Carter: Racism Plays Major Role In Opposition to Obama

[Ab-Titchaz]

Carter: Racism plays major role in opposition to Obama​

Former President Carter tells NBC Nightly News that racism has surfaced in opposition to President Obama.​

(CNN) -- Former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that racial politics played a role in South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's speech to Congress last week and in some of the opposition the president has faced since taking office.

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," Carter told NBC News. "I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that shares the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans."

"That racism inclination still exists, and I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of belief among many white people -- not just in the South but around the country -- that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country. It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply," Carter said.

Carter made similar remarks at an event at his presidential center in Atlanta, Georgia, The Associated Press reported Tuesday, pointing to some protesters who have compared Obama to a Nazi. "Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national program on health care," the former president said at the Carter Center, according to AP. "It's deeper than that."

He grouped Wilson's shout of "You lie!" during Obama'speech in that category, according to AP. "I think it's based on racism. There is an inherent feeling among many in this country that an African-American should not be president," he said.

"The president is not only the head of government, he is the head of state. And no matter who he is or how much we disagree with his policies, the president should be treated with respect."

The House voted Tuesday to formally disapprove of Wilson's behavior during the joint session of Congress. The resolution was approved largely along party lines, with Republicans calling the measure unnecessary partisan politics.

Wilson apologized to the White House last week, but congressional Democrats said he owed the chamber a similar statement of regret.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/15/carter.obama/index.html

 

[Ab-Titchaz]

Video hapa...

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/15/jimmy-carter-wilsons-outb_n_288003.html

 

[The Boss]

Very true.

 

[Kevo]

Very true.

I dont think this dude had any racist ideas in his mind though it might spark racist ideas in other people.
I believe many people inthe US now are against the Health Care Bill so he was probably being carried away with his own emotions.

 

[Nyani Ngabu]

Hata Bill and Hillary Clinton were racists during the primary. Oooh Joe Biden was racist too. He said Obama was new, fresh, and clean! Anybody white against Obama is racist, period.

 

[Brutus]

Hypocrites!!
They called Bill Clinton a racist, a president who left office with an approval rating at 66%, the highest end of office rating of any president since World War II ,a white president who is an honorary member of a black fratenity Phi Beta Sigma.
If Obama doesn't get rid of his radical ideologies and if he doesn't switch gear from campaigning to governing mode then he is gonna end up like President Carter. He needs to stop poking China, and to decide quickly whether to send 40,000 requested troops to Afghanistan or to appease his colleagues in Democratic Party, Moveon.org and George Soros.

 

[Lole Gwakisa]

Carter: Racism plays major role in opposition to Obama​

Former President Carter tells NBC Nightly News that racism has surfaced in opposition to President Obama.​

(CNN) -- Former President Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that racial politics played a role in South Carolina Rep. Joe Wilson's outburst during President Obama's speech to Congress last week and in some of the opposition the president has faced since taking office.

"I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man, that he's African-American," Carter told NBC News. "I live in the South, and I've seen the South come a long way, and I've seen the rest of the country that shares the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African-Americans."

Thank Ab , for the posting.
Pres. Carter has revealed the stark naked truth about the whole issue.
I am sure the level of contempt shown by the errant Councillor Wilson would have not come to the fore if Obama were a white president.
It goes a long way to show how some Americans are "colonised" by their skins-even when it comes to public conduct.

 

[Nyani Ngabu]

Oh so failed president Carter is now a clairvoyant huh?

 

[Ab-Titchaz]

Obama as witch doctor: Racist or satirical?​

By Ashley Fantz
CNN

(CNN) -- Posters portraying President Obama as a witch doctor may be racist, organizers of Tea Party protests say, but they reflect anger about where he is leading the country.The posters, showing Obama wearing a feather headdress and a bone through his nose, have been popping up in e-mails, on Web sites and at Tea Party protests for weeks.

The image has stoked debate and cast attention on the rallies, which have drawn people Tea Party organizers describe as on the fringe and not representative of the overall movement. Their general viewpoint, leaders say, is that there's been too much federal government intervention, particularly concerning health care and taxes.

