When Oiyan Poon was president of the University of California Student Association, she learned first-hand how difficult it was to get young people active in politics. But then Barack Obama came along. “I started seeing a difference,†she says.
Around the same time, her father—who had always voted Republican—told Oiyan he was going to vote for Obama. “Not only did I have my 65-year-old father say he really liked this guy, but I also had my friends getting excited,†she says.
Like most Obama supporters, Oiyan, 32, says she thinks any candidate who can unite people as diverse as her father and her classmates can end the divisiveness of the Bush years and bring about a cultural shift at the grassroots level.
She’s also hoping the senator can dramatically change the health care system that has left many in the country, including her own family, in pain.
If you’re a registered independent in California, leaning left in this 2008 Presidential election, but feeling left out of the super-hyped Super Tuesday festivities, this post is for you. Come to the polls Tuesday because… you can vote! In 2004, Democrats changed the rules to allow independents to participate in their party’s presidential primary. That’s good news for the state’s fastest growing group of registered voters. Independents get to partake in the Clinton/Obama rumble. (But you can’t weigh in on McCain/Romney/Huckabee because the Republican party allows only their own party to vote for their candidates.)
Of course, this leaves a lot of us playing the guessing game because no one really knows which Democratic candidate you independents will support. But with the political scene charged up to an intensity I’ve never witnessed before in my short politically active life, enjoy being courted to no end.
This is how to play. First, make sure you are registered as an independent. In other words, if you checked “decline to state” on your registration form, you’re good to go— you’re officially an independent. Next, when you get to the polling station, you have to ASK for a Democratic ballot. Fail to do this and you’re automatically handed a nonpartisan ballot. Now here’s the hard part: choose the best candidate. That’s it. Make history, you independent, you.
If you haven’t yet felt the tinge of excitement and inspiration in the presidential campaign, check out this video. Have the tissues nearby.
It’s pretty damn amazing that a presidential candidate who actually has an excellent chance of winning can be this inspiring to so many people. This isn’t Mike Gravel or Ron Paul – candidates who clearly can get people passionate about ideas and idealism, but have no chance of winning.
This is a candidate who is mainstream. He has big shots on his side, like Ted Kennedy and Oprah. Even the Los Angeles Times endorsed him!
And yet, he still manages to truly inspire people.
This might be nothing new. Maybe the stories about JFK and even Reagan are true – maybe they too made people feel this way. But for us, for our generation, we have never seen this before.
Hillary Clinton’s Pres. Johnson versus MLK comments on civil-rights-era progress were seen as insensitive and wrongheaded and caused a flap about her understanding of issues of race in the country she wants to lead. The flap has died down, finally, but the remarks remain instructive heading into Super Tuesday.
Referring to voting rights legislation and desegregation, she said that although King was the poet of the moment, it took Johnson, as president, to “get it done.” But what a narrow view of events such a version of history betrays— her not thinking that without the poetry of the King speeches and the poetic and dangerous work on the streets he undertook and from which the speeches were made, there would have been no getting anything done. In fact, there were a hundred years worth of presidents brimming with “experience” who had failed to get a single bit of it done.
The New York Times yesterday, fresh off its endorsement of her candidacy, featured a long front-page story on “Clinton’s Gradual Education on Issues of Race.” It detailed her inspiring evolution from suburban Republican Goldwater Girl— the dream daughter of her racist father, Hugh Rodham, and of the privileged lily white enclave in which he made their home— to leftist campus activist and politician. It’s an amazing story of her generation— that much-discussed 60s generation, to which we owe much of the social progress we enjoy today.
Yet it is a story of the past. Yes, we are still fighting the 60s battles for expanded equality on all fronts, but now, “to get it done,” there are alternative options— and a suddenly glaring one at the top— to simply asking another “nice white person” to do right for American communities of color and people of all races across the country similarly seeking expanded opportunities and equal treatment under the law.
The Times article, in a revealing phrase, reports that “By the time Mrs. Clinton moved to Arkansas in 1974, she had acquired a number of African-American friends and colleagues.” Clinton had been living and working in DC and other east coast cities for decades and yet she had made no real black friends? Then as a forty-something governor’s wife in an Old South state she “acquires” a “number” of black friends… This is great and all, but, again, we now have options. It all casts into a different light the Obama debate remark that, while he was organizing on the impoverished Chicago south side during the Reagan years, she was a “corporate lawyer on the board of Wal-Mart.” Clinton has tread the path of an uber-Baby Boomer liberal. Always willing to help the underprivileged, but mostly from the comfortable heights of wealth and privilege. The Times quotes Maggie Williams, Clinton’s former chief of staff, to say that Clinton has always viewed civil rights within a larger portfolio of causes. “Low wages, poor health care and lack of educational opportunities… etc.”
It is Lani Guinier, the first tenured black professor at Harvard law school, Bill Clinton’s aborted nominee for Assistant Attorney General and an Obama supporter, who best sums up in the article the distinction between the two candidates— not just on race, but on the directly related issue of how they view power and service. Guinier says that Clinton is “always the talented lawyer serving her clients.” Obama, though, is the organizer “who sees the source of his power as the ability to inspire people to mobilize.” On some essential level, Obama sees the power in the people, of which he considers himself one. On some essential level, Clinton sees power as a thing owned by the elite, one that comes with a responsibility to help people who can’t help themselves. There’s no question where she sees herself in that equation.
Boomers can’t seem to understand what Obama means when he says he’s not as invested as Clinton in the battles of the sixties. I think he’s in part speaking of a mindset. Hillary has made a tremendous mental journey. She has done great work. But times have changed. We can do better. We have an opportunity to turn the page and begin a new chapter in the history of U.S. race relations and power. This is the hip-hop generation. To speak in Clinton’s terms: why elect another Johnson when we have the option to elect a King?
If Thursday night’s debate was a movie, it would be American Gangster: you’re super excited for it, everything points to carnage and death and fantastic-ness, you’re pretty sure you have a classic on your hands. You got two stars at the top of their game set to duke it out on screen. But what d’ya get instead? You get an occasionally meandering, mildly disappointing entertainment product featuring a lack of fireworks— aside from a few choice scenes, eg, man getting head blown off in the middle of a street in the movie and Hillary flailing hopelessly on her Iraq vote.
Similarly, and much to my chagrin, the debate did not start with a man being set on fire. The motley crew of celebrities in attendance—Pierce Brosnan! George Constanza! Louis Gosset, Jr.! Stevie Wonder!—certainly upped the enjoyment quotient in a way that dead people couldn’t have (probably), but it wasn’t what you’d call electrifying. We were served up a fairly congenial, wonkish debate that featured far less acrimony than was forecast. Hell, Obama even pulled out Hillary’s chair at the end.
The candidates played it safe to a fault. Moderated by the bearded wonder himself, Wolf “and they are so black†Blitzer, the debate posed the more pointed questions to Hillary. The questions referenced, among other things, her troublesome husband, her quasi-dynastic pursuit of the presidency and her vote on Iraq, the latter of which really question on the poor judgment specter that has haunted her throughout the race.
