Superville Review

Incredible. Stunning. Stupefying. Ralph Nader your green party candidate. Upon watching the current political news cycle from poll to poll, pundit to pundit, CNN to MSNBC to Fox a funny thing happened on the merry-go-round. Ralph Nader accused Barack Obama of talking white and not focusing on exploitation of the "ghetto." Wow on whatever level one wants to choose.

A white Presidential candidate, fringe and independent as he wants to be accusing a black Presidential candidate of a major party, who happens to be of African descent of being white is uncharted territory. It seems that Barack Obama cannot win whichever way he turns and this has played out slowly over the course of the past three months. Reverend Wright; he should not distance himself from Reverend Wright, his mentor, his crazy old uncle. But when the good Reverends dog and pony show at the National Press Club made any affiliation with Wright impossible Obama saved his candidacy and rightly distanced himself from a man he would not outright abandon six weeks prior. Some in the media wondered what it meant about Obama and not in a good way. Those same people wondered why Obama did not leave Trinity United years ago. Obama was damned if he did and damned if he didn't.

As the first African-American nominee of a major political party Obama has been credited with running a "post racial" campaign that focused on issues of broad concern and avoiding race based speak. Which isn't entirely true because his speech on race in Philadelphia was necessary and the first of it's kind for a Presidential candidate. But Obama has little choice. He doesn't visit a Mosque he's said by Minnesota's Muslim Congressman, Keith Ellison to have abandoned the Muslim community. However, if Obama goes to a Mosque the aforementioned news outlets would make it 24 hour news and that would feed the fire of internet innuendo claiming Obama to be anything, but a child of God. Some of his staffers have gone overboard, like removing head-scarf wearing Muslim women from behind the podium during one of Mr. Obama's speeches, but he is a candidate that is fighting a unique game perception that no other candidate has had to navigate. Why? Because Obama is a first of his kind for the stage he now sweeps across so charismatically.

Obama has to present himself as a man running for President of the entire United States, not, to borrow an associates line, block captain of Martin Luther King Boulevard. So here comes Mr. Nader, who has not shown himself to effectively enact any policy or tangible action in the past decade regarding issues affecting the "ghetto" he blames Obama for abandoning; and not only abandoning, but doing it in an appeal to white guilt with white ways of speaking at least figuratively if not literally. Obama's past career as a community organizer in the roughness of South Chicago must not give him enough negro points in Ralph Nader's view. But Obama's very presence on the national stage gives him more clout in any ghetto than Ralph Nader will ever be given or can ever earn. Stealing votes from Democratic nominees in the past two Presidential elections that has lead to the Republican rule of the past several years was a bald faced stake in the heart to ghetto's domestic and international. Dig that campaign strategy.

So Ralph Nader posits an old argument that black nationalists have espoused against the black middle class for several decades. A chastisement for not being "black enough." Obama or at least his surrogates have been accused, with some legitimate reasons, of allowing race to be floated in an attempt to knock Hillary Clinton out the box in Dixieland, USA. Obama has no choice but to tell the truth of race while at the same time distancing himself from the same racial hope and resentment that draws itself to him throughout the diverse communities of America. Either way Obama is damned by someone for doing or not doing a racial dance that no other candidate running for President has been made to endure. But that person should not be Ralph Nader.

Labels: 2008 Presidential Campaign, Barack Obama, Race and the 2008 Presidential Campaign, Ralph Nader