Barack Obama and the Jim Crow Media

by Ishmael Reed

  To respond to the Davis ads, MSNBC ran Joe Mitchell, a black regular and former Cheney speechwriter, all day. He was one of those who predictably discounted the racist features of the ad. I’m wondering where the MSNBC and CNN producers get these far-right black people. Does Karl Rove have a secret Maryland laboratory where if one could hurdle a barbed wired fence, one would find a windowless building where inside these black right-wingers are being created in tubes, ready for use by the networks as opinion stand-ins?

  Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised that Congressman Harold Ford defended McCain’s camp from charges of racism. He’s the head of Clinton’s post-race Democratic Leadership Council, an outfit that was formed to stop Jesse Jackson. The Democratic Leadership Council holds that whatever problems black Americans encounter are a result of their personal behavior. I think that my personal behavior is okay, yet when I show up at an exercise track in a white neighborhood, I get stalked regularly by the Berkeley police. (Progressive Berkeley is now the whitest tract in Contra Costa County.) It’s a tract owned by the university where I’m a faculty member. What do the Upper West Side progressives say about class being the basic “contradiction” of the United States? To the police, blacks belong to the same class.

  I’m sure that Congressman Harold Ford was aware that McCain meant to spring one of these skanky ads from the beginning of the campaign, the ad that exposed the other McCain, not the beatific-faced martyr laying on a prisoner-of-war cot, but the man who makes sick jokes about bombing Iran, finds humor in rape, and offers his wife as a contestant in a biker’s beauty contest in which nearly nude women do awful things with bananas while gyrating their buttocks, which makes you wonder why some of the Clinton feminists are threatening to vote for the man or assent to his election by staying home? The Zogby poll says that Obama is losing the votes of younger white women. Maybe you got to treat them rough. In order to woo this faction, maybe Obama should invite Mrs. Clinton to join him in an Apache dance.

  I’m sure that Ford knows that McCain’s first hire was Terry Nelson, a former Bush-Cheney campaign operative, who gets to exhibit his weird fantasies before the public and get paid for it. McCain fired him in July of 2007 for “mismanagement of operations and excessive spending.” Nelson was the man who designed the ad connecting Ford to a blonde Playboy girl. The notorious bimbo ad for which Rev. Jesse Jackson got him fired from Walmart. Thank god for Jesse Jackson. Maureen Dowd sounds silly when she sums up Rev. Jackson’s career as that of exploiting “white guilt,” on the basis of comments by Shelby Steele who gets paid by the far right for his recycling of the same two or three ideas: that blacks are prone to “victimization,” and that they exploit white guilt, which he repeats endlessly like a windup toy. His ideal is an African American who allows injustices to happen to them without protest less they be accused of “victimization,” a word that rich publishers insist be used in scores of Op-Eds that blame black men for all social problems so as to deflect attention from the excesses of the taxpayers’ subsidized “Free Market” system. In the nineteenth century, Steele’s ideal African American was known as “The Contented Slave.” Like John McWhorter, who told a C-Span audience that whatever complaints blacks lodge about their treatment in American society stem from their “insecurity,” Steele even accepts money from billionaire eugenics quacks.

  If his associating Obama with two hot blondes were not enough, McCain’s bottom feeders followed this one up with one of Obama grinning after the fading image of a vulnerable white man and a child, an ad that was supposed to have been based upon the form used by the show America’s Most Wanted. They were reaching all the way back to the Middle Ages with that one. According to legend, St. Nick’s assistant Zwarte Piet (Black Peter) stuffs white children into sacks and transports them across the border from the Netherlands into Spain.

  They also did an ad in which Obama was linked to a movie made in 1956, starring Charlton Heston.

  If I were to cast Obama in a movie, I would have him fighting through a crowd of flesh-eating zombies and the lead zombie would be labeled “the media.”

  How did I feel about the ads? Some years ago, a clique of white students tried to needle me by writing racially offensive stories. I told them that they could write all of the racist material that they desired as long as they made it fresh and original. That ended their efforts. The ringleader finally came to my office and confessed that I reminded him of his father.

