Well, dude actually pulled it off. I don't know what to say. Truth be told, I woke up in the middle of the night a few days ago stricken with an abrupt, late-blooming fear that Obama was going to lose the election. (I think it's all the time I've been spending reading NRO's The Corner.) By all accounts he was up, but, as the saying goes: "who are you going to believe: the desperate hopes of white racists or your lying black eyes?" Over-confidence is a sin, but there is something deeply sad (and borderline pathological) about how a history of losses trains you to distrust your instincts. Having experienced this campaign, or more to the point, having my side win this campaign, it will become easier to lay down in bed and tamp down future night terrors, get some sleep so I can get to work in the morning.

Until you have that first win, you just don't know what's possible. And once you have that first win, things are just plain different. Some of you know that among my various side hustles is managing websites, and I owe my entire career pretty much to the fact I have a single metrical win on my resume - blackplanet.com. That's it, and my first time at bat, too, BLAM, out of the park. It's like going to Yale: I will be 100 and there will still be practical professional use-value to be extracted to having managed BP last century. Yes, being the one time ruler of a kingdom devoted largely to black-on-black nookie (and it's various admirers) is a step below running the free world, but a win is a win, right? The fact that I inherited an amazing software platform, was privileged to work with an amazing group of people, was hooked-up with a gig by a bud, and was essentially in the right place at the right time in history, are the end, for me to know, and for you to find out. (By which I mean, "for you to find out" if you ever hope for me to respect you. Nothing warms me to another human being like gentle cynicism about random-but-generally generally praised people, places and things.)

But winning changes things. I don't know about every thing, but definitely some of them. For example: even up until a few days ago, I would not have bet my life on a black man being elected the president of the United States. Several hundred dollars in donations, a few hours phone banking, lots and lots of forwarding, phone calls and so on, sure, but my life? No way, and therein lies the difference between me and Barack Obama. The power of leverage is such that my meager contribution can be multiplied into real power when the right tools are in place, but at the end of the day I would have been heartbroken if Obama had lost but not necessarily surprised. Next time around, though, in whatever shape next time takes, I will have new data to help me make a decision: "it's possible for black men to win the highest office in the land." That is a truly nifty piece of information to carry around with you.

Last night my man Wesley was texting this to everyone he knew: "Whitey may be on the moon, but we're in the white house!" Someone shot back, quick as digital lightening: "Fuck that: We're going there, too. Mars, bitches!"

Why the fuck not? I thought. Who better to send us to Mars than a black president? And that, my friends, is changed between today and yesterday. More shit is suddenly possible, some of it wonderfully outlandish. I have been reading a lot about the meaning of conservatism the last few days on the right wing blogs. This is what Peggy Noonan had to offer:

Prudence. A sense of reality. Understanding limits. Respect for tradition — it didn’t happen by accident.

Seriously, fuck all that shit. My disinterest in the above is, in underlying terms, why I am not and will never be a conservative. I am a citizen of a country that does not fully exist yet, although, by becoming a country where a black man can become president, we got significantly closer. But ultimately, I think I am a citizen of the United States of Space. I hear the president of that shit is a Kenyan-American Hawaiian.

I don't understand why these people have jobs, especially in a weak economy.

Obama is on board with Democratic capitulation on retroactive immunity for warrantless wiretapping, but promises/hopes to do an accountability do-over later down the road:

This leads me to the latest backward attempt to analyze Barack Obama and race. I think the MSM, frankly, needs to just give up on this whole topic, their record is disastrous. First Obama wasn't black enough. Then he was so black that he couldn't win the nomination. Now the question is "How black is too black?" Lemme explain something to you, dog: I just watched a black man carry Iowa and Oregon and then carry roughly nine out of ten black voters. Don't give me that business about Appalachia. You know damn well if I had told you three years ago that a black man would do that you would have laughed at me. With that backdrop I've gotta say, I don't even know what the phrase "too black" means.

