This is more illuminating and direct than anything I've seen in the U.S. media of late. It gives a good sense of some of the ugliness to come, and confirms some of my earlier comments. The quotes from voters in South Carolina are priceless. First, the elderly racist:
“We have to peel back his identity,” said one elderly white voter in South Carolina, a state Obama must win on January 26. “Did you know his middle name is Hussein? He is a Muslim and was raised in an Islamic school.”
In fact, Obama was not brought up to follow any religion, although his African grandfather and Indonesian stepfather were Muslim. He became a Christian as a community organiser in Chicago and in the late 1980s joined the Trinity United Church of Christ, an African-American mega-church with an 8,000-strong congregation.
The same southern voter, who did not wish to be named, then threw another piece of Obama’s biography into the frame. “I looked at his church’s website. It said it was ‘unashamedly black’. They don’t want any whites there. I wouldn’t feel real comfortable if I tried to worship there.”
And then the African-American in South Carolina, who cuts to the chase on Senator Clinton (who has now calculated that being uncalculating is the way to win!):
“Hillary Clinton thinks she is more experienced, but she’s had 35 years of what? All I know about her is that she was the wife of the president.”
That, of course, is unfair. She has amassed a distinguished record in the Senate that includes voting for the criminal and immoral war of aggression against Iraq and, more recently, contributing to the general hysterical war-mongering about Iran.
Now that Senator McCain of Arizona appears to be the front-runner for the Republican nomination, the decent thing for Senator Clinton to do would be to withdraw from the race, since a McCain-Clinton context is one of the few match-ups in which the Republicans seem to have a good chance to prevail. (Senator Obama, of course, fares only slightly better against Senator McCain.)
But perhaps we'll all be surprised, and come November it will be Representative Paul vs. Representative Kucinich? Now that would actually be interesting!
UPDATE: Ruchira Paul, in correspondence, makes another important point about the prospect of a second Clinton Presidency: "do we want this dynastic thing take root in the US as it has in India, Pakistan and other developing nations?" Even putting aside the fact that Senator Clinton is a fake with a quite embarrassing public record, what does it say about our pseudo-democracy when the only people who can be elected President have to have relatives in high office? How long before Chelsea Clinton and Jeb Bush's son George are running for office? (One of Ms. Paul's co-bloggers addresses the issue here, and has appropriately scathing remarks about the Senator from New York.)
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