But here’s the problem for me. I had really liked President Carter. I had a lot of respect for him, in fact. I was young and naive when he was in office, but certainly the work he had done AFTER leaving the White House was commendable. For instance, the work he and his entire family did for Habitat for Humanity has helped numerous people, including in my home town. I have experienced firsthand seeing the joy and pride the new homeowner as she looked at her house, and talked about what it meant to her. And the group of university students with whom I was working, all female, becoming more empowered, more sure of themselves, because they were helping to build someone a HOUSE, and the sense of pride and accomplishment that gave them.

The work Carter has done in Africa, helping to eradicate a horrible disease of worms that infiltrate too many areas there, doing horrible damage to the people they infest. Or his work in monitoring elections. Heck, even his recent decision to leave his church of many years because they will not ordain women.

My partner and I have visited the Carter Presidential Library in Atlanta, GA, a beautiful place in a calming and serene environment. I walked through that buildung filled with a sense of awe, seeing what he gave up, and subsequently his wife, when he left his commission as a Naval officer behind to go back to Georgia and help out the family. As I saw photographs marking historic moments, actual papers from events I had read about, or seen on tv. I was in awe as I saw his actual Nobel Peace Prize. And with pride, we have supported the Carter Peace Center for years now with monthly contributions…

(Photo by rachydachy)

But, things have been changed now. It began with some of his statements about Israel. Then President Carter inserted himself into the Primary Campaign, making some unkind remarks about my hero, “>Hillary Clinton. And now this. Being called a racist because I oppose the way by which Obama became President, but even more, because I oppose his policies. When someone calls me a racist, I gotta say (as we do down here in the South, “Them’s fightin’ words.” And so, I have written this letter to send to the Carter Center when my next payment is due:

Dear Carter Center,

Sincerely,
The Rev. Amy

What a sad day, for me personally, but also for this nation, when a former president makes such a grievous, and unfounded, charge against over half of the population. Because we have the audacity to judge the president by his CHARACTER, rather than the color of his skin, as Martin Luther King, Jr., charged us to do, we are called a heinous name. How sad, and how infuriating.

President Carter, as respectfully as I can muster after being called a racist, I would suggest it is time for you to go into retirement, and leave off sharing your political opinions. You are not doing yourself or your legacy any good, to be sure. Even more, you are not doing this nation any good. Rather, you are fanning flames that divide us, not unite us, all to provide cover for a man who, had he been properly vetted in the first place, and had the DNC followed its own rules, would never have gotten this far. Speaking for me only, I am judging Obama on the merits, not the color of his skin. I suggest you do likewise.

From the original post:

Gatewaypundit has a video from Naked Emperor News with some comments from BO back in 1995. Yeah, it’s a few years ago. But he talks about the same thing he mentioned to “Joe the Plumber.” This sounds like the real BO to me – not the sanitized stump speech version. After all, there are no white people who willingly pay taxes for AA children to go to school, are there?

Here’s the audio:

All day yesterday, Memeorandum featured many, many articles about the second video, including one at the National Review.
Read the rest ->

First, the audio from 2001:

The National Review author provided a transcript of the audio and interspersed parts of it with interesting comments. I’m excerpting a few here, but it’s worth the time to read the entire article.

There is nothing vague or ambiguous about [Obama's comments]. Nothing. 

From the top: “…The Supreme Court never entered into the issues of redistribution of wealth, and sort of more basic issues of political and economic justice in this society. And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical.”

If the second highlighted phrase had been there without the first, Obama’s defenders would have bent over backwards trying to spin the meaning of “political and economic justice.” We all know what political and economic justice means, because Barack Obama has already made it crystal clear a second earlier: It means redistribution of wealth. Not the creation of wealth and certainly not the creation of opportunity, but simply taking money from the successful and hard-working and distributing it to those whom the government decides “deserve” it. 

This redistribution of wealth, he states, “essentially is administrative and takes a lot of time.” It is an administrative task. Not suitable for the courts. More suitable for the chief executive.

Wow. “.. . redistribution of wealth. . . essentially is administrative.” Redistributing the wealth, then, is both a job for the President and is simply a matter for planning? And “not suitable for the courts” certainly suggests one would not have much chance for redress. Are you kidding?

