Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 1763 } Location: Hudson Valley, NY
Posted: Wed 16 Sep 2009 18:46 Post subject:
Dragon Horse wrote:
actually many conservatives, as in my Post: Tue 15 Sep 2009 10:12 are starting to wish some of the "protesters" would shut up. Meanwhile, new polls show Obama's approval rating edging up...
I think you should have had "conservatives" in the quotes, not protesters...
His approval ratings will go up and they will go down. But they most likely will never be as high as they were 6 months ago, they could still be, but not likely.
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Wed 16 Sep 2009 20:31 Post subject:
DChapman wrote:
Dragon Horse wrote:
actually many conservatives, as in my Post: Tue 15 Sep 2009 10:12 are starting to wish some of the "protesters" would shut up. Meanwhile, new polls show Obama's approval rating edging up...
I think you should have had "conservatives" in the quotes, not protesters...
His approval ratings will go up and they will go down. But they most likely will never be as high as they were 6 months ago, they could still be, but not likely.
No president to my knowledge has ever maintained a 70% approval rating, if Obama goes into the next election with only 50% approval that is still good by historic standards.
Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 1763 } Location: Hudson Valley, NY
Posted: Wed 16 Sep 2009 21:16 Post subject:
Dragon Horse wrote:
Quote:
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
JIMMY CARTER
Racism Blamed for Clamor Over Obama
Former president Jimmy Carter said Tuesday that he believes race is at the core of much of the opposition to President Obama.
"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 in an interview. "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 shared the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans"
Continued Carter: "And that racism inclination still exists. . . . It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply."
The 39th president also predicted that Obama will be able to "triumph over the racist attitude that is the basis for the negative environment that we see so vividly demonstrated in public affairs in recent days."
It looks like the White House disagrees with Mr. Carter........
Quote:
W.H. disputes ex-pres. remark
By ALEXANDER BURNS
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs rejected former President Jimmy Carter's suggestion that President Barack Obama's ...
... critics were motivated by racial animus.
"The president does not believe that criticism comes based on the color of his skin," Gibbs said in his Wednesday briefing at the White House. "We understand that people have disagreements with some of the decisions that we've made and some of the extraordinary actions that had to be taken by both this administration and the previous administration."
In an NBC interview earlier in the week, Carter argued that 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."
Gibbs said it was unlikely that Obama had seen Carter's remarks.
"I doubt it. Not that he doesn't watch NBC," the spokesman joked to the network's White House correspondent.
Joined: 07 Feb 2007 {Posts: 1829 } Location: Lookin DC Metro, Feelin Geneva
Posted: Wed 16 Sep 2009 23:20 Post subject:
Quote:
But how many Southern whites aren’t sure whether the president has lied about his citizenship? The “South” defined by the poll includes 30 percent of the country’s population, in twelve states: Florida, North Carolina, South Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, Virginia, Tennessee, Kentucky, Louisiana, Arkansas, and Texas. That’s around 99.2 million people, of whom 61.3 million are non-Hispanic whites, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. According to the exit polls in those 12 states, 30.6 percent of the voters in this region who cast ballots in 2008 were black, Hispanic or members of another minority group.
According to Del Ali of Research 2000, if you excluded those people from the poll—if you look only at white voters in the South—the number of people who doubt Obama’s citizenship is higher than the 47 percent figure that has grabbed headlines today. “There was no deviation in the number of black, Hispanic, and other voters from one region of the country to another,” Ali told TWI. In the South, like everywhere else, the vast majority of non-white voters said that Obama was born in the United States; 97 percent of black voters, 87 percent of Hispanic voters, and 88 percent of other minorities. The extremely low overall percentage? That’s due to white Southerners, who dragged down the average with an extremely high level of doubt about Obama.
So what proportion of Southern whites doubt that Obama is an American citizen? While Ali did not release the racial breakdowns for the the South, and cautioned that the margin of error in the smaller sample of 720 people would be larger than the national margin of error (2 percent), the proportion of white Southern voters with doubts about their president’s citizenship may be higher than 70 percent. More than 30 percent of the people polled in the South were non-white, and very few of them told pollsters that they had questions about Obama’s citizenship. In order for white voters to drive the South’s “don’t know” number to 30 percent and it’s “born outside the United States” number to 23 percent, as many as three-quarters of Southern whites told pollsters that they didn’t know where Obama was born.
One thing to keep in mind, if only a quarter or a fifth of white Southerners believe Obama was born in the United States, that’s more than voted for him last year in some states. Obama won 14 percent of the white vote in Louisiana, 14 percent in Mississippi, and 10 percent in Alabama.
Joined: 24 May 2007 {Posts: 129 } Location: Danville, VA
Posted: Fri 18 Sep 2009 00:14 Post subject: The disagreement is based on (deliberate?) misunderstanding
Carter was accused of saying, paraphrased as saying "that he believes race is at the core of much of the opposition to President Obama." But the
following quote immediately gives the lie to the above summary. Carter wasn't talking about opposition generally, but a particular subset thereof: "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 in an interview.