One thing I do know, the Times definition of blackness--"a sense of black grievance"--is a joke. And if it weren't Al Sharpton would have dominated the black vote. That sort of flat rendering of black America, keep up this false idea that the most unifying factor of black culture is the ability to make white people feel guilty. Look, I know this is tough to believe, but black people aren't nearly as obsessed with white people, as media would have you think. Fueling that notion is a cheap and easy way to fill some column inches, while not giving a flying fuck about stripping the humanity and complexity away from black folks. [full ta-nehisi]

The NYT op-ed that Ta-Nehisi is shitting on was written by Marcus Mabry. I actually (usually) like Mabry's work, (we might be friendeded on some or another social network) but this strikes me as a case where a (youngish?) black writer was ill-served by white editors who didn't know enough to him ask the right questions. When you're the only member of your tribe in an editorial encounter, and when, moreover, the underlying narrative of that encounter involves you being imported in order to explain said tribe to the publication and its readers, well, you're basically blogging with the aid of a highly compensated human spell-checker. Your editors are very often useless in guiding the piece and are themselves basically sweating it out on their side of the computer screens praying they bet on the right horse/native informant.

h/t Oliver Willis on the youtubery. Also:

bumpity

[El Pais cover h/t gawker]

My man Siddhartha, like many people, refers to Obama as "The Hope" but every now and then a wire gets crossed and he calls him (or maybe I just hear?) "The Truth."

How to be useful?

That's the thing I've been wondering since last night. How can I, ebog, myself, personally do my part to help insure Obama becomes the next president of the United States? Hillary Clinton and her dead-enders don't think Obama has a chance in hell of becoming POTUS, so they're not just going be useless moving forward but flat out detrimental. I think these people could actually see him becoming the Democratic nominee - TO THEIR INCREDULITY AND CHAGRIN - this because they're the kind of self-hating "liberals" who believe their party is self-destructive, weak-willed and uniquely susceptible to racial bullying. These kind of White Resentment Democrats completely agree with Rush Limbaugh that black people get things handed to them on silver platters, and up until last night they imagined a future for the party where the mark of its strength would be its ability to resist being "mau-maued". The dream of such a Democratic party probably ended last night - provided of course, Obama wins.

So: how to be useful? Blog? Volunteer? Phone bank? Donate? What are you planning to do?

Make no mistake. The Clinton surrogates (not to mention the Clintons themselves) who will be campaigning for Obama over the next few months will do so half-hearted and with the fingers crossed. They just don't believe a black man can ever become POTUS. That's not saying they think it would be a bad or anything were such an event to occur (some of my best friends, and all), it's just that they don't think it will happen given what they think they know about America. That's why Hillary Clinton was willing to praise McCain and attack Obama in the same breath:

[h/t Ta-Nehisi]

That, or they're just terrified that politics, like popular music or big league sports, will be transformed by the rise of Obama in ways that will make it difficult for the average white politician to effectively compete. I have had my issues with The Hope, in that there are aspects of it that strike me as the political analogue of the Oprah-approved Secret, but I have never bought into the idea that Obama supporters are "cultish." Some people connect with Obama so deeply not because they're pre-disposed to be mindless followers, but because this particular candidate offers those who are properly configured unique and novel ways to connect. Obama's race, his youth, his demeanor, his facility with popular culture, his message, his looks, his interactions with his wife, his embrace of the internet, his calm, all of it - as the total candidate package Barack Obama just offers more facets, channels, textures and hooks for people relate to and latch onto. The difference between him and Hillary just at the level of candidate craft was often like comparing an analog broadcast tv with a digital HD in surround with TIVO. If you'd never experienced the new and better version of the tube, people who spend a lot of time fiddling with it and all those features might seem cultish to you as well.