  Boogiemen

  How Lee Atwater Perfected the GOP’s Appeal to Racism7

  (The founder of the dirty tactics that were used by Bush One in the infamous Willie Horton campaign was the late Lee Atwater. In 2008, filmmaker Stefan Forbes approached me to appear in a film about Atwater.)

  O

  ne of the founders of the neo-Confederate organization called the League of the South, which will probably renew its call for secession of the southern states if Barack Obama wins, was the late Grady McWhiney. In his book, Cracker Culture, Celtic Ways of the Old (University of Alabama, 1988), he traced “cracker” to the Gaelic word craic—still used in Ireland and anglicized in spelling to “crack”—and said it meant “entertaining conversation.” (According to The New York Times, folk etymology had had it that cracker came from cracking or pounding corn, or using whips to drive cattle.) He was quoted in the Irish Literary Supplement.

  Celts and Southerners, in Dr. McWhiney’s view, are pastoral groups with a taste for gambling, drinking, “raucous music,” dancing, hunting, fishing and horse and dog racing. They are lazier than the English and Northerners and cling to an easily offended sense of honor, naturally linked to “a propensity to violence.”… He resigned from the League of The South complaining that it had been taken over by “the dirty fingernail crowd.”

  I learned first hand about how the media buckled under when self-described crackers seized the Republican Party. The kind of people who even use hot sauce on ice cream. Who, like South Carolinian Lee Atwater, love black culture, especially the “raucous” music Rock and Roll, but have issues with its creators. (In this tradition, check out Sarah Palin’s hands-in-the-air moves on the October 25, 2008 Saturday Night Live.)

  During the administration of Bush One, I was invited to do commentaries on National Public Radio’s All Things Considered. After the infamous Willie Horton ad ran, an ad that criticized a Massachusetts program that led to the furlough of a black rapist and murderer, Willie Horton, and an ad that some contend caused the defeat of Democratic nominee, Michael Dukakis, I wrote a commentary about how the ad would backfire on Bush One and on Lee Atwater. The commentary was rejected and that was the end of my career as a commentator on NPR. Atwater also employed tactics that were used earlier by Richard Nixon, one of his admirers, and are being used in the current campaign by Senator McCain. Painting one’s opponent as unpatriotic (a socialist, even) and packaging his wealthy clients as ordinary Joes, like Bush One pretending to enjoy pork rinds and cowboy boots. Atwater’s playing of the media is also a current strategy.

  A number of news entertainers have repeated the McCain charge that the media are in the tank for Obama. Two academic studies and one by LexisNexis have disputed the media’s supposed love of Obama. I watched three hours of Morning Joe on October 20, 2008. Much of the time was spent analyzing General Colin Powell’s endorsement of Barack Obama and debating whether it was given because both were black.

  Pat Buchanan, member of the media that’s so cozy with Barack Obama, is on MSNBC all day championing the cause of Senator McCain. During this show he joined Tucker Carlson, Howard Kurtz, and others who believe that the media love Obama. An Obama representative was riddled with questions, while Rick Davis, McCain’s man and Atwater impersonator, wasn’t questioned at all. The male commentators expressed their having the hots for hot Sarah Palin without mentioning Troopergate. Even Lawrence O’Donnell was panting about the vice-presidential candidate’s measurements.

  William Ayers of the 1960s Weathermen was brought up without reference to the sup
port for projects on which Ayers and Obama worked from the Annenberg family, a Republican family that supports McCain. None of the media has followed up on Obama’s listing of Republicans and conservatives who served on the same board as Ayers and Obama. On October 24, 2008, Joe Scarborough and Mika Brzezinski chided The New York Times for suggesting that there were hints of racism in John McCain’s campaign. I suppose they missed the ad coupling Barack Obama with Paris Hilton and Rudolph Giuliani’s playing of the Willie Horton card.

  Here’s the script of a Giuliani’s Robocall:

  Hi, this is Rudy Giuliani, and I’m calling for John McCain and the Republican National Committee because you need to know that Barack Obama opposes mandatory prison sentences for sex offenders, drug dealers, and murderers. It’s true, I read Obama’s words myself. And recently, Congressional liberals introduced a bill to eliminate mandatory prison sentences for violent criminals—trying to give liberal judges the power to decide whether criminals are sent to jail or set free. With priorities like these, we just can’t trust the inexperience and judgment of Barack Obama and his liberal allies.

