I can’t quite decide if this presidential race is trying to rise above the racial arguments of the past or merely exposing the ongoing mistrust among many in our country toward people of different races and creeds, which has festered long before “We the People” ever appeared on a governing document.
This is from a Democratic voter in Indiana:
From state to state, voters who support Mr. Obama’s rivals regularly cite information gleaned from e-mails that falsely claim that he is a Muslim or that he doesn’t respect the Pledge of Allegiance.
“His name scares me, his background scares me,” said Terri Knowles, a grandmother from Tippecanoe County, Ind. She voted for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton last week and said that if Mr. Obama wins the nomination, she will sit out the November election.
For anybody of sound mind, reading that has to feel exhausting. Knowles choses Clinton not because her health care proposals are more sweeping than Obama’s, or that she has questions about Obama’s leadership style, or that she wanted to pocket about $30 this summer from a gas-tax holiday. No, because Obama has a funny-sounding name, his father was a Kenyan, he was born in Hawaii, he lived for a time as a kid in Indonesia, that and nothing else pushed Knowles to Clinton.
Maybe for the sake of people like Knowles, those of us in the press should just continue to run stories about Obama’s foreign-sounding name, but wait … I just looked at Article II and the relevant amendments to the Constitution, and they say nothing about disqualifying a candidate based on how their name sounds.
The segment quoted above is from the Washington Times, which ran an article concerning how Obama will have to deal with the rumormills already full of falsehoods about his religion and patriotism. It’s here.
About the religion and patriotism issue with Obama, you can get a good read at Factcheck.org here.
And for an interesting look at how race and politics are mixing in 2008, Howard Fineman of Newsweek has a piece here.
A century and a half ago, the American Argument over personhood sparked one of the bloodiest disputes any nation has ever had with itself: our Civil War. But the enduring debate also spawned tremendous social progress and constitutional changes, not just for blacks but for women, gays, lesbians and others. The phrase “We the People” has a far broader meaning than our white male Christian Founders imagined.
But now, in the presidential campaign of 2008, the old argument engenders fresh ones. Is Obama’s campaign erasing racial consciousness, or raising it? Are voters willing to see a black man not only as an equal, but as commander in chief? If Obama wins, will we finally and forever reach the sunny uplands of tolerance? If he loses, does that mean we are hopelessly mired in kind of racist thinking that still denies full personhood to individuals for no other reason than skin color?