Every black "first" changes the game they enter irrevocably, for the simple reason that overcoming the structural obstacles between them and the playing field often calls upon them to be "better" in some aspects than most of their white teammates, sometimes heroically so. The irony here, of course, is that Hillary Clinton had a chance to be a first too, but she squandered it by clinging to the most regressive elements of her party and the most shameful riffs in American political rhetoric. Nobody jumps from a minor, chitlin, girls or other marginal league to national "majors" that they were previousl excluded from by offering solid familiar fundamentals. They do it by offering something so unusual that it makes up for them being negroes, minor, chitlin, girls or marginal. They do it by being useful.

There's a risk of exceptionalism and essentialism in the idea that black participants by definition bring new qualities to any field of endeavor that they've been previously excluded/absent from (whatever the reason). But the one thing you can safely say they bring is the experience of being excluded from the job on the basis of race. I imagine that there are gigs where that specific background and experience adds little to a person's conduct of their job, this even as the reduction of an inequality increases the general amount of good and justice in the world. But I don't think the presidency is one of those jobs. I think a black president is by definition a better president because of the unique understandings, rhetoric, ways of connecting to country, types of moral suasion, demons and, yes, pressures they will be under. There are things that a white Democratic president might do that would be simply impossible for a black Democrat to do. Oppose reductions in mandatory drug minimums, for example.

But since so much about racial psychology is contradictory, hand and hand with the fear that Obama can't win is the equally racist fear that he can't lose. This fear about Obama isn't that he'll be, as Pandagon's Jesse Taylor put it, "Blackazoid, the Nubian Avenger, here to right all the perceived wrongs black people illegitimately feel were heaped on them since we solved racism in 1963," but that he'll be Oprah, Michael Jordan or Tiger Woods. This fear worries that no "regular" white person will ever win again once Obama has changed the game, especially not in a nation where millions and millions of potential voters recognize a Hova reference when they see one. And yes, I know there are lots of white stars in the NBA. White folks know them too, and know that they're Croatians and Canadians and Spaniards and so on.

The beauty of this terror is that it encompasses not just the black body that inspires it but all those bodies - black and otherwise - that are sympatico with that originating black body. White Resentment Democrats don't just resent black people, they have issues with the young and the cool and the internet and youtube and loud music and the agile - everything really that leaves them feeling out of touch and falling farther behind day by day. They disdained Kerry for being a "snob" and they would have resented John Edwards for being too good looking. Hillary doesn't represent these people, she roused them from a stupor in hopes of using them against Obama, and now she's about to slink off and leave the mess for him to fix.

But it's amazing, isn't it? A black nominee for the president of the United States! And not some Colin Powell ex-soldier bullshit aimed at the lizard brain, his blackness painted over in a protective layer of medals. Who woulda thunk it?

I didn't bother to read Edward N. Luttwak's May 12 New York Times op-ed President Apostate? because: A) it seemed stupid, and B) it seemed stupid, so I missed this example of assassination spam:

Apologies for the Hamsherite sourcing on that clip, but it was too good not to share.

FOX News analyst Liz Trotter, while discussing the Hillary RFK gaffe, mistakenly calls Obama "Osama," then, catching her error, laughingly goes on to joke of assassinating "both, if we could." [h/t Think Progress]

There is a Bruce Sterling novel (I think. Maybe Neal Stephenson? My books are still in storage) that includes the idea of a spam assassination engine. In the book, highly intelligent people known to suffer from certain forms of violence-producing mental illness are constantly spammed with encoded emails that subliminally suggest that a given target must be killed. The program is autonomous and long running, and it only needs one successful "conversion" in order to be measured a "success." You send out an encoded email a day to a million susceptible and capable people until someone tries to kill the target. What is that over five years? 1.8 billion messages, one assassination and a 0.000000054% conversion rate?

How many people were exposed to Hillary's gaffe or Trotter's joke either directly or in the context of reporting? I don't know which FOX segment Trotter was on, but, according to last week's ratings, FOX News tended to have between 800-900K people tuned into the channel every day during its daytime hours last week. What's a conservative estimate for the number of people who saw just that one clip? 100K? 200?