  (With this appeal, Giuliani was up to his old tricks as the racial divider, an appeal he would later use in the 2009 mayoral race in which he supported Mayor Bloomberg against a black candidate and an appeal for which he was chided by Times columnist, Bob Herbert. The media emboldened Giuliani by supporting the myth that the administration of black mayor David Dinkins was a failure during which crime was permitted to flourish. A belated revisionist assessment of Dinkins appeared in The New York Times. Also, ignoring the criticisms of the mayor’s actions on 9/11 by firemen and those who lost loved ones during the attack, the corporate media crowned Giuliani, whose support among New Yorkers was forty percent prior to the catastrophe, “mayor of the world.”)

  Walter Isaacson, appearing on this typical all-white cable panel adjudicating what’s racist and what’s not, agreed with Mika and Joe about the Times charge against McCain.

  This is the same Walter Isaacson who traveled to the headquarters of David Horowitz, an ideological thug, and begged forgiveness after Jack White called Horowitz a racist. Mika Brzezinski chimed in that it’s hard to run against an African-American candidate, which probably explains Governor Tom Bradley and Senators Harvey Gantt and Harold Ford.

  The fact that we hear more about Rev. Wright than the preacher who embraces John McCain, Rev. Hagee, is an example of how the right has intimidated the media. For the same reason, we hear more about Bill Ayers than about Sarah Palin’s ties to an Alaska outfit that advocates secession, the Alaska Independence Party (AIP) whose founder, Joe Vogler, made comments that in comparison make those fulminations of Rev. Wright, a former Marine, seem tame. Rosa Brooks of The Los Angeles Times (September 4, 2008) writes of Sarah Palin’s palling around with secessionists:

  Over the years, Palin has actively courted the Alaska Independence Party, or AIP, an organization that supports Alaskan secession from the U.S. To be clear, we’re not necessarily talking about friendly secession either: As the AIP’s founder, Joe Vogler, told an interviewer in 1991: “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government. … And I won’t be buried under their damn flag.”

  The Robocall being used by McCain’s campaign was one of Atwater’s tools. Slyly disparaging your candidate by asking a series of leading questions. When McCain’s Robocalls imply that Obama and Ayers planned the bombing of the Pentagon, some of the recipients of these calls are so ignorant that they probably think of the 9/11 attack and not the 60s Weathermen activities that occurred when Obama was eight years old.

  Predictably in the final weeks, code terms like “Welfare” and “Socialism” are being bellowed by McCain and Palin. These are the standard Atwater tricks. Slithering beneath McCain’s speeches is the idea that Obama is going to take the hard earnings of people like tax dodger Joe the Plumber, and give it to lazy black people who, as whites have been told by the media for decades, receive all of the Welfare, when it would take a couple of hundred years for blacks to attain the kind of subsidies and government support that whites have received. If one refers to these appeals as racist, the little Goebbelses surrounding McCain’s campaign would plead innocence, another leaf from the Atwater handbook. Only Rick Davis has expanded the technique by accusing the accusers of racism.

  Among Atwater’s clients was George Bush One. So powerful is the Bush family, two of whose presidential campaigns were managed by Lee Atwater, that they were able to crush the promotion of Kitty Kelley’s devastating portrait of the Bushes, The Family, for which she received Pen Oakland’s Censorship Award.

  The Bush family has even been able to wuss Hollywood. In Oliver Stone’s W, George W. Bush is portrayed as a clownish loveable and clumsy dope and reformed party boy who was misled by incompetent and sinister advisors into believing that Iraq harbored weapons of mass destruction, not someone who was bent on invading the country from the beginning of his presidency, WMDs or no WMDs.

  Bush One is portrayed as a wise leader, a Solomon, despite his connection to the Iran-Contra scandal, his support of Central American death squads, the Willie Horton campaign and his invasion of Panama that cost three thousand Panamanian lives. Nothing is said in W about the slaughter in the desert of thousands of retreating Iraq soldiers on “The Highway of Death.” Lee Atwater is barely identified in this film. In his attempt to be objective, Stone chickened out.

