Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama Speak in Selma, Alabama

Senator Obama and Senator Clinton gave good speeches in Selma, Alabama over the weekend. From what I hear, Barack Obama had the stronger reception but the truth is that both Democratic presidential candidates were well received. Here's the story from Richard Fausset and Jennie Jarvie of the Los Angeles Times:

Presidential candidate Barack Obama staked his claim to the African American experience Sunday, despite a personal background far from the bloodshed that was typified in this Deep South city during the struggle for civil rights.

Yes, the senator said, his grandfather was a Kenyan, but a racist system similar to America's limited him to work as a cook for whites. Yes, Obama said, his mother was a white woman from Kansas. But she learned colorblindness from the likes of Selma's 1965 freedom marchers, marrying the son of that cook in Hawaii.

All of that, Obama said, made him "the offspring of the movement" — and it made his first visit to Selma a sort of homecoming.

"Don't tell me I'm not coming home when I come to Selma, Alabama," the Illinois Democrat said.

(snip)

Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, the Democratic front-runner, was also here to celebrate the anniversary of the Edmund Pettus Bridge crossing, in which black protesters were beaten by white state troopers on March 7, 1965.

Clinton brought her husband, the former president, a beloved figure among many black voters who was inducted into the hall of fame of the National Voting Rights Museum. She too claimed to be a beneficiary of the civil rights era — because it eventually led to advances for women.

Despite some serious questions I've raised about the Clintons and the Iraq war, I continue to think well of them. It's clear Hillary Clinton is still trying to figure out how to incorporate Bill Clinton in her campaign—in fact, that may become her biggest challenge. Given Wesley Clark's assertion that the Bush administration had considerable ambitions in 2002 in terms of taking on more than just Iraq, I continue to have questions about how much Bill Clinton knew about these things. What kind of discussions did he have, for example, with Tony Blair? And what kind of discussions with Hillary? I hope Senator Clinton doesn't think she can avoid some of the questions around her vote and around Bill Clinton connection to the Iraq policy by simply piling up enough money to simply overwhelm her Democratic competition. The Republicans will not be so easy with her if she wins the nomination.

I continue to like Barack Obama but I admit to worrying about how much is there beyond his rhetorical brilliance. He would be a good president but our nation is in trouble and we need the best president we can get. Let's hope if the senator from Illinois is still hot a year from now and is winning the nomination that he is what we hope he is.

I'm still puzzled by how Barack Obama is covered. There are people who seem to accuse Senator Obama of not really experiencing what it's like to be black since his father was African and he was raised in Hawaii, far from Alabama. But that's ridiculous too. Those who are black Americans share the same experience in school, jobs and elsewhere. Barack Obama also worked for a number of years in community organizing on the south side of Chicago; that's a powerful experience in itself.

I guess Republicans are finally beginning to worry about Obama though. They have recently pointed out that Barack Obama's family on his mother's side (who's white) were slaveholders way back when. Actually, since most African Americans have some white blood in their background, it's very common to have ancestors who owned slaves, if you go back far enough. I suspect most Americans, including whites, who can trace their family tree to those who were here in the United States before 1800 would find relatives on the family tree who were slaveholders. That happens to be true of one side of my own family.

Slavery was the one big issue our founding fathers wrangled with and could not solve when they wrote the US Constitution but it should be noted that they ended the trade and that many men of the constitutional convention would have preferred to end slavery. We forget too easily how far we have come and how much work there is to do. When conservative or right wing Republicans play games with the history of the law, people should remember that, in fact, we inherited the laws of kings and cavaliers in 1776, and not the laws of free men (and later, women). Despite the serious problem of not dealing fully with slavery, the US Constitution and the Bill of Rights moved clearly in the direction of real freedom. Now Republican movers and shakers talk about being free and etc. but when you scrutinize what they're doing, their objective is to protect the status of the wealthy and the privileged. It's 2007, and we are still creating the laws of a free nation and we still have a ways to go.