Then he adds this:

Now that’s just garden-variety socialism, which apparently is not a big deal to may voters. So I would appeal to any American who claims to love the Constitution and to revere the Founding Fathers… I will not only appeal to you, I will beg you, as one American citizen to another, to consider this next statement with as much care as you can possibly bring to bear: “And uh, to that extent, as radical as I think people tried to characterize the Warren Court, it wasn’t that radical. It didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution — at least as it’s been interpreted, and [the] Warren Court interpreted it in the same way, that generally the Constitution is a charter of negative liberties: [it] says what the states can’t do to you, says what the federal government can’t do to you, but it doesn’t say what the federal government or the state government must do on your behalf.

To me, when Obama says “[the Warren Court] didn’t break free from the essential constraints that were placed by the Founding Fathers in the Constitution,” I get the distinct impression he means the court somehow failed in the “breaking free” part. That would mean Obama feels the constraints engineered by the Constitution should be removed or overcome somehow. This is what the NR had to say about that:

The entire purpose of the Constitution was to limit government. That limitation of powers is what has unlocked in America the vast human potential available in any population. 

Barack Obama sees that limiting of government not as a lynchpin but rather as a fatal flaw: “…One of the, I think, the tragedies of the Civil Rights movement was because the Civil Rights movement became so court-focused, uh, I think that there was a tendency to lose track of the political and community organizing and activities on the ground that are able to put together the actual coalitions of power through which you bring about redistributive change. And in some ways we still suffer from that.”

So, the Civil Rights movement, by using the courts to address questions of equality missed out on creating “coalitions of power” that would bring about “redistributive change.” The reason the Civil Rights movement used the courts is because that is what the courts are for – to address such problems in a venue everyone believes has legitimacy and the force of government behind it. Why would community organizing have done any better? How in the world would “redistributive change” have occurred outside the courts? What does he MEAN?

In addition to the author’s comments about Obama’s statements, he notes as well that this video – by Naked Emperor News – was found and reported on by an individual. NOT THE MSM. The 1995 video is also from NEN.

I, do however, blame the press for allowing an individual citizen to do the work that they employ standing armies of so-called professionals for. I know they are capable of this kind of investigative journalism: It only took them a day or two to damage Sarah Palin with wild accusations about her baby’s paternity and less time than that to destroy a man who happened to be playing ball when the Messiah decided to roll up looking for a few more votes on the way to the inevitable coronation. 

We no longer have an independent, fair, investigative press. That is abundantly clear to everyone — even the press. It is just another of the facts that they refuse to report, because it does not suit them. 

Remember this, America: The press did not break this story. A single citizen, on the Internet did.

I just did a story on the MSM, noting that it had lost all its integrity. This is just another reason to distrust those providing you “news” on tv and print and radio. At least on the ‘net you can look at multiple sources and are not limited to whatever some editor decides to give air time to.

CBSnews did give some cursory coverage to the story by reporting on a remark by John Boehner.

“As disturbing as Barack Obama’s comments about ‘redistribution of wealth’ are, what’s worse is that seven years later his rhetoric is the same,” Boehner said Monday in a statement.

“Obama still wants to ‘redistribute’ our tax dollars and ‘spread the wealth around,’ giving money to people who don’t pay taxes rather than growing our economy for everybody.”

The Obama campaign immediately pushed back, arguing that the Right is deliberately misinterpreting a narrow legal argument Obama was making about decades-old court cases.
————–
“In this seven year old interview, Senator Obama did not say that the courts should get into the business of redistributing wealth at all.

The Obama campaign is whacking away at a straw man here. I don’t think Obama was arguing the courts should redistribute wealth at all either. He plainly said that was an administrative function for the chief executive.

Of course, this audio also has other implications. By discussing the redistribution of wealth and justice within the context of the civil rights movement, Obama also makes this a racial discussion. His context is clearly about AAs and whites.

Obama has said he is all about trans-racial politics even while his past associations with the likes of Rev. Wright, Father Pfleger and other race salary-men suggest otherwise. To me, this audio is simply more of the same in that sense.

