But beyond that what else can be said? I have a feeling that for many of you 1960s left vets this white folk voting for a black guy thing is huge. So huge it tends to obscure the elephant crapping in the room. .d.
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Speaking as a 60s vet, hmm. No it's not huge, but it is a pleasant surprise. I admit it. And it remains to be seen how long it will last.
My own preference in Iowa results would have been Edwards, Obama, Richardson, Dodd, Clinton.
But getting to the race part. Part of my problem is that I have to go back thirty-five, forty years to the era when it was a surprise that various cities around the country got their first black mayors. Here we had just campaigned to get local city councilman Ron Dellums elected to the House of Representative, and followed up with Warren Widner as mayor. Dellums was staunchly anti-Vietnam war and pulled in almost the whole white vote on that issue, matching a civil rights and affirmative action stands that pulled almost all the black vote. It was a black wipe out, against a very liberal white union guy, who was wishy-washy on the war. These guys (Dellums and Widner) were almost leftwing radicals compared to Obama. But Widner actually resembled Obama in one respect which is the neo-liberal angle (big elephant, see below)---which derives from their shared professional background. Widner graduated UCB Boalt and got married to a woman who a community activist in housing and urban development, etc, etc (I forget her name, Mary?). Both Widners became heavily involved in the local business communities---but for the good liberal reasons, trying to make business more responsive to social issues. Neo-liberalism with a conscience, I guess. Not exactly commies, but hey, better business with a social consciousness, than without---or so I deluded my ancient self.
The point is that I've learned myself out of some illusions and expectations about black candidates a long time ago. But I've got to say, I am very proud of Barabara Lee. She is as close to my views on things as I could ever hope to vote for in public office. She was Dellums chief of staff in the local office. She won her seat with a stunning victory in the 80% range.
Anyway over the years I figured out the obvious. (1) The African-American public here is very very liberal, (2) composes the single biggest voting bloc, (3) has a spectrum (4) that ranges on the conservative side like Obama, (5) over to the more radical side like Lee. We all agree almost all the way the down the list of what is to be done. Getting all that out of the local political establishment is a different story---especially the school systems and police departments. There is a deep rooted institutional intransigence that will not breakdown---and this establishment resistance occurs in completely integrated, multi-racial, multi-cultural, multi-ethnic systems.
It has been in following all the shifts and turns, going in circles over local problems, that finally moved me from being a very liberal-progressive integrationist type from the 60s towards an outright marxist-commie stand. Screw it. I finally saw the big elephant crapping in the room, Capitalism.
So turning to the big elephant, what's going on structurally here, that is why we are going in circles, is a reflection of a much more sobering fact of life. Capital as a socio-economic force has decided collectively to pro-actively de-invest in places like the Oakland-Berkeley-Richmond (the old east bay industrial corridor). So capital keeps us down, way down, while absurdly privilaging the outland freeway suburbs that string like beads toward Sacramento and Manteca. That's where all the money is going, into these wastelands where capital feels free of any constraint at all. Yes, and where white developers can mobilize all the capital they want to exploit cheap land, cheap labor, and be free of those nasty, urban, community groups of rainbow citizens, ready to march on city hall if they don't get plan changes they want, i.e. democracy in action. Meanwhile, the sleaze bag banking and credit industries during the last decade have `helped' kick-start local urban (previously red flagged) housing and development markets with their bogus plans that really exploit to explode, and sell the temporary illusion that we are in `recovery'.
Since Dellums is back home and took over as mayor of Oakland last year, we'll see if he can manage to deal with the elephant. I have my doubts because he needs state power to overhaul all the tax, land use, and development issues involved. And then too, Dellums is getting old fighting the good fights most of forty years, that's got to wear you down. Also the hispanic and asian communities are heavily pro-local business development talking the usual neo-liberal mantra celebrating multiculturalism for the local economy...
Which reminds me that what Obama, Edwards, and Clinton really need to face are some of our local radical to liberal public here, for purposes of de-construction. It won't happen, but it would be great to see, and good to see how they carry themselves before completely skeptical unruly audiences, where issues of race, economics, and social justice are old familiar territory.
Then, random rifting on Obama and the Elephant, reminds me very much of Warren Widner (mayor 1971-79)---a phase of Berkeley politics that is especially interesting and close to me. My ex-wife had just graduated in city planning and worked in Widner's planning department. Internally the planning dept was administered by the city manager and both followed direction from the Council and Mayor's office. There were several inter-related planning issues: the economic decline of the down town, industrial job flight, breaking down economically segregated housing demographics, and what to do about the university. The issue with the UCB is its land use, utilities, and infrastructure impact are completely out of range of any local government control, since it is a state institution. So the city tax base pays for all the impact and gets zero direct benefit from the state. Therefore the University vastly amplifies all existing economic and social injustices and in-equalities no matter what city government does or how it is composed. In other words the university acts exactly like a giant corporate pig (which is), tossing a few crumbs to locals every now again. The whole point to the rent control policies dating from the Widner era was to slow local rent hikes to milk the trapped student population, and try to keep some economic proportionality for local low income people outside the student areas. It's hard to understand the connections here, but the basic idea was (get the student vote) and keep local housing `affordable', i.e. integrated. It didn't work out in the end, but it definitely helped for awhile.
Then to sum up in traditional rhetoric. The seriously flawed liberal idea that you can work with business to help ameliorate the vast inequalities and injustices of society is shared by liberals like Widner, and Obama. Meanwhile they like the Clintons, provide the illusion of social progress towards a more just and equal society. This is precisely why and how Obama and the Clintons get such solid capital support. This is neo-liberalism's pretense of bringing `democracy' to the world. This pretense or propaganda is popular, because without it, then most positively engaged people would have to face the horrible fact that business and the economy itself is the real problem---the whole vast corporate-governmental system of capital needs a radical overhaul.
So the above goes, I hope toward answering why:
``This isn't that subtle a point! Why is it so easily lost?''
CG