There is a vast difference between "opposition" and "intensely demonstrated animosity." Everyone who equates the two is semi-willfully misrepresentating Carter's point and attacking a straw man. He went on to say:"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 shared the South's attitude toward minority groups at that time, particularly African Americans...And that racism inclination still exists. . . . It's an abominable circumstance, and it grieves me and concerns me very deeply."
And as a lifelong Southerner, I don't just agree with Carter about this, I KNOW he speaks the truth. (Went to college in Louisiana and grad school in Alabama, finding the blatant racism there shocking even as a fellow Southerner.) Thank God in the case of Senator Macaca, Virginians were faced with such blatant racism that no one could pretend it was something other than what it is. (Or rather, a great many could and did but not enough to get him reelected.) But I wonder if his flagrancy would have harmed him in the Deep South, or made him more popular.
Dean wrote:
It looks like the White House disagrees with Mr. Carter........
But yet another reporter attacks the same straw man, and so does the Presidential Press Secretary:
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs rejected former President Jimmy Carter's suggestion that President Barack Obama's ... critics were motivated by racial animus. "The president does not believe that criticism comes based on the color of his skin,"
Which has exactly ZERO to do with what Carter said, which was about intensely demonstrated animosity and not mere criticism.
And as a lifelong Southerner, I don't just agree with Carter about this, I KNOW he speaks the truth.
Jimmy Carter and you are in the minority because only a mere 12% of American voters agree with your so-called "truth". Your opinion on this subject is not very mainstream. Your opinion on this subject is considered to be on the fringes.
Link.
Joined: 24 May 2007 {Posts: 129 } Location: Danville, VA
Posted: Fri 18 Sep 2009 01:27 Post subject: Another straw man
Matt quoted me: "And as a lifelong Southerner, I don't just agree with Carter about this, I KNOW he speaks the truth." But got completely wrong just what it was that I agreed with in the above reference:
"Jimmy Carter and you are in the minority because only a mere 12% of American voters agree with your so-called "truth". Your opinion on this subject is not very mainstream. Your opinion on this subject is considered to be on the fringes."
Wow, three personal remarks in as many sentences, based on total incomprehension. The "this" I said "(in considerable personal detail) that I know to be true is the prevalence of racism in the South and its persistence as a problem in the nation. That has nothing to do with the survey question below, or with with the healthcare issue specifically.
But to my earlier point about "intensely demonstrated animosity" not being identical with mere opposition, this survey question takes the straw man of previous willful misrepresentations and makes it even worse--
"most opponents of Obama health care plan are racist." Piling one false equivalency on another! Carter said no such thing. I happen to oppose the "Obama health care plan" myself if you mean the monstrosity presented by Max Baucus.
Please refrain from personal remarks which do nothing to promote understanding, and poison the atmosphere here.
Posted: Fri 18 Sep 2009 13:43 Post subject: Re: Another straw man
kpauljohnson wrote:
But to my earlier point about "intensely demonstrated animosity" not being identical with mere opposition...
Let me see if I understand. You are saying (and Carter is saying) that, although opposition to Obama's policies is mostly content-driven, the frantic intensity of expression is mostly racial-perception-driven. Is that correct?
Joined: 02 May 2006 {Posts: 443 } Location: Île-de-France
Posted: Fri 18 Sep 2009 16:31 Post subject:
I think opposition to Barack Obama and his policies is a very complex, multi-faceted phenomenon. There are those who oppose him and his policies because they have carefully considered them, and they believe that their negative consequences would out weight the positive. They are also those who just believe everything that comes out of Glenn Beck's and Rush Limbaugh's mouths, and who think that worldnet daily is an unbiased news source. Furthermore, these two categories probably overlap. These are the same people who believed, and probably still believe that the Clintons were murderers and drug king pins. There is a disturbing tendency in US politics to demonize and ascribe the worst possible motives to one's political opponents. Stuff like the birther's and the occasional overtly racist cartoon are just the vehicle for expressing the hatred that is based on raw politics and the leftovers of the culture wars, and the general conservative tendency towards fear and distrust. Personally I think we would all do better to listen calmly and with an open mind to those we disagree with. Unfortunately, this doesn't generate ratings the same way that screaming about taking our country back does-whichever side is screaming.
Certainly some of those who don't like Barack Obama are racists, but I doubt that is responsible for a significant portion of the opposition. If Hillary Clinton would have won, or even John Edwards, I highly doubt the opposition would be much different.
Joined: 27 Nov 2004 {Posts: 1763 } Location: Hudson Valley, NY
Posted: Fri 18 Sep 2009 16:54 Post subject:
Mister Lawyer wrote:
They are also those who just believe everything that comes out of Glenn Beck's and Rush Limbaugh's mouths, and who think that worldnet daily is an unbiased news source.
I'll tell you what about WorldNet Daily, they have more political investigative reporting than does the NYT and the like. They are now doing the job that the "traditional media" operatives used to. I mean, the NYT did not even touch on Van Jones until he was resigning. So I guess it all boils down to what your political philosophy is.
Mister Lawyer wrote:
Certainly some of those who don't like Barack Obama are racists, but I doubt that is responsible for a significant portion of the opposition. If Hillary Clinton would have won, or even John Edwards, I highly doubt the opposition would be much different.
Yes, I agree, this is what I have been saying all along.
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