The witch doctor imagery is blatantly racist, critics contend.

Others remind that presidents get made fun off all the time, and the election of a black president has only made racially charged political satire more sensitive.

While not denying the crudeness of the image, Tea Party organizers stressed that those who carry the signs are a few "bad apples." That [witch doctor] image is not representative at all of what this movement is about," said Joe Wierzbicki, a coordinator of the Tea Party Express, a three-week series of protests across the country.

The anger the image portrays, however, "says to me that a lot of people in this country are angry about the direction that the administration and Congress are taking us," he said.


"And you're going to see a wide expanse of those people," he continued. "Some are going to be more extreme. Most of them are going to be in the mainstream of American politics, as evidenced by Obama's falling poll numbers."


An incendiary image such as witch doctor detracts from any hope for a cohesive message at the rallies, where many appear not to be associated directly with either the Republican or Democratic parties, said W. Joseph Campbell, a media professor at American University. And previous infringements of good taste don't make it acceptable to Photoshop the president into a witch doctor.


"It's true that presidents before have had to endure some rough stuff, and there's nothing wrong with satire," Campbell said. "President Bush was morphed into Hitler. That was not excusable either. Just because it's happened in the past doesn't mean there isn't a line and it can't be crossed."


As a politics and African-American studies professor at Princeton University, Melissa Harris-Lacewell typically advocates discussion about the racist overtones in images or language bandied in public discourse.

"But I'm concerned in the age of Obama, too many of our public conversations about policy have been limited to a kind of investigative effort to determine whether opposition to him is based on race or substantive disagreement," she told CNN. "The problem is, it can be both."


Harris-Lacewell points out that Obama made his African father a part of his campaign narrative. Now his critics are trying to mock that heritage.

"This witch doctor image is racist in a very specific way because of his proximity to Africa," she said. "You can imagine there would have easily been a time when [Jewish New York Mayor Michael] Bloomberg would have been portrayed in anti-Semitic ways. You can go back to political cartoons when Irish Democrats were mocked, Italians were lampooned."


Spelman College history professor William Jelani Cobb, who has written extensively about race and politics, points out the original Boston Tea Party was driven by colonists who frequently declared that they had been "enslaved" by the king of England. The men who led that revolt dressed up as Native Americans when they dumped the tea into Boston Harbor in 1773.


Hard to pin down and a seeming catch-all for general anger at the government, the modern Tea Party movement is grounded the belief that the federal government should stay out of state business. But "states' rights is also an argument with a history tied to racial segregation during the civil rights' era," Harris-Lacewell said. And so it comes full circle.

Cobb said Obama's election has also rekindled the historic rancor some whites feel against successful blacks.

http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/09/17/obama.witchdoctor.teaparty/index.html

 

[Visenti]

I dont think this dude had any racist ideas in his mind though it might spark racist ideas in other people.
I believe many people inthe US now are against the Health Care Bill so he was probably being carried away with his own emotions.

Unambishia hata CARTER! kazi kweli.

 

[Hofstede]

The true behind these rallies is that, " there are two groups, policy opposing group which is sponsored by Insurance companies supported by some GOP for 2010 election points, and racially driven groups which is also supported by some GOP for 2010 election points.

Because all these are in one group, using racially driven signs and swasticas depict Obama as an evil, then these overshaddowing the policy driven group and make them all be seen as racists. It won't be otherwise unless policy driven opposition group repudiates the racially driven signs and rhetoric which is not possible because they are both in the same bottle.

 

[Nyani Ngabu]

Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden are all racists!! And they are also Republican.

 

[Ab-Titchaz]

Obama: Race not An Issue In Debates​

​

AP) WASHINGTON - President Barack Obama said Friday that angry criticisms about his health care agenda are driven by an intense debate over the proper role of government -- and not by racism.

"Are there people out there who don't like me because of race? I'm sure there are," Obama told CNN. "That's not the overriding issue here."

