Barack Obama Makes It Official

Cross-posted at All Things Democrat. And yes, let's try nominating a Democratic presidential candidate who seems more like a Democratic Party type than a GOP type. Pretty please?

Here:

Well, Barack Obama made it official today. I was pleased to see this, but far less happy about a few trains of thought which seemed to predominate in the media today on the heels of his announcement.

For one, so many treat him as a man of color as quite the novelty. Please… this is 2007. Wouldn’t you have to have lived decades in a cave to truly feel like a man of Obama’s stature is a novelty?

Even if you set aside those who treated the past candidacies of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton as oddities, I remember some strong women of color from my childhood - Barbara Jordan and Shirley Chisholm among them - suggested for the nation’s highest office. [Sometimes, I wonder how many could have guessed back in 1968 or so that the U.S. would reach this deeply into the next millennium without a woman or person of color - or both rolled into one - making it to the presidency.]

A second bothersome issue for me today, cited again and again, was this notion that somehow Obama is neither black enough OR white enough to make it through the primaries. Huh?

I think I know what people who say this mean, but it’s still pretty jarring.

By that same token, we could apply a similar standard to Hillary Clinton: she’s neither Democratic enough nor Republican enough to survive, meaning that she’s frequently been willing to vote against or marginalize core values of the Democratic Party YET I doubt the vast majority of Republicans would cast their vote for her even when she’s voted more like a moderate/centrist Republican than even the party of her husband.

But when all is said and done, we really need to choose Dem candidates who reflect our goals and values as progressives/liberals/lefties rather than make the decision seemingly made too often in recent years, a decision which boils down to this:

Republicans can put up whatever far right extremist they want but, because the far right and Karl Rove tell us no intelligent East Coast/Northeast candidate will ever be elected as president, somehow the Democratic Party has to put up someone who sits to the right of GOPers like John Warner and John McCain to be taken seriously.

That’s uh… manure. Granted, manure comes in useful for various agricultural/horticultural pursuits but do we really want to run the country on it? We’ve done so since December 2000 and it’s not gone well.