And what about the redistribution of wealth and justice? Obviously Obama feels redistribution needs to happen. That’s not even open to question for him. He also seems to think the President can accomplish such redistribution because it is an “administrative function.” And he says the Constitution, rather than define what government cannot do to citizens, should rather define what it HAS to do for citizens. That’s a very different way of approaching the fundamental outlines of how our country works.

And, the Civil Rights movement missed out by ONLY using the courts to work for justice. ONLY? What venues did the Civil Rights movement miss?

Fundamental questions for a candidate, one would think. Will anyone but the bloggers bother to ask? Given that Obama has provided so little about his beliefs (other than his strong Christian beliefs, but NOT at Trinity, no, that was a 20 year fluke) or about him personally (writings, personal information), something like this audio offers a window into what a President Obama would put on his agenda. Had he bothered to make more information available, this audio might be placed within some bigger context. But he hasn’t. So, this audio is as important as it gets.

Obama is remarkably consistent from at least 1995 to 2001 in how he views the ideas of who owes what to whom. I wonder. In the wake of these audio clips, will people try to convince us BO’s politics have changed or his attitudes? Given that he was at Trinity until last spring, I’d say the only viable thing to say is his (mis)representaitons of his politics and his positions have changed. After all, the BO campaign will do whatever they can get away with, not what is true or even passes the sniff test.

The Obama campaign has had a deliberate strategy of calling the Clinton campaign racist and the media has allowed itself to be led along. Obama himself confessed to this strategy in the Nevada debate when shown a copy of a campaign memo directing campaign workers to use race-bating to defame Hillary Clinton.

January 27, 2008:

Please, just fuck off. Bill Clinton made exactly the right point and Obama’s defenders are playing into the worst of the Right-wing racist tropes, that there is something tainted about successful black candidates who get majority black support.

January 28, 2008:

I’ve spent a good amount of time here on this blog defending HRC against bogus claims of racism, and I’ve smacked The Golden One around for engaging in his own race-baiting, trying to milk liberal white guilt for all it is worth.

There is no person, no campaign, no victory that can justify deliberate use of racial divisions. Leave it to the Republicans to immolate themselves on the pyre of racism come November.

February 2, 2008:

Then begins the long slog towards South Carolina, with the media, the blogosphere and Obama’s campaign screaming at every turn that the Clintons are racists.

March 31, 2008:

My point here is not to promote the Clintons (though I think they deserve it), but to emphasize the way in which they are demonized by their own party. They become the embodiment of the old South, the unrepentant, segregationist South, just as northern blue collar voters who challenge the party orthodoxy are labeled Archie Bunkers.

April 5, 2008:

Here is the challenge to the Democrats – how to cease treating working class whites the eternal “Other” of the party, the roadblock to fulfilling the promise of the nation, and seriously address the ways in which the party will help all Americans live their lives with dignity.

April 28, 2008:

I have seen it put cynically (hell, I have put it cynically myself) that Obama was just promising the (mostly white) comfortable class of the party that he wouldn’t insist on looking at those nasty claims of justice if they would just elect a black dude and redeem their souls.

May 2, 2008

The assault on the Clintons has no basis in policy or political philosophy. It is an attack on uppity white trash who dares to succeed in the world without assimilating into the ruling elite, and for the added insult of being adored by the nation precisely for their common connections.

May 4, 2008:

Hannah Arendt, my favorite political theorist, has been excoriated as a racist for pointing out that integration and post-racial sociality is not such a big deal when the person being integrated is already part of your socio-economic class, remains a numerical minority within your enclave, and is no threat to your social standing or economic power.

May 6, 2008:

Obama’s campaign is certainly doing pernicious race-baiting, but mostly to initimidate critics and shame wavering white voters.

May 8, 2008:

What I’m seeing is an amplified, exaggerated perversion of the lessons, biases and attitudes I encountered in my very liberal college education, things that resonate with me in strange ways, playing on the way I learned to see the world as divided into evil whites, good whites and the oppressed Others we good whites had to free from the evil whites.

May 18, 2008:

I don’t see the Hillary campaign saying a bad word about the voters, even those who vote for her opponents. I don’t see the campaign explaining away their losses because of some flaw or failing in the voters.