Obama, the first black president in the nation's history, spoke about the issue of race during a battery of interviews on Friday. In a media blitz aimed at pounding home his health care message, he taped interviews with ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and Univision to be shown during the networks' Sunday morning talk shows.

Some excerpts aired during Friday night broadcasts.

Time and again, Obama was asked about whether the tenor of the health care turned nasty because of undercurrents in racism. Former President Jimmy Carter raised the point prominently this week when he said the vitriol was racially motivated.

Not so, Obama said.

"There's been a long-standing debate in this country that is usually that much more fierce during times of transition, or when presidents are trying to bring about big changes," Obama told CNN.

To NBC News, Obama put it this way: "It's an argument that's gone on for the history of this republic, and that is, What's the right role of government? How do we balance freedom with our need to look out for one another? ... This is not a new argument, and it always evokes passions."

Read more at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/09/18/barack-obama-this-week-in_n_292013.html​

 

[Companero]

From The Sunday Times

September 20, 2009
Unleashing a race war on President Barack Obama

Andrew Sullivan

Jimmy Carter's political touch remains, it appears, eternally off-key. After a summer of simmering right-wing dissent against the Obama administration, and a protest march by about 70,000 conservative activists in Washington, Carter declared that most opposition to Barack Obama was rooted in racism.
He was responding to the unprecedented heckling of a sitting president from the floor of Congress by a good old boy from South Carolina, Joe Wilson. This is how Carter put it - and the nuances matter:

"Those kind of things are not just casual outcomes of a sincere debate on whether we should have a national programme on healthcare. It's deeper than that. I think an overwhelming portion of the intensely demonstrated animosity toward President Barack Obama is based on the fact that he is a black man ... That racism inclination still exists. And I think it's bubbled up to the surface because of the belief among many white people, not just in the South but around the country, that African-Americans are not qualified to lead this great country."

Few words would have caused Obama more heartburn than these. Obama has, from the start, emphasised the nonracial and post-racial aspects of his politics. He feared that if he were to become the black president, rather than the president who happens to be black, something deep in the American psyche would kick in, and he would be marginalised for good. In the campaign, the Clintons went up to the edge of this tactic, with Hillary at one point appealing directly to "white voters" in the South, and Bill dismissing Obama as another Jesse Jackson.

In the general campaign, Sarah Palin used codewords - that Obama was not a "real American". But somehow Obama remained unscathed. The closest he came to racial immolation was when Fox News broadcast round-the-clock clips of his former pastor Jeremiah Wright yelling "God damn America!". But he rescued himself with a speech of such sweep and candour that even his fiercest critics relented.

He lost a lot of the white vote to John McCain, of course. And the vote actually swung to Republicans in the Appalachian region, where racism is strongest. But McCain refused to run a race-baiting campaign, either through code or explicit association. And Obama won with a massive majority of blacks and Hispanics and with a solid white bloc. After his victory, it seemed as if the weight of history had been lifted. We should have known, of course, that his election would be the beginning and not the end of this racial narrative.

However, it's important to note that Carter is almost certainly exaggerating. Obama has lost some lustre - but he remains a popular president with approval ratings above 50%. He's put through massive changes to the system - from the stimulus package to support the car industry to an outreach to the Muslim world to a plan to overhaul health insurance. The last year has been bewildering for many people - a recession that seemed caused by the very bankers we bailed out, unemployment climbing relentlessly, the government owning the car industry, debt going through the stratosphere, with no relief in sight. It is in no way surprising that, under these circumstances, attacks on the president would be coarse and rambunctious.

Remember the far left's opposition to George W Bush before the Iraq war? Equations of him with Hitler were routine. Columnists openly bragged about hating him. Remember what was done to Clinton? An essentially centrist president from the South was subjected to a wave of hysterical criticism, hysteria, paranoia ... until he was impeached. Richard Nixon was a totem of loathing for every educated liberal (and many educated conservatives) for years. Lyndon Johnson was despised by his fellow Southerners. John F Kennedy was called a communist and a traitor. This is not abnormal for America. It's a rough and unruly place, where the first amendment protects even the most inflammatory speech. What Obama is enduring is not, in other words, utterly out of the mainstream of political discourse in the US.

