Obama candidacy: high stakes for USA

By Rick Morris

Hillary Clinton's campaign is seizing on the prospect of Barack Obama raising hopes that can't possibly be fulfilled as a desperate grasp to keep him from the Democratic nomination. However, despite the fact that everything she says should be taken with an entire shaker full of salt, there is an underlying undeniable truth that is at least somewhat related to Hillary's point: the Obama candidacy has moved this country to a point where the stakes are very high in terms of any potential for national unity and maybe even viability down the road.

Although it's folly to draw too close a comparison with the Middle East, because our country on its worst day is 1,000 times more stable than the lands of feuding fanatics in the desert will ever be, it's worth thinking back to the launch of the Second Intifada in 2000. The first (and God willing, only) President Clinton brought together the key players in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict to try to put together a nice 11th-hour gloss on his troubled legacy. Hopes were high as the parties agreed on almost all key points. And then -- it collapsed. Yasser Arafat walked away from the table at the end, unable or (probably) unwilling to compromise on the final sticking points. At that point, the bitterness of the raised expectations boiled over and the Palestinians took their militant operations to new heights, threatening the entire region.

Now, I don't think anything like that is possible in the literal sense here in America. I'm even dubious that we'd see a repeat of the urban riots of the late 1960s or those that followed the Rodney King verdicts of 1992. I could be wrong, but I don't think the strife that could arise between the races in this country will erupt in the streets.

However, it's not necessary to have a situation crest to that level for it to truly become a crisis. This country has traveled down a long road of redemption, first becoming the only country to go through a bloody war with itself to extinguish the crimes of slavery, then legislatively addressing the wrongs of Jim Crow. While the media has long harped on remaining points of contention between the races, such as how to administer affirmative action programs, we're at a point of overall peace between races in this country that our parents and grandparents probably could not have envisioned. Go talk to an elderly relative if you don't believe this assertion.

But with the country very much on the verge of electing its first black president, hopes have been raised to a point that could prove dangerous for all of us down the road. Let's examine some scenarios:

^ Hillary overtakes Obama for the nomination through "shenanigans." We've already addressed the point that Hillary has to pretty much leave a smoking crater where Obama used to be if she's to still get nominated. How's that going to go over in the minority community, with a longtime purported friend of theirs destroying their would-be pioneer?

^ John McCain comes back in the polls to win in November. With cynicism still high in the black community on issues of racial justice (for reasons I would partially agree with, given this nation's history), how's it going to look if McCain pulls out a win when all the polls indicate otherwise? Frankly, to many blacks it'll look like this country would never elect a black man under any circumstances.

^ The worst case of all: assassination. The internal strife this country endured in the 1960s over matters of race and war shook us all like nothing since the Civil War. I daresay that if the worst fears of many blacks are realized and Obama does not survive his campaign, the Sixties might look like a cakewalk in terms of ANY prospects for significant national unity. There's no way to ever undo the damage that such a tragedy would inflict on our country, no way to avoid the permanent bitterness if not outright hatred that a significant percentage of our fellow Americans would always carry with them. To a much, much lesser extent, the same would be true if Obama had an unsuccessful presidency and did not get reelected; the sense would be that America dumped him at the first available opportunity regardless of what any of the facts on the ground were.

Because assassination would rip this nation apart at the seams from now until the end of time, it's especially unforgivable that the Secret Service had such an egregious lapse (in Dallas of all places!) when they reportedly relaxed weapons screening at an Obama rally in the interest of speeding up the process. Because an Obama assassination would be more damaging to the country than any single killing that has happened in our history, his security detail should be significantly above and beyond that of any other candidate. The full weight of the disciplinary process needs to come down on any individuals responsible for this idiotic and amateurish decision.

Aside from keeping Obama's security air-tight, there's nothing that can be done to head off any damage from the possibility of high hopes being dashed. At the end of the day, he's a politician like anyone else, albeit a very talented one, and he's going to have to navigate the political process like anyone else. If he has a successful presidency, he'll move us much further along the path to racial reconciliation that we collectively began in the 1960s. Anything short of that is going to set us back in terms of truly being "One Nation Under God," and the only question is how far we get set back.

Perspectives on MLK Day

By Rick Morris

America's most-scrutinized legal holiday is upon us. Every year, as Martin Luther King Day approaches, pundits everywhere ponder the meaning of the day, King's message, and what both would have meant going forward had the tragic circumstances in April of 1968 in Memphis not occurred.

This column, from the always-interesting Paul Greenberg, is entitled "Martin Luther King: The Radical as Conservative." In it, he argues somewhat persuasively that contrary to the image many now have as King the would-be changer of everything that America stood for, King actually was calling for America to reaffirm and live up to its stated values and for individuals to take the responsibility to better their own lives and those of their loved ones and countrymen. I agree, that does sound like a conservative message. As someone on the right, I can attest that true colorblindness is a conservative principle. What ended up muddying the waters on civil rights, to the long-term detriment of the conservative movement, was the fact that many powerful racist whites were able to tap into the legitimate language of "states' rights" and the resentment that flowed from the federal government asserting complete power over the states ever since FDH tried to unilaterally write the 10th Amendment out of the Constitution.

But ultimately, Greenberg does not account for the economic and foreign policy elements that were creeping into King's message in his final years. He was adopting many stances that were very, very liberal on redistribution of wealth and the rightful role of the United States and its military around the world. Given the fact that America was locked in an existential struggle with the Soviet Union and its satellites at the time and that the statist economic policies of the Great Society were creating incentives that further preyed upon poor communities, it's impossible for me or any other intellectually honest conservative to get behind that part of the message.

Personally, I've never been a huge fan of how exactly the holiday was implemented. Given that King was not so egocentric as to have wanted a personal celebration of himself every year and given that I think something that celebrates America is more appropriate, I'd rather that we have an annual "Equality Day" instead. Celebrate King, but also Nat Turner, Booker T. Washington and a host of others who worked to push America in the right direction. While we castigate ourselves endlessly for the sins of slavery, as we probably should, we also need to remember that no other nation fought a violent tug-of-war for its soul on that subject and came out the right way. Granted, the shameful Jim Crow era is impossible to put any kind of a gloss on, but again, America did respond to pressure to get rid of it. That's the beauty of this country; we screw up just as much as anyone else, but we're uniquely positioned to atone for our errors.

But it seems that we keep coming back to the same place, one that we are fated to repeat every year as a consensus about Martin Luther King fails to gel. His ultimate legacy and this holiday are like a national Rorschach Test as those of us from different points of view perceive what we are likely to see from our own perspectives.

The real “Black Quarterback Syndrome”

By Rick Morris

The ridiculous heat that Vince Young has taken this week seems to dictate that we spell out for you one more time what really constitutes the “Black Quarterback Syndrome.”

Donovan McNabb implied earlier this year in his crybaby diatribe that black quarterbacks are persecuted