Home > Political Insider > Archives > 2008 > January > 21
Monday, January 21, 2008
A Democratic primary debate conducted in code — mostly
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
This morning and into the afternoon, all you had to do to see into the heart of the Democratic presidential primary was to look deeply into your television screen, and listen.
Carefully.
First came Barack Obama, on ABC’s “Good Morning, America,” to complain about President Bill Clinton’s criticism of the Obama movement.
“You know the former president, who I think all of us have a lot of regard for, has taken his advocacy on behalf of his wife to a level that I think is pretty troubling,” Obama said. “He continues to make statements that are not supported by the facts — whether it’s about my record of opposition to the war in Iraq or our approach to organizing in Las Vegas.”
Obama was in a TV studio, not a church. He could speak plainly.
The rest of the conversation occurred in Georgia, and was mostly in code. At the new Ebeneezer Baptist Church on Auburn Avenue, in the midst of the Martin Luther King ceremonies, Mayor Shirley Franklin — a newly confessed Obama supporter — was the most brazen.
The mayor marveled at a presidential race that included a Mormon, a Baptist preacher, a former First Lady, and a black man. She told of a country on the “cusp of turning the impossible into reality. Yes, this is reality, not fantasy or fairy tales.”
And yes, that was a slap at former President Clinton, who had used the Grimm phrasing to describe a slice of Obama rhetoric. Clinton, too, was at Ebeneezer, sitting directly in front of Franklin. When she finished, the house stood. Clinton did not.
Then came U.S. Rep. Sanford Bishop of southwest Georgia, another Obama supporter. He spoke of the need to rally behind the “Joshua generation.” To cover politics in the South, learn your Bible. Joshua was the fellow who led the Jews into the land of Israel after Moses showed the way.
The reference comes straight from a speech Obama made last March in Selma, Ala., thanking the “Moses generation” — think John Lewis and Andrew Young — for its past work.
But the artist of the subliminal message on Martin Luther King Day was Bill Clinton himself. It’s easy to forget just how good he was, and still is, when it comes to connecting.
He took his audience back 44 years, to the August day when King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.
Clinton said:
“I was sitting alone in my house, in a family where I was the first person to go to college. I had not started yet. Listening to that speech alone, I remember the chair I was sitting in, I remember where it was in the room, I remember what I saw, I remember cryin’ like a baby, I remember saying, ‘This is the America I want to be a part of.’”
Translation: “I’ve been with you since my beginning.”
Then he spoke of the fiery days after King’s assassination in 1968:
“So Washington D.C., where I was in school, went up in flames, and I got a little Red Cross signature and I taped it on my car, and I kept bring supplies down into the African-American communities that burned, where people were living in church basements because the churches had been left alone from the violence. And they were taking people in.”
Translation: “I’ve been on the front lines, on your side.”
Then Clinton said this:
“When I was a boy, my heart was touched by the word and the example and the sacrifice of an astonishing man who said I, too, could be part of his beloved community. Me and all my Southern cracker kinfolks with our limited education and limited income, we could be part of it, too.”
Translation: “Martin Luther King invited us into the movement. We’re family, and shouldn’t be locked out.”
And there was this:
“I am old enough to remember what it was like in the summer of 1967, in Washington D.C., where every single night I could go down and listen to people debate whether King was right or wrong. I heard young, angry people with absolutely legitimate grievances say, ‘Dr. King is wrong. We are never going to get anything done, we will never get where we want to go, unless we push people around and we beat them up and let them know we’re going to be violent because we have been denied for too long.
“It’s easy for the young people here to forget. That was a debate. There were serious people who thought this should be done.”
Translation: “The Joshua generation has been wrong before. Enthusiasm can break a movement as easily as it can make one.”
And this:
“This is a time for humility, because there are many storm clouds along the horizon and around the world. And we still talk better than we do. We still talk better than we do. All of us…”
“None of us should fall in love with our gifts…We’ve been without Martin Luther King for 39 year and 42 weeks, on the 40th birthday observation. For 39 years and 42 weeks, the advancement of his dream had depended on the rest of us.
“Let us be humble, and realize that St. Paul was right when he said that love was even more important than faith and hope.”
Translation: Surely by now, none should be necessary.
Two down, one to go: Edwards says he’ll be in Atlanta on Jan. 30
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The state Democratic party is doing a jig. John Edwards just committed to attend the state’s annual Jefferson-Jackson Day fund-raiser. Hillary Clinton pledged to attend next week.
Party officials would like a complete set just a week before the Feb. 5 primary. They’re waiting for Barack Obama.
A Georgia organizer for Thompson shifts to Romney
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
The Fred Thompson lifeboat in Georgia just a little lighter.
Senate President pro tem Eric Johnson of Savannah, the ranking Republican in that chamber and one of the leaders of the draft-Fred movement last year, is switching to presidential candidate Mitt Romney.
Johnson said he’s got no special knowledge of whether Thompson, who finished third in South Carolina on Saturday, will be pulling out of the Republican contest.
“I don’t know if he’s pulling out today or tomorrow or not at all,” Johnson told us from Savannah. “But clearly Fred Thompson is not going to be the nominee.”
Expect more defections. “All of the campaigns are reaching out to the Thompson people,” the senator said.
Johnson, an architect by trade, said he had promised Romney his support this summer should Thompson falter. “I think he’s the most qualified business person ever to run for president,” the senator said. “If he can manage the Olympics and Massachusetts, he can control Congress.”
Romney’s financial expertise could become important as the economy and foreign trade become more prominent issues, Johnson said.
Genetics might also have had something to do with Johnson’s new champion. The Savannah senator’s great-great-great grandfather, like Romney, was governor of Massachusetts.
Perdue a veep possibility? If the Washington media says so, then it must be true
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
For the first time we can count, Gov. Sonny Perdue has made a major list of mentionables in the underground Republican contest for vice president.
Though not officially ranked in order, Perdue was in the No. 2 spot, behind Mike Huckabee, in the Washington Post review on Sunday.
“While the rest of the country was going south for Republicans in 2006, Perdue was cruising to a second term as governor of Georgia,” read the caption.
As we said, Huckabee was on one side of the Perdue sandwich: “In the days after Sen. John McCain’s win in New Hampshire, Huckabee seemed to me making a play for the second slot on the ticket. His strength among social conservatives would likely allay the doubts some carry about McCain.”
John Thune was after Perdue: “The handsome first-term senator from South Dakota became a national GOP hero when he knocked off [Tom] Daschle in 2004. Thune, who has endorsed McCain, is a darling of social conservative voters and his youth — he is 47 — might offset voters’ concerns about electing a septuagenarian as president.”
Others on the Republican list: Gov. Mark Sanford of South Carolina, Gov. Tim Pawlenty of Minnesota, and former Ohio congressman Rob Portman.
.JPG)
-1.JPG)
Services »
