The greatest lesson of Senator Barack Obama’s presidential campaign is not in his winning or losing the Democratic Party primaries or even the November 2008 elections. It is in the eternal statement that the often marginalized American minority could aspire to the same normal human ambitions as the majority; and that the Hill-Bill Kingdom of the Clintons has been exposed for the self-serving manipulator and bully it has been.

Following the all-round drubbing that Obama gave her in Wisconsin , Hawaii , and Washington State , a television commentator posits that Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton should be charged with “political malpractice” for running a less than average campaign unbecoming of a former First Lady. Its finance report shows that the Clinton campaign has blown some $140 million, a whopping $6,000 of which was spent on fattening donuts alone, while an astonishing $5 million was paid to “top consultants” in January. The senator was forced to loan an unaccounted $5 million of her personal money to her flat-broke campaign. In all this confusion, Senator Clinton wins a paltry 11 states to Obama's 26, and then fires both her first campaign manager and deputy campaign manager.

In employing its perfected “Kitchen Sink” strategy, the Clinton band has thrown everything at Obama except sticks and stones. Another television commentator actually uses the word, “kneecappers,” to describe a former president and his political wife. Hillary Clinton floundered when she stood before the United States Senate and threatened to teach Iraq a lesson by voting to authorize the prosecution of an unprovoked and unjustified war, the kind of war that Chinua Achebe describes in his classic novel Things Fall Apart as a “war of blame.” She staggered again when she erroneously predicted that Democratic Party’s presidential primaries would be over on Super Tuesday, February 5. Former President Bill Clinton himself has been all over the place finger-wagging and brawling with over-excitable Obamamaniacs and Obamadigtats.

Is it not ironic that Mrs. Clinton who runs an unimaginative and flimsy campaign is the one asking a skinny Mr. Obama, “Where’s the beef?” In the uncouth language of its spokespersons, its inconsistency of message, and its selective presence in a chosen half of fifty-one states, Hillary’s candidacy should be a model for schizophrenic and visionless campaign. With hallmark poor judgment and even more deplorable management skills, how does this exemplary Hill-Bill expect to run the world’s only Super Power? The New York Times of February 22 reports that Hillary Clinton’s most stalwart donors and supporters now think that her spendthrift campaign is a “road map of her political and management failings.” They express concern that Mrs. Clinton’s spending priorities amounted to “costly errors in judgment.” When will all the fuming Clintonites learn that though they may sound alike, Hill is not Bill; that if it is not Bill, it is not the same thing as Bill; that where Bill is the name and image of soft American dollar, Hill is only an over-hyped platform composed of rock and hard earth?

Legions of distinguished black scholars and politicians have published books and articles on how Bill Clinton has consistently used and dumped the African American community. Two instances would suffice. Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School and Bill Clinton were classmates, and the two were friends until 1993. In her book Lift Every Voice (1998), Guinier provides a disturbing account of how Mr. Clinton publicly hung her out to dry by withdrawing her nomination to the post of Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights. As the “smooth” President Clinton stalled from defending his “friend” against a “vast right conspiracy,” Guinier writes: “I began to see him differently, as a watcher, not a doer. It was my reputation, my sense of self, my cause that was being chewed over, by a president who remained passive.” The writer Ishmael Reed equally notes how President Clinton turned stone-deaf against all entreaties for immediate American intervention to checkmate the spreading carnage that became the Rwandan genocide in 1994. In his essay “Going Old South on Obama” (January 14, 2008), Reed persuasively argues that it is a Clintonian tradition to sink any ship so long as the Hill-Bill raft floats.

It was the Nobel literature laureate Toni Morrison who gave Bill Clinton that amorphous award, “ America ’s first black president,” which he now wears like a Boys Scout badge of honor. Ironically, no one is in a better position to draw the stark contrast between Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama more than Morrison herself. Morrison's letter endorsing Obama for president (January 28, 2008) reflects, if subconsciously, the moral burden of the Clintons: “In addition to keen intelligence, integrity and a rare authenticity, you exhibit something that has nothing to do with age, experience, race or gender and something I don't see in other candidates. That something is a creative imagination which coupled with brilliance equals wisdom. It is too bad if we associate it only with gray hair and old age. Or if we call searing vision naivete. Or if we believe cunning is insight. Or if we settle for finessing cures tailored for each ravaged tree in the forest while ignoring

the poisonous landscape that feeds and surrounds it.”