Nonetheless, Carter wasn't merely posturing. He knows the South and most Americans can pick up on nuances utterly lost to outsiders. Remember also that Obama won few white Southern votes. And there is a tone to the conversation recently that does indeed suggest that part of the country finds it hard to accept Obama as a legitimate president. As soon as he ceased to be a mere symbolic president, and started to change things, the resistance suddenly became fierce and, to some extent, irrational. Of course, race was in there somewhere. He's black and powerful and, unremarkably, part of the country feels as if it has lost its bearings. Of course some attacks on him will be partly racist - because the racial divide is still a big factor in American partisan competition.

The right in America, after all, was reborn after the civil rights struggle. Before Johnson's determination to protect black voting and education, the South was overwhelmingly Democratic. After Johnson took on civil rights, Nixon's and Ronald Reagan's Southern strategy - appealing to white Southerners who were enraged by black equality - was critical to winning electoral landslides. The Democrats believed - with reason - that race was a factor in this realignment.

Fast-forward a few decades and the Democrats now constitute the majority in much of the country once ruled by Republicans - the northeast, Midwest and west - and have much less traction in the South. You also have a black Democratic president - a concept that would have been simply incredible to the older white generations who grew up with segregation. And Americans are human; their politics is driven by reason and debate, but also by symbolism and emotion and sentiment.

And so when a white congressman interrupts an address to call the president a liar, there is a contempt in his voice that means something to Americans but which may not resonate outside. There is, in The New York Times's columnist Maureen Dowd's mind, an unheard "You lie, boy!" in it. "Boy" is how white men condescended to black men in the South for centuries. And in last year's campaign, a Kentucky congressman did indeed say of Obama, "I'm going to tell you something: that boy's finger does not need to be on the button." In the protest march last weekend, one sign said (complete with picture of a lion): "The zoo has an African [lion] and the White House has a lyin' African!" A mayor's e-mail in the last campaign showed the White House suddenly surrounded by a watermelon patch.

What are we to make of the fact that in opinion polls, a big majority of Republicans in the South - far more than in any other region of the country - doubt that Obama is an American citizen? In the state of Virginia, which Obama won, 70% of Republican voters believe he is not legitimately president because he was, they believe, born in Kenya. Last week, a staggering poll found that a third of Republicans in New Jersey believe that Obama was not born in the US. And 17% of self-described conservatives in the same survey said they believe the president is the Antichrist.

What explains this if not, to some degree, racism and xenophobia? It's almost ludicrous to look for more esoteric explanations. Obama is right to ignore it - his finest skill is refusing to take the bait - but he cannot be under any illusions that it's out there. It is not, in my judgment, the core motivation of those who marched on Washington last weekend. Their horror at what they called a fascist and a communist president requires no racial subtext - just good old American paranoia and extremism, which can be found on right and left. But it does exist, and it's silly to pretend that just because a black president was elected, it suddenly vanished into thin air.

What disturbs me more is something subtler but more pernicious. There are elements on the far right who are clearly trying to stir up racial animosity by seizing on random events and trying to polarise the country through them, and thereby polarise the country against Obama.

The radical populist Glenn Beck said on Fox News that Obama has "exposed himself as a guy [with] a deep-seated hatred for white people". He offered no evidence for this: he just put it out there and refused to retract. Last week, in one of the most baldly racist diatribes I have heard on American radio, the biggest figure in the conservative movement, Rush Limbaugh, noticed that there had been a ruckus on a school bus in which a white kid was stomped on by a black kid. The incident, it turned out, was a classic school bus bully story: the white kid was being tormented and the bullies were refusing to let him sit down. There was no racial rhetoric in a bus full of black kids and white kids.

But this is what Limbaugh said: "In Obama's America, the white kids now get beat up with the black kids cheering, ‘Yay, right on, right on, right on, right on' ... I wonder if Obama's going to come to the defence of the assailants the way he did his friend Skip Gates up there at Harvard."

