RealityLicks -> RE: Can Barak "get ghetto?" (2/18/2008 9:16:27 AM)
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ORIGINAL: TheHeretic It's a metaphor, Licks, and I seem to recall inviting others to select their own if they didn't like it. I don't see any difference between what I used and a suggestion that Bill Clinton was capable of "getting trailer park." Given Obama's lack of experience, I think questions about his ability to both effectively negotiate and whether he has what it will take when negotiations fail are critical. I recognise both that it was a metaphor and that Obama's limited experience bears some scrutiny. What I don't recognise is what the colour of his skin has to do with either. You might connect Clinton and a trailer park metaphorically but you definitely wouldn't with SonofaBush - because he was a rich kid. They're both white, but came up different ways. It wouldn't fit. So why is it any more fitting to connect Obama with the ghetto? Did he grow up in one? Now, if for you black=ghetto, I care little about it but it strikes me that the whole point of his candidacy underlines that America can be more than that sad and out-dated stereotype. Believe me, I'm not offended by it, it just illustrates to an onlooker how little things have changed there. It's interesting because there does persist, in US presidential politics particularly, an appeal to a "folk" background. They have to be cowboys or mint julep guzzlers, Boston brahmins and the like, when off-duty. It's just illuminating that your mind seems to have alighted on the ghetto as being Obama's natural habitat and that (for you, for now) there isn't another arena in which his mettle can be measured. I think the thing which makes his election highly unlikely is this very tendency and have read that his vote among white males is not all he'd hoped. Shame. As Gil Scott Heron said "Would we take Jesse Jackson? Hell, we'd take Michael Jackson".
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