May 21, 2008:

Failure to create the conditions under which vast majority of the party will have no doubts that he will serve the interests of the party and be protective of those who dissent from him will leave not just Obama but the party itself in dire straits in the months to come. Riverdaughter has a brilliant post up on The Confluence. You need to go read it all beause it is good in every regard

May 23, 2008:

I’m reading the reports on the mendacious attacks the Bogger Boyz are making on Hillary by completely perverting her comments about RFK.

Rather than weigh in on the current idiocy (which is being handled very nicely by Riverdaughter & Co. over on the Confluence. If you have not read that blog, stop, go there, read and bookmark. I’ll be here when you’re done.)

May 31, 2008:

1. I am not saying in any way shape or form that Larry Johnson is lying about the existence of some video of Michelle Obama. Please. Larry would not do that. A video of some kind exists.

2. If you read his posts closely, Larry does not claim to have seen the video in question himself. I may have missed a post where he did state this, but in the posts I have read, he does not. He was very clear that he has spoken to at least two people who do not know each other, who he trusts completely, and who have attested to the existence of a video.

September 24, 2008:

When Democratic women say “The Obama camp has run a sexist, mysogynistic campaign,” we are told we’re wrong, no such thing, there was not any sexism there, except maybe some from Tweety. When Democratic women say, “No, it’s not his race, it’s his lack of commitment to the programs that matter to us,” we are told that, no, we’re all just racist bitches, and that it’s our fault if he doesn’t win.

September 16, 2008:

The ultimate shadow of Reagan is that you don’t win by defending losers, only by securing the interests of the winners. That is the dark heart beating in the chest of the Unity Democrats. They are done with the losers.

May 2, 2008:

It is the deep guilt of the liberal upper class that we know, every last miserable one of us, that our privilege is due to centuries of white supremacy and to the informal, unspoken, but pervasive advantage our skin color and behavioral patterns gives us in this society. It is our Moby Dick, the whale we pursue obsessively through political seas, frantic to have material proof that we are innocent of the crimes of our nation.

This didn’t occur to me until McCain selected Palin. I knew that Obama benefited from and encouraged the misogynistic narrative against Hillary. However, McCain’s nod to Hillary’s voters was exactly what Obama should have done but for which he is psychologically incapable. It shows a level of respect for our grief at the way Hillary was treated and it’s a tacit acknowledgment that Hillary should have been on the ticket. Riverdaughter writes:

McCain is only pandering to you wimmin. Truth: Yup. And??? You think we’re too stupid to realize this? Of course he’s pandering to us. He’s a f%*(ing politician. That’s what successful politicians do. They reach out to voting blocs and offer them something.

Why is Obama so afraid of Hillary that he wouldn’t even vet her for VP? What is so scary about this brilliant and beautiful woman who works 10X harder than him and who won the popular vote?

Much like George W. Bush, I think it’s Obama’s massive but fragile ego. Obama believes the press reports about his greatness, he drinks in the adulation from his adoring fans, and he sees himself as near-divine. Any crack to this facade threatens the whole construct; it would be the death of his ego. The faux presidential seal IS the Mission Accomplished banner. It’s no accident, of course, that the McCain campaign has skewered Obama for his narcissism, comparing him to celebrities and Charlton Heston’s Moses. Team McCain has done their homework. I have no doubt that they have dossier on Obama, not just on his friends, but on his habit of choices.

In a brilliant 12-part series on this issue, blogger Valentine Bonnaire, discusses Obama’s ego in detail. She sees his choices being made out of narcissism. A narcissist will

stop at nothing? Just to bask in the reflected glow of adoration, But really, the followers mean absolutely NOTHING to the narcissist. They are only a means to an end? And, the narcissist is consumed with “winning” except, once having “won” what they are after? It’s on to the next challenge…

Sam Copeland, writing in these pages, asks:

Why did Obama have to select a lower tier candidate – a candidate who has twice left the Presidential sweepstakes (in 1988 and 2008) in early rounds?

One answer that is often given is what we can politely term Obama’s ego. Top talent candidates such as Clinton and Clark would threaten his self-image as a one man crusader – the star of his own Saturday morning action-adventure cartoon series. A big ego can be a serious liability in making political decisions. It prevents one from seeing the world through the eyes of others, and that lack of realism and perspective-taking undoubtedly leads to political blunders.