How many more such jokes will there be between now and November just on FOX? (FOX jokes about killing Obama times 100K viewers = ? between now and November?) What about if Obama wins? How many times will an equivalence be created between Obama and Osama bin Laden on air or online? How many joking references will there be to killing Obama in the first year of his presidency alone? How about the whole four years or during the 2012 campaign? Will the Secret Service investigate every single one of these jokes? Will they knock on Hillary's door or Liz Trotter's?

Asked why she's staying in the race, Hillary Clinton today evoked, of all things, the assassination of Bobby Kennedy. Talking Points Memo has video of the offending comment and of the non-apology.

I had to go over to the otherwise odious FOX News to learn that Clinton made much the same point on May 7th, but the story didn't catch on until she repeated it today and the reference was picked up by the Drudge Report. Clinton's subsequent non-apology (no reference to Obama or even why the comment might be offensive) and the Drudge sourcing indicates to me that her camp has processed this issue Jane Hamsher-style, meaning they view it as nothing more than "ginned up controversy" (to use Hamsher's words after the Blackface Joe incident) created by manifold enemies in order to "further distract from the issues important to the voters"Clintons. In this view of events, instead of legitimate concern over Clinton's word-choice, we have black folks, with our dumbness and our annoying hypersensitivity and tendency to keep losing leaders to gunfire, being played for cynical, strategic advantage.

As November draws near, expect the number of times someone - be they GOP and Democratic partisan - refers to, references or depicts people pointing guns at Obama, or lynching, or sexually torturing Michelle Obama to only go up. Exponentially.

When the right wing does it, it will be a media outrage, and when someone on the left does it, it will be just an "ooopsie!" that the right is trying to exploit, so shut your black mouth if you know what's good for you. That each of these episodes will feature white folks fantasizing about the physical mortification of the Obamas, and that racism is the one thing that often unites white folks across the political spectrum, will not be discussed.

Filmmaker Althea Wasow, likely in response to my saying in The Root that I couldn't think of any pro-Hillary Clinton viral videos, sent me this in the emails:

I thought we were buds, Althea?

Someone just IM'd to ask me why I didn't include nutcase Harlem preacher and youtube star James David Manning in my Root article on viral video and Obama. You guys have nothing to do all day except wait for your RSS feeds to update or something?

First off, I was on the high volume James Manning beat long before you were, so back the fuck up off me. (I would turn your speakers down before clicking the link above.)

Second of all, my piece is about viral video, not foul-mouthed Kooks from the Outer Limits of Human Belief. (That's one of my favorite books, BTW. I lent it to someone and never got it back.)

But the latest Reverend Manning clip - TRINITY OF HELL! - is above for my faithful ebogites. I should say that my naturally pervy (as in media pervy) inclinations make me a bad go-to guy on topics like Manning, not bad so much as unstrategic. I find him kind of fascinating because I find the aesthetics and rhetoric of American kookery fascinating in general. Manning is actually an amateur in terms of his kook-kung fu, being mostly just funny as opposed to crystal-bullet-through-the-forehead novel like, say, the Nuwaubians.

Speaking of which:

But the thing about Manning is that the somewhat smug amusement he inspires in me likely keeps me from understanding his use value in transmitting smears about Obama. (Too much irony is worse than none at all, to misquote Machine.) For example, Manning takes the stillborn "Obama=gay" meme and tries to revive it by casting the Wright-Obama fracaso as a lovers quarrel, and then piggybacks that on the already well-circulated "Oprah=lesbian" meme. It's completely bananas (like Manning) but not a bad example of kook electoracial psy-ops. If a version of that story pops up again on, say, FOX, we know who to blame.

...me for embedding that video and context-shifting it so that it seems less crazy? Doh!