Limbaugh then mocked what he sees as political correctness in "Obama's America": "We know that white students are destroying civility on buses, white students destroying civility in classrooms all over America, white congressmen destroying civility in the House of Representatives." Get the picture? There's an implication that a racist president is actively trying to hurt white America. Despite the local police chief's insistence that race had nothing to do with the incident, Limbaugh simply declared: "I think the guy's wrong. I think not only was it racism, it was justifiable racism. I mean, that's the lesson we're being taught here today. Kid shouldn't have been on the bus anyway. We need segregated buses. This is Obama's America."

The goal is to portray white Americans as besieged by a sea of blackness, capped by Obama's presidency. And, in a reference that would be clearly understood, Limbaugh proposed re-segregation in order to protect white people.

Limbaugh was echoed by one of the most popular Republican bloggers, Michelle Malkin, who described the bullying as "racial thuggery". In the same week, Beck ran exposé after exposé of Acorn, a corrupt group that tries to enfranchise minorities, and of a black appointee of Obama's, Van Jones, who had dabbled in 9/11 conspiracy theories. Yes, these were legitimate issues, and absolutely worth reporting, but after a while, you sense a pattern. If America has a president who has "a deep-seated hatred for white people" and he's destroying America, and backs a black Harvard friend against a white cop ... well, you get the picture. "We came unarmed (this time)" read one poster in Washington last weekend. Was that a sterling defence of the second amendment's assurance of the right to bear arms? Or something of a threat?
We do not know. But what we do know is that this kind of discourse is not only vulgar and ugly but dangerous. Fomenting a race war to undermine a black president is incendiary, perilous stuff. This is a country that has shot its most charismatic presidents. And Limbaugh is not weighing the pros and cons of particular policies. "I wanted him to fail from the get-go," was his refrain last week. And if racial hatred can help Limbaugh find a way to force Obama to fail, he has no hesitation - and some amount of glee - in using it.
Beneath the surface there is considerable cultural anxiety. America is not the country it used to be. It's far more racially diverse than in any previous era, and the demographics show that without black and Hispanic votes, the Republicans may be consigned to long-term electoral doom. The collapse of the conservative movement under Bush has left many bewildered and angry. A majority-minority country beckons and the right is as scared as it is furious. They voted Republican ... and the debt exploded, spending went through the roof, two wars became quagmires of nation-building, and gay marriage came to America. Of course this leads to some paranoia, fear and unruliness. Any brief foray into American history would predict nothing less.

But there is something a little different this time - and it's because the president is a little different this time. One of the most common signs last weekend said simply: "I want my country back". This could be a response to the huge increase in government power under Bush and during the financial crisis, continued by Obama. Or it could be a cry of racial, cultural panic. Or, more plausibly, it could be a fusion of the two that renders the entire picture extremely volatile.

One way to mitigate this would be for Republicans to craft policies that might appeal more to blacks and Hispanics, to recruit more minorities and to embrace immigrants. This is what Bush was trying to do - and, in retrospect, seems positively liberal. But another way is to so racially polarise America that so many white votes flee from the black president that a Republican is elected by whites alone. Divide and rule is the tactic: as crude as it could be effective.

Obama understands that if he were to take this bait, and attack the racism out there, he would lose. Limbaugh understands this too - and he has a much tighter grip on the Republican base than any current politician. And so in the cultural context, Limbaugh is all about riling people up and Obama is all about calming them down. It's a war of nerves that Obama needs to transform into something much less compelling. He has to bore his way towards acceptance.

Limbaugh, on the other hand, makes a vast fortune from such forays into the gutter and has no incentive to stop. The key for him is to generate a narrative that compounds Obama's race with his policies. And so Obama's policies are shredded daily - Limbaugh has the biggest single talkradio audience in America - while Limbaugh plays ditties like "Barack, the Magic Negro", and calls the president a "Halfrican". And this man now controls the current Republican party's message. It is as if the party's super-ego was removed by Dick Cheney, its ego left town with Bush, and its id is all that remains: full of sound and racial fury signifying money.