  Stefan Forbes, a young filmmaker with little money used a small HD camera, the HYX-200, edited his film, Boogie Man, The Lee Atwater Story, on a Macbook Pro laptop, the kind of brilliant use of technology that will lead to the decline of Hollywood in the same way that cyberspace is undercutting the flaccid Jim Crow corporate media where Joe Barbies and Jane Bimbos are awarded the status of journalists, and they have the temerity to ridicule the vacuity of Sarah Palin. Filmmaker Stefan Forbes, an outsider, has done what corporate Hollywood has failed to do with his Boogie Man, The Lee Atwater Story.

  Forbes’s is the most courageous film about the use of Atwater’s tactics by the Republican Party and his beyond-the-grave influence on the McCain campaign, the kind of campaign that Joseph Goebbels used against Germany’s Others.

  Last year a bubbling, bouncy young Stefan Forbes asked whether I would be interviewed for a documentary on Lee Atwater, the Republican idea man who raised the dirty tricks strategy to an art form. Forbes and his producer came out to the house and asked me a series of on-camera questions about Atwater, specifically his use of the fear of race mixing, the old strategy that ex-Confederate candidates for office used to stir up fears about blacks being elected to office, while these officers were doing some heavy race mixing with African women prisoners. I also gave my opinion about Atwater’s exploitation of anxieties about black men and his love for black music. Indeed in Forbes’s film, Atwater comes across as a “white negro,” a term that appears during the Civil War when a Southern newspaper accused Jefferson Davis of treating Southern whites like “white negroes.”

  After the interview, Forbes and I exchanged information. I sent him some historical documents and he kept me informed about the progress of the film. Early this year, Forbes announced that his documentary, Boogie Man, The Lee Atwater Story, would be shown at the Los Angeles Film Festival. It received rave reviews.

  Next I learned that it was screened at the Democratic Convention. Preparing for a trip east on September 19 for appearances at Yale, Colgate, The New School, New York University and a trip to Buffalo, New York, for my mother’s book party, I learned that Stefan’s film would be showing at the New Cinema in New York on East 12th Street.

  I didn’t know what to expect. Our guests at my movie debut were my daughter, Tennessee and her friend the famed poet from Puerto Rico, Linda Rodriquez-Guglielmoni; Carla and her friends Karin Bacon, whose business is creating events all over the world—she got to talk to Michael Jackson in Dubai—and Kate Hirson, a film editor who has worked with Clint Eastwood.

  Peop
le exiting from the theater recognized me and asked what I thought of it. I told them that I hadn’t seen it. I sat in a rear corner of the theater in case I had to crawl beneath my seat were my performance not up to par. The full house was riveted as Lee Atwater’s life unraveled before us. Forbes’s interviews with politicians and commentators were mixed with archival footage. But the way the archival footage was used was ingenious. Some of it seemed to do for Atwater what talk therapists do for those who use their services. Though surrounded by his fellow good old boys, even at home, some of the stills show him to be distant from the celebratory events following the success of those politicians whom he packaged. In some of the scenes he seems to be daydreaming. When a child, Atwater caused an accident in his home that killed his younger brother. His screams haunted Atwater all of his life.

  Lee Atwater perfected the appeal to racist feelings among some white voters. For over a hundred years politicians ran against fears of a black uprising, from the ex-Confederate officers, who regained their power in Congress after the Civil War, through Tom Watson, a politician who began his career as a populist, through the colorful Southern demagogues of the twentieth century. Instead of using explicit language, Atwater suggested code terms. “Welfare.” “Crime.” “Busing.” In his famous quip, Jesse Jackson said “The bus is us.” In Clinton’s time, African Americans were alluded to with terms like “personal responsibility,” a code term used by Barack Obama who Sister Souljahed black fathers in his Father’s Day speech.

  After some interviews with Joe Conason, a chilly Mary Matalin, editor of a foul work called Obama Nation, Michael Dukakis, who was destroyed by Atwater, and Ed Rollins, whose comments are frank, surprising and remarkable, my face loomed above the audience. I commented on my reaction to the Horton ad and had a voice over during a scene of the Bush One inauguration, commenting on Bush One, whose family includes some dysfunctional members, speaking of “urban demoralization.” It’s been three weeks and Hollywood hasn’t called. My fifteen minutes of fame lasted exactly fifteen minutes.