A leader can sometimes take leadership and make unpopular decisions. But trying to turn the country red when a significant proportion are happy calling themselves capitalists is what you call political suicide. And political suicide is always a stupid tactic.
Oh you can try and convince people… you can persuade through discussion and examples. You can be like the Goldwater Conservatives of the 1970s and 80s and run a guerilla campaign to turn the country leftwards through sheer power of ideas and example. But that’s different to straightforward political suicide – which is what would happen if Obama followed your policies.

but it’s hypocrisy of the highest order for a liberal journalist to accuse anyone else of being patronising for presuming to know what’s best.

If this was aimed at me, that’s precisely what I’m against. If I won any mandate, it would have to be a popular one, based on my abilities to convince people what my arguments and ideas are sound.

That’s the difference between being a journalist/blogger – who can say pretty much anything without consequences – and a politician who depends on popular votes.

Is that patronising? If it is then you’re just as guilty by presuming to hold opinions which in turn can only be validated if I’m wrong.

Making a generalisation about a political grouping is rather different to making a generalisation about people marked out by the colour of their skin/

Moreover, I’d say that these people should be allowed their podium and might have something important to say, judging by their activist histories. Speaking of indulging in stereotypes, by the by, you have half a dozen of your own, which I’ve counted every time you tap on your keyboard about the “far left”. I’m fairly certain I’m far-left and I don’t regard other political ideologies as traitorous – simply as wrong.

Is that patronising? If it is then you’re just as guilty by presuming to hold opinions which in turn can only be validated if I’m wrong.

Finally, you open up for me the clear difference between woolly-thinking and Marxism. Obama shouldn’t sound red because America’s not red? Give me a break. A country’s leaders should perhaps be beholden to whatever the latest opinion polls say about late-term abortion or euthanasia perhaps? That’s the natural extension of what you’re saying.

I have no problem with ruling pragmatically; Obama should walk softly and carry a big stick as the Teddy said. Persuade the public and meanwhile organise across the country to win. I don’t think this is what you mean by pragmatism of course – what I suspect you mean is that Obama should ignore people to his left in favour of courting media approval.

Which in turn is what I suspect he will do. But we’ll see.

Neil, most of your piece was, I thought, spot on. I don’t prima facie agree with Nader, though I certainly think that in following through with redistributive change, Obama might come up shorter than in days before his campaign to be President.

As for whether Nader was being racialist, it’s a difficult one to call.

Nader asked if Obama was afraid to sound like Jesse Jackson, implied as an opposite to “talking white”. Presumably he thinks that Jesse Jackson “talks black”, but what he means is “stands up for working class black people”. Everyone got what Nader was trying to say – even the people who are bringing the acrimony. To that extent I don’t think Nader was being racialist.

Okay, so he’s a bit of a tit for saying it like that but I don’t think he was ascribing significance to presumed differences between the races. I imagine if one asked Nader that he’d be the first to say that if Obama looks after the black underclass, he’ll take steps for the white and latino and Chinese underclasses too.

No, but its pretty patronising for these writers to think they know what’s best for an entire race, and accuse any people who different to be ‘traitors’.

It’s like patting a black or brown person on the head and saying ‘I know what’s best for you’ and then subsequently condeming anyone who doesn’t follow that stereotype. If negative sterotypes are pernicious, so are positive sterotypes.

Obama won’t sound red. In fact he doesn’t need to. The country isn’t red. He needs to rule pragmatically and hopefully the centre ground will shift leftwards.

I realise that the far-left thinks anyone who doesn’t follow Marx to the letter is a traitor, but when they start using ‘Uncle Tom’, that is clearly as patronisingly racist as those who think all black people are criminals or vagrants.

“I clearly nearly upgrade my coffee intake”

I give up.

I don’t know whether you were referring specifically to me, but I want to reiterate that I haven’t said that Nader or Pilger made racist remarks. I will contend that phrases such as ‘Uncle Tom’ and ‘talking/acting white’ are part of a discourse which presupposes difference between races, and I’ll stand by my earlier statement that such a discourse is inherently racialist (the difference between the two terms is important). Do I think that these two antagonists intended the interpretation I’ve offered? Of course not – your rewording of Nader’s remarks was entirely accurate. But the unfortunate nature of distanciation is that we can’t ever control how others interpret our words, and it was stupid of Pilger and Nader to choose phrases with such negative pre-existing meanings.

I think this:

What is this talking white? Could it be an attempt to pretend that racial issues don’t exist, or that where they do they don’t have anything to do with structuralised poverty?

Was mostly covered in the debate we had a few weeks ago, but if the inference is that Obama himself tries to pretend that racial issues don’t exist or have anything to do with structuralised poverty, then I’m afraid this is a characterisation I don’t recognise. The following is from his ‘race speech‘:

Legalized discrimination – where blacks were prevented, often through violence, from owning property, or loans were not granted to African-American business owners, or black homeowners could not access FHA mortgages, or blacks were excluded from unions, or the police force, or fire departments – meant that black families could not amass any meaningful wealth to bequeath to future generations. That history helps explain the wealth and income gap between black and white, and the concentrated pockets of poverty that persists in so many of today’s urban and rural communities.

A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one’s family, contributed to the erosion of black families – a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods – parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement – all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us.

Also, whilst this interview was recorded prior to his national political career, I don’t think it’s irrelevant to note that his main criticism of the civil rights era was that it focused on judicial activism rather than “redistributive change.” He’s never been a Marxist, but nor has he been ignorant or dismissive of the structuralist aspects of Marxist theory. I should’ve probably been clearer in my post, but I consider Nader’s comments to be substantively wrong, as well as symbolically troubling.

Anyway, this topic has consumed a massive amount of our time, and I should really sleep before I continue today’s trend of schoolboy spelling errors. I’ll will just finish, however, by restating the point of that post: America isn’t spoiled for choice when it comes to positive black male role models, and in the absence of achieving the seismic social & economic shifts which we both know are necessary, I’m quite comfortable hurling spitballs at people who’re too clumsy & out of touch to know that the language they use – however good their intentions are – implies that the guy in the Oval Office is different from them.