Obama, on the other hand, knows that a racially polarised America will be too distracted to address health insurance reform or climate change or the debt or the wars or anything else. And so he has to somehow plough on through the emotive racial minefield, denying the racial angle, and hoping that reason will eventually triumph over emotion. One speech, as in the Jeremiah Wright brouhaha, will not suffice any more. He's president now, not a candidate. He has a lifetime of experience dealing with this; but it cannot be easy. And it will not be over soon.
www.andrewsullivan.com

 

[Nyambala]

President obama appearing on David Letterman show ametoa jibu la mwaka though a joker kuhusiana na misukosuko ya mipango yake ya bima ya afya.

I just liked it!

Obama also had to answer yet on the question of whether some of the vitriolic reaction to his health care plan is driven at least partly by racism.

"First of all, I think it's important to realize that I was actually black before the election," Obama said to huge laughs from Letterman and the audience.

Watch here - http://www.cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id=5328061n&tag=cbsnewsSectionContent.0

 

[Abdulhalim]

Sijaiona hiyo sehemu Mh. Kiongozi, labda umechanganya clips.

 

[Shapu]

Mkuu ni clip ipi? mbona hii haielezei?

 

[Mtu wa Pwani]

Mzushi huyo anapenda '.......

 

[Yegomasika]

Insider info on Obama's appearance

By KIKI RYAN & PATRICK GAVIN | 9/21/09 4:19 PM EDT



We've got an insider source who's privy to the filming of tonight's "Late Show with David Letterman", which features President Barack Obama as its top guest. Here's video from the show, courtesy of CBS:
- Letterman has a presidential seal on his coffee mug for this particular show.

- Letterman does a "Top 10" list on reasons why Obama agreed to go on the show.

- One of the "Top Ten" reasons is "I don't know" (meaning that the self-deprecating Letterman isn't quite sure how he scored the POTUS).
- Letterman to Obama, after talking about health care: "Your job is more difficult than my job, that's what I learned here tonight."
- Topics of discussion between Letterman and Obama include health care, Afghanistan and Iraq.
- Obama tells Letterman: "We're not going to recover overnight. Unemployment is still going to be a big problem for at least another year." (hat tip: Reuters)
- When asked if racism is to blame for harsh rhetoric, Obama says, "It's important to realize that I was actually black before the election." (via AP's Phil Elliott)
- Before his interview with Obama, Letterman chatted with a woman in the audience who brought a heart-shaped potato for the president. Obama later said, "The main reason I am here? I wanna see that heart-shaped potato."
- From the pool report:
Top Ten Reasons Why President Obama Agreed To Appear On The Show

10. Heard the lady with the heart-shaped potato was gonna be here.
9. Thought it would be fun to watch someone else get heckled.
8. Something to do with that whole cash for clunkers deal.
7. Every president since Teddy Roosevelt has done it.
6. Someone offers you 600 bucks you take it ladies and gentlemen.
5. We told him Megan Fox would be here.
4. Needed some time to hang out before check in time at his hotel.
3. I have no idea.
2. Said yes, without thinking, like Bush did with Iraq.
1. Wanted to congratulate Dave on the big Emmy win.

(hat tip: Ben Smith)

 

[Richard]

President obama appearing on David Letterman show ametoa jibu la mwaka kuhusiana na misukosuko ya nipango yake ya bima ya afya.

I just liked it!

Obama also had to answer yet on the question of whether some of the vitriolic reaction to his health care plan is driven at least partly by racism.

"First of all, I think it's important to realize that I was actually black before the election," Obama said to huge laughs from Letterman and the audience.

Watch here - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wiXLzRFX3Rc

Mkuu,

Naona ulipitiwa kidogo wakti ukiweka hii issue.

Nafikiri ukirudia tena kuiangalia hio video utasikia bwana Letterman akimtambulisha Obama kwa wakati ule akiwa mbunge au Senetor wa Illionis, na anasema wazi kwa ni mgombea wa Democrats.

Kwa hio ni bora ungetafuta video yoyote ambayo ni relevant na mada yako.