Redstate

By LibertarianHawk Posted in 2008 — Comments (0) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

Forget the "acting like he's white" comment that is sure to dominate the coverage of this Jackson/Obama kerfuffle. It's beside the point -- it's just more of the soundbite hyperbole that Jackson's become known for.

The story here is that Rev. Jackson thinks Obama has not been vocal enough about the Jena story (which, frankly, I've never even heard about until I read this story). And, moreover, Jackson blames Obama's deficit to Hillary Clinton on this and things like it.

“If I were a candidate, I’d be all over Jena,” Jackson said after an hour-long speech at Columbia’s historically black Benedict College.

“Jena is a defining moment, just like Selma was a defining moment,” said the iconic civil rights figure, who worked with Martin Luther King Jr. in the 1965 Selma civil rights movement and was with King at his 1968 assassination.

Well, Jesse, you were a candidate -- twice -- and your candidacies went nowhere. While Obama probably isn't going to win the Democratic nomination, he's making a formidable run at it.

I think there's more at play here than meets the eye. The last thing Jesse wants, regardless of how the 2008 campaign plays out, is the end of racial politics. And Barack Obama is a black man running a non-racial campaign.

Of course Jesse wants Jena to become the new Selma -- what doesn't he want to become the new Selma? It's good business for him. If there's no Selma, there's no Jesse.

And the prospect that black candidates for the presidency from here on out might try to rise above race-card-candidacies is anathema to Jesse Jackson....not because of anything substantive, but because it isolates race politicians like him.

There's little that Barack Obama and I agree on. And, frankly, I'm underwhelmed by his amateurish foreign policy pronouncements. I think he's an attractive package of nothing much -- a guy who can speak beautifully and say little.

But I'm glad that we've finally had a black Democrat who ran as something other than a "race candidate". Alan Keyes ran that way -- but, as you might imagine, he doesn't count. For Democrats, it's a different ballgame entirely.

Jesse knows that Obama isn't going to win. And now his candidacy presents more of a threat to the Jacksons and Sharptons of the world than anything else. He could well symbolize the post-racialization of Democratic presidential politics.