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Hopeless Boomers? We Invented Hope
In a recent article on Sen. Ted Kennedy’s powerful endorsement of Barack Obama, New York Times columnist David Brooks suggests that Baby Boomers who developed their political identities in the late 1960s and early 1970s, and who have hardened over decades of political conflict, are intrinsically devoid of hope. Instead, the Camelot mystique of the…
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He’s Black and We’re Proud
It is supremely ironic that Barack Obama, the candidate who seeks to bury race as an issue in this campaign season, owes his overwhelming support among blacks to the continued power of black nationalism. For a century and a half, black nationalism has provided the main ideological challenge to the liberal, social democratic sensibilities that…
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Could an Obama Win Backfire on Blacks?
Abigail Thernstrom, the conservative commentator on race in the U.S., once called me a member of the “doom and gloom” contingent among black political scholars. So, that probably makes me overqualified to make this assertion, but here goes. An Obama presidency could seriously backfire on African Americans. It is true that should Barack Obama become…
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No Time For Smoked-Filled Rooms
Several weeks ago we were presented with the surreal specter of two iconic figures from the civil rights movement battling each other in the name of “democracy.” Julian Bond, the chairman of the NAACP, wrote a letter in early February to the head of the Democratic National Committee (DNC) demanding that the delegates “elected” by…
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Is Obama Wrong About Wright?
Senator Obama is mistaken. The problem with Reverend Jeremiah Wright, the Chicago minister who is the Obama family’s pastor and the subject of recent fierce attacks in the media, is not, as Obama has stated, that “he has a lot of the…baggage of those times,” (those times being the 1960s). The problem is also not,…
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Thug Life on the Campaign Trail
Princeton historian Sean Wilentz has leveled an odd charge against Barack Obama. He accuses the Illinois senator’s campaign of trying to hijack the Democratic presidential nomination by arguing it has a stronger claim on the nomination because Obama has more pledged delegates than Sen. Hillary Clinton and larger percentage of the popular vote. Wilentz argues…
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A Nightmare of their Own Making (Smoked-Filled Rooms II)
They’re working. The rules are working as designed (see my earlier piece, No Time for Smoke-Filled Rooms), to guarantee that in a deeply divided, complicated and dangerous primary season the party elders will have the last say in choosing the Democratic Party’s nominee for president. But the people who designed, and seem so eager to…
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End Games
The Democratic Party’s primary race has reached a dangerous stage for black people. It has come to this: Both the Obama and Clinton campaigns are apparently willing to sacrifice black citizenship rights in order to win the Democratic nomination for president. On one hand, we have Sen. Clinton’s supporters being charged with intentionally trying to…
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Sexy, Yes. Art? No.
I have been gaming longer than most gamers have been alive. In the early 1970s, I was one of a handful of electronic technicians at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center who used what was allegedly the most powerful computer complex outside of the military and intelligence communities to play geeky Star Trek strategy games during…
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Ugly To The End
After the last presidential debate both Karl Rove and Slate’s “Poll Tracker” electoral maps projected that Sen. Obama would win the presidency with 313 electoral votes if the election was held that day. This would be a massive Electoral College victory for Sen. Obama. On that same day, the Associated Press reported that perhaps as…
Black News and Black Views with a Whole Lotta Attitude
