At this late hour, cable’s political pundits are feeling reflective. To wit, MSNBC’s Mike Barnicle on Morning Joe earlier:
At some point we’ll look at the coverage of this campaign, what we all do for a living and we’re gonna realize because of our tendency to blog every fifteen minutes and to talk every other second about it, we have missed the extraordinary nature of this Obama story, the vindication of this country. Yesterday, I’m in a cab on the east side of Manhattan. The cab is driven by a Haitian guy, 43 been here 23 years, lives in Reading, Pennsylvania, comes to New York four days a week to drive 15 hours a day a cab, ok? And he is listening to a tape recording of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s We Shall Overcome speech. And I said, “Are you going to vote for McCain?” He starts laughing. Haitian guy. Starts laughing, lyrically, like music. We have missed the story of the meaning of this campaign, this one man all beneath the surface of what we do. We’ve missed it. We’ve touched upon it but we’ve missed it.
Also missed is the influence on white racial privilege on this race. When, per NPR, black women feel they must be especially nice to whites so as to not offend potential Obama voters, we see white privilege at work. When McCain treats Obama's comment about feeling his primary victory "vindicated" his faith in America as evidence of deficient or defective patriotism because he (McCain) can say "My country has never had to prove anything to me...,"(Chicago Tribune), we see white racial privilege at work.
Of all the missed stories of this campaign, this is the biggest: the extraordinary disadvantages Barack Obama has had to overcome to even be considered a serious candidate. Even in the last hours of the campaign, those disadvantages continue to weigh.
Posted by Ecumaniac on Mon 3 Nov 2008 at 11:02 AM
I haven't a clue what this post means. I'm sure Barnicle made some intelligible point -- he's a pretty smart guy -- but this blog post makes me guess as to what it might have been. Grade: F.
John Mecklin, editor
Miller-McCune magazine
Posted by John Mecklin on Mon 3 Nov 2008 at 01:09 PM