And make no mistake, bypassing Hillary for the conventional Biden was a political blunder of Titanic proportions. First, of course, it further alienated Hillary supporters. Second, it made McCain’s choice of Sarah Palin that much more damaging to Obama. On the Left, it gives Hillary supporters the opportunity, in good conscience, to exact revenge on Obama and the DNC by actually pulling the lever for McCain. It neutralizes Obama’s insulting but effective race-baiting (”you’re a racist if you don’t for me”) narrative, allowing independents, women, and conservative Democrats a moral redoubt (I’m not voting against a black man, I’m voting for a woman). Lastly, by choosing Biden, Obama undercut his message of Change by choosing a man who has spent his entire life in Washington.

Hillary was Obama’s last chance to bring many of her supporters into the fold. The always astute Anglachel writes:

The real elephant (ahem) in the middle of the room is the unacknowledged fact that the DNC and their selected candidate abused the intelligence and trust of the party base and subjected the base’s preferred candidate to outrageous abuse month after month in the primaries. The blogosphere’s hysterical overreaction to the Palin selection reveals the fear that their hate-filled, explicitly misogynist tactics will backfire on them and that a significant enough percentage of this disaffected base will do more than sit out the election in November, but will actively cast a protest vote.

Obama’s narcissistic drive for power unleashed a politics so ugly that millions of committed progressives are seriously considering voting for his opponent. Palin is McCain’s love letter to Hillary’s supporters. Revenge is a bitch, baby.

But this movement has a twist: Obama lacks legitimacy. The continuation of this rift is not about Hillary “losing.” Clintonistas, like myself, know that losing elections and having your heart broken is the inevitable risk of politics. Anglachel writes:

With John Edwards in the news these days, I have been reflecting on the theme of “Two Americas” and have applied a twist that more accurately reflects the two Americas within the Democratic Party – those whose bigotry and biases are excused because they are of the right class and those whose flaws are inexcusable, even when the flaws do not exist.

This “class” split in the Democratic Party is much more than an economic split. As Anglachel suggests, it is evidence of a values divide. These values are not the black-and-white split of abortion. Instead, this divide is a matter of emphasis. Obama talks about access to health care, but he doesn’t offer a universal plan. Obama criticized Hillary for her Iraq War vote, but he wasn’t in the senate to vote. Obama lectures Americans to learn Spanish–an irony not missed by many– a language he doesn’t speak.

But the differences of emphasis were not themselves the deal-breaker. The deal-breaker, I believe, was about Obama’s tactics in the campaign and the Democratic Party’s complete bias and vote-rigging for their chosen candidate. Donna Brazile’s embarrassing performance at the RBC was so transparent in its bias that she became the most visible Obama shill massaging rules for her candidate, all the while lecturing us on rules. Do they really think we’re that stupid?

Clintonistas, and now PUMAs, are revolted by four major issues. This is by no means an all-inclusive list, but includes the followings:

(1) The Democratic Nomination was Stolen

garyinchapelhill writes about Obama’s lack of legitimacy resulting from a stolen nomination:

Obama’s decision to return full voting status to delegates from Michigan and Florida does not make up for the fact that the RBC stole delegates from the uncommitted voters, as well as all write in votes, AND 4 of Hillary’s delegates. Until that travesty is corrected the votes of those delegates can not be considered legitimate.

And Marc Rubin of The Denver Group considers Obama’s current flip flop on Florida and Michigan as a ploy to entice disgusted Democrats into the fold:

Florida and Michigan were one of the earliest examples of how dishonest, two faced underhanded and fraudulent Obama can be, when he claimed in speeches that he stood for “voices being heard” and “every vote must count”, and then clamped his hand over the mouths of almost 3 million voters in Florida and Michigan because he didn’t like what those voices were saying, which was a loud “go home”. And in all likelihood are still saying “go home and will continue to say it. Clinton beat him by landslide numbers in both states and this little act of political self preservation isn’t going to fool anyone. Anyone, even an Obama supporter can see it’s nothing more than another cynical political ploy to try and win back voters who were disgusted with him a long time ago because he needs them now.

(2) Obama Race-Baited the Clintons

Obama’s race speech was compared to Lincoln by his sycophants in the media. It was closer to Nixon’s infamous “Checkers” speech, a disingenuous, hateful piece of sophistry created to dove-tail with white liberal guilt. The conflation of Jeremiah Wright’s homicidal racism with Geraldine Ferraro’s simple observation was only the most glaring evidence of Obama’s tactics. Anglachel points out that Obama’s demonizing of low income whites was a basic political calculation:

working class voters are not the socio-economic slice of the “white” vote that votes Republican. They are the least likely portion of white voters to do so, which is part of what made the constant slamming of this group so infuriating during the primaries. This was the slice of the white demographic most likely to vote for Hillary, and that was the reason they were being singled out for shaming and insults.

And Alegre puts her finger on why PUMAs find Obama unacceptable:

I think I can speak for millions of Hillary’s 18 millions supporters when I say that Camp Obama stepped over a serious line when they tarred the Clintons as racists in the lead-up to the SC primary (and since). Those attacks were simply unforgivable and may be a big reason (among many!) why many of us won’t get on that unity pony of Howie’s.

(3) Obama Attacked Hillary from the Right

Attacking Hillary from the Right was not by itself a deal-breaker. But the fact that Obama went after Hillary on health care — after everything she had fought for in the 1990s — was a disgraceful appropriation of Right Wing tactics and talking points. As SusanUnPC writes:

The sad reality, of course, is that Obama has no fealty to commitments over issues. Issues are merely fodder to be used to grab what he seeks above all else: Victory…Now, every politician has to be focused on winning. But most politicians have some issues about which they genuinely care and are knowledgeable about. Obama doesn’t seem to hold any issues dear.

(4) The Democratic Party Rejects Racism, Embraces Sexism

Democratic Party leaders and Obama supporters stayed silent while egregious misogyny was leveled against Mrs. Clinton. As feminist blogger Violet Socks said to me, the silence from our “brothers” on the Left regarding this sexism has been one of the most disappointing political events in the annals of progressivism. So we must have an accounting, and a defeat. There are worse things than losing elections, and I believe we have just witnessed them during the primaries. Obama’s use of sexist stereotypes against Hillary gave cultural permission for the venom against Hillary. It was outside the realm of acceptable behavior for a Democratic politician, and must be vehemently rejected. Voting for Obama is condoning tactics which are anathema to why we are Democrats in the first place.

Lynette Long writes:

I am not Lolita. I will not crawl back into bed with a party that raped me. I will not stay in an abusive relationship because I have nowhere else to go. I will not be placated by a pat on the head or a worthless trinket. I will not spend the rest of my life waiting for tomorrow or listening to people tell me that today is better than yesterday.

Defeat is Good

Just as Barry Goldwater’s defeat by Johnson in 1964 was considered the end of the conservative movement, Obama’s victory is seen by the neo-liberals as a rejection of third-way progressivism. However, the PUMA movement is not an end but a beginning. It’s not the continuation of Bill Clinton’s moderate policies, but a movement of dedicated progressives who embraced Mrs. Clinton’s far more bold agenda, an agenda more analogues to FDR than Bill Clinton, and one which is much more progressive than Obama’s. Our nascent movement parallels the rise of the conservative movement:

All the pundits saw the size of Goldwater’s defeat. Almost none grasped the implications of the fact that the Goldwater campaign had twice as many volunteers as Johnson’s — or that while 66,000 people donated to the Kennedy and Nixon campaigns of 1960, over a million gave to Barry Goldwater in 1964. Among other things [it is an] account of how a rebellious and at first marginal political faction moved toward power reminds us of the dynamic character of politics and the dangers of static analysis

I am a Democrat because I believe in universal health care, because I despise racism, race-baiting, and sexism, and because I believe in the democratic process. On all these counts, our Party has failed us. We must rid our Party of race-baiting, sexism, and vote stealing, and return our Party to its glorious heritage of patriotism, equal opportunity, and care for the most vulnerable.

Thanks to Medusa for her help with this essay.