama received in the recent West Virginia and Kentucky primaries. In those states, working-class/blue collar white Americans favored Hillary Clinton by a huge margin in the fading weeks of a Democratic presidential contest that Obama will soon wrap up.
Why would so many voters in these two states so vividly demonstrate their electoral dislike for the soon-to-be Democratic presidental nominee? One view comes from conservative columnist Kathleen Parker, who writes that rural/working-class white Americans value “full-blooded American” values and fear they are getting lost “in the remodeling” of their country.
Under the Parker definition, Obama thus comes up short given that his father was Kenyan, and besides that basic fact, there’s the matter of his exotic upbringing in Hawaii, and spending part of his childhood in Indonesia. And then there’s his name. How in the heck is a guy in Appalachia going to get a guy named Barack Obama?
And there’s more. Parker infers in a May 14 syndicated column that Obama isn’t an American patriot in the same way that, say Clinton or John McCain are, because the Democratic prez frontrunner has a deficiency in “heritage, core values and made-in-America” ideals.
Parker goes on to make the preposterous claim that Clinton’s “own DNA is cobbled with many of the same values that rural and small-town Americans cling to. She understands viscerally what Obama has to study.”
Are you kidding me? Hillary Clinton grew up in an affluent Chicago suburb, attended an elite all-women’s college, and then went on to the Yale law school. For much of her adult life she has lived in governor’s mansions, (as spouse of Bubba Clinton), expensive goverment digs, (eight years in the White House), and has generated a family income of over $100 million this decade. Hillary doesn’t even know how to pump gas or make coffee.
The Clintons, however, are great actors on the big stage, so we’ve seen the reinvention and farce of working-class Hillary during this campaign season. Hey, whatever works, right?
For Parker, Hillary fits the bill as “a full-blooded American,” while Obama, the son of a single mother, who was raised in good part by white, Kansas-bred grandparents of modest means, does not for some reason. That reason may be explained by another columnist, Gregory Rodriguez of the Los Angeles Times, who recently wrote that the Clinton-Obama rivalry has changed the way we can now talk about the demographics of presidential campaigns.
The evolution of the Obama-Clinton race, Rodriguez writes, has further exposed the fears that some working-class white Americans see and feel all around them.
“With immigration and globalization reformulating who we are as a nation, it isn’t the white elite that are threatened by the changes; rather it’s the the nearly 70 percent of white Americans who are not college educated who figure among the most insecure of Americans,” Rodriguez writes. “Many feel that their jobs are being outsourced or taken by immigrants - legal or otherwise - and that their culture is being subsumed.”
Working-class whites in Appalachia, Rodriguez writes, flocked to Clinton not because of “Anglo-Saxon racial trumphalism, but to the fear of white decline.” These voters, the columnist believes, are “seeking to carve out a niche and demanding that, at the very least, the presidency remains `theirs.’ ”
Lest righties think Rodriguez is on some sort of ethnic power trip, he ends his column by saying that in a rapidly diversifying America “we are all becoming minorities, (and) the idea that any given group has an inalienable claim on a particular political seat, appointment or office based on demographics has officially outlived its usefulness.”
Indeed it has. Being a “full-blooded American” has lots of different names and backgrounds these days. Barack may have trouble getting Bubba, but it can be said that Parker and conservatives like her have even more trouble getting the fullness and reach of a changing but still very beautiful America.
- By R.D. Cavazos, Daily Chisme contributor
May 23rd, 2008 at 9:22 am
First, let me say that the only reason that Clinton has the popularity that she currently has with Bubba is because she is running against a guy who is left of Attila the Hun. Clinton looks almost mainstream when compaired to Obama. Barack, born and raised Islamic, and then converted to some type of Christian faith that thinks the white man needs to be eradicated off the face of the earth, isn’t going to fly with Bubba. I worked for years with Bubbas and yes, there are lots of them that did not like me because I was brown, period. Over time, when Bubba realized that I was going to act like everyone else, I was fully accepted as a brown Bubba. When my neighbors realized I wasn’t going to park cars on the grass in my front yard, cut my grass on time, and not pile trash around my house, my neighbors accepted me, and didn’t care what color I was. The point to this story is that Black and Brown people move into white neighborhoods and keep living like they did in the hood back home, and that don’t fly with Bubba. Bubba thinks, and rightly so, that people ought to blend in. I might add that it is your right not to blend in, but expect Bubba to treat you as the second class citizen that you are. Obama is elite, Obama is a tad bit anti-american in his actions, and his wife is a mouthy little rich girl that flat out says she is not proud of America. This isn’t going to fly with Bubba, and it should not be flying with any straight thinking American.