A bit of the Clintonite treachery is notable in how Senator Clinton used her Latina campaign manager, Ms. Patti Solis Doyle, to win Hispanic votes in Nevada , California , and New York , only to quickly kick her out for her old black assistant, Ms. Maggie Williams. Her calculation is simple, to divide black votes with Obama by using a black woman. Two New York Hispanic political leaders, State Sen. Ruben Diaz, Jr., and Assemblyman Jose Peralta, have jointly written to Hillary Clinton to protest the apparent mistreatment of one of their own. Much of America 's socio-political engine still runs on race-grease. Billary's earlier calculation – after their bruising in Iowa – was that by injecting race into the primaries and marking Obama as a “black candidate,” white America would abandon Barack for Hillary. It backfired because after seven years of Bushist debacle Americans of all persuasion yearn for just one thing which only Obama seems to honestly promise, a change for an inclusive human community. Economic recession in the middle of geometric rise in global warming and interminable wars on global terror is enough pressure on a nation of faithful patriots.

It is easy for some compatriots to cast aspersions on Obama out of Clintonian loyalty. Most Americans know that money is good; they also know that power is everything. Material affluence serves the momentary passions of a few, but political access empowers generations of Americans, including those who came in chains and those who came in voluntary pursuit of happiness. A simple question to all those who tout Bill Clinton's economic achievements of the 1990s is: Where are the “abundant” menial jobs and “increased” minimum wages that supposedly benefited African American and Hispanic minorities during the Clinton presidency? Have they not been wiped out in only seven years of the presidency of George W. Bush? How would today’s American youth, especially one whose great grandfather was a slave and whose father lost out in the bullish world of Wall Street, be empowered by Bill Clinton’s faded economic glory? In other words, Obama’s promise of hope and unity resonates far much more to the higher consciousness of most Americans than the pedestrian bread-and-butter politics of Hillary and Clintonism. This, in part, is the essence of Morrison’s endorsement of Obama.

Revisiting Morrison's letter of endorsement will uncover a hidden angst towards the squandered promise and moral bankruptcy of the Clinton presidency. Morrison's letter is an urgent cry for Americans to look to the collective future of their children. The letter equally underscores the colossal disgrace of those few old black carpetbaggers who would insist on carrying the water for the Clintons of this world, just so they could pick whatever crumbs fall off the high table. The legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Rosa Parks is the gift of all generations of Americans. The present generation of Americans cannot afford to stoop lower than carpetbaggers for a blessing that is already its inheritance. Obama need not kowtow to the oppressive leadership of a select few who argue that Bill Clinton is blacker than Obama because he had supposedly had more black women than Obama. Is this “Youngian logic” the kind of warped rhetoric that should be advanced to America ’s children? That political pedigree depends on sexual conquest of the other? Should America’s children be taught that some of the elders who succeeded great visionaries like King and Parks were hunter-gatherers who shot the mother-bird and her fledgling flew away? Is it any wonder that Andrew Young was a chief prop of the inept and debauched former President Olusegun Obasanjo who ran Nigeria to the ground and turned a generation of his country’s young folk into perpetual exiles in the west?

Obamamaniacs fervently work for Barack Obama to win the 44^th presidency of the United States . But it matters even more that Obama makes a universally acclaimed case that on no account should the place of all America’s children ever be taken for granted again in the history of humanity. The Clintonite cult may brand Obamamania “false hope” and “sound bite.” To serious observers, however, the Obama phenomenon has become a mass movement and a grand affirmation that things can be better than they have been. The 20^th century Clintonite politics of patronizing handouts, equivocation, slash, and burn has finally run its course because it no longer gets much traction. Americans are ready to face the 21^st century. All across the country many young and old people who had never paid close attention to politics are now organizing “volunteer meetings” to get out the vote. One of my students even came to recruit me to join her mother’s team from North Carolina to work for the Obama campaign in Ohio . It is the legendary American spirit, the historic Biafran gesture that is awakening in these first-time activists a deep sense of self-preservation, a conscious aversion to bullying.

Obiwu was among the 15,000 audience present at Senator Obama’s rally at Nutter Center , Beavercreek , Ohio , on Monday, Feb 25, 2008. Contact: obiwu@yahoo.com

Robot  Villager

# 1 The greatest lesson of Senat...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 27.02.2008 12:26