"Articulate"
I would like to say that Joe Biden's hairplugs seem to have made hazardous inroads into his brain, but if I did that without citing James Wolcott, I would be a two-bit plagiarist, and that is not my style.
Biden, of course, recently disparaged the incipient Barack Obama presidential campaign as a superficial media creation (which, by the way, it is) by saying: "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that’s a storybook, man."
This incident forces me to make two predictions with respect to Obama:
(1) Over the course of the presidential primary season, there will be others besides Biden who are mystically drawn to the word "articulate" as a way to describe Obama.
(2) The supposedly "out-of-the-mainstream" Jesse Jackson got more votes for president in 1988 than Barack Obama ever will.
I'd like to suggest this humble blog post as a repository for forthcoming examples of prediction (1) -- post 'em in the comments. As for prediction (2), I suppose I could start taking bets, though I admit that the odds are closer on that than they would be on a prediction that Jesse Jackson got more votes for president than Joe Biden ever will.
Technorati tags: articulate,
Biden, racist, racism, Obama, Jesse Jackson, Rainbow
Comments
I can't believe Biden was that stupid! Wait... was he loaded when he said it? Cuz that I could understand.
Anyway, as I wrote here a bit ago, the Obama hype reminds me a lot of the Clark hype in 2004. I don't see him getting past New Hampshire.
Posted by: DG | January 31, 2007 08:19 PM
Oh, here's another prediction. White folks in the blogosphere will quote from Chris Rock's famous routine about how he loves black folks, but he hates niggers.
Posted by: DG | January 31, 2007 08:27 PM
John,
What's up with you and Obama. You've been hating on him and "predicting" his demise before he started.
I get he has a slim chance, but as my Ohio comrade says, give the guy a chance.
What's your beef with him?
As you pointed out to me before, he's a former organizer. Not bad credentials. Please don't blog about his lack of experience.
Posted by: paul cooley | January 31, 2007 08:53 PM
PC: I am not hating on Obama, I am hating on Joe Biden for being a racist prick. Yes, I do assume that the Obama candidacy is going nowhere and will fizzle -- but that is not hatred, that is a fact. Unless you have other ideas about making bets on number (2).
If you want some Obama-hate from me, though, here goes. And it's not so much about hating Obama himself -- I don't hate him any more than I hate any other centrist Democratic politician, with the new exception of Joe Biden. What does irritate me more than anything else is the overinflated hopes of "progressives" in Obama, which are infused with the not-so-subtle, white gatekeeper post-liberalism that Biden has just put out in the open.
Here's what I mean: Biden is saying that Obama is the first "serious" black presidential candidate, even though Jesse Jackson was once the frontrunner in 1988 after winning the Michigan primary with 55% of the vote -- a feat that required substantial white support. And he did that by putting the issues of Black America at front-and-center and using them as a populist anchor that attracted whites. In many ways it was the high watermark of the left in electoral politics in this country, for we have never regained the glory days of the Rainbow. People like Biden are running around saying that a "serious" black candidate has to engage in the kind of "post-racial" bathos that Obama does, for the sake of being "non-threatening" to whites.
Obama, to his credit, has come out and said that Biden was being unfair to Shirley Chisholm, Jesse Jackson, and even Al Sharpton in what Biden said.
Posted by: John Lacny | January 31, 2007 09:17 PM
On prediction one, W himself and a big crew of right-wing pundits have jumped in to say, hey, they think Obama's articulate too. Sheesh. You called that'n, John.
At least we can hope that that's Biden's Macaca moment.
On prediction two, one simply notes that Hillary has been dealing out threats to her donors that they'd better not copper their bets by contributing even token amounts to anyone else's campaign. Now that's as depressing as Biden...
Posted by: Jimmy Higgins | February 2, 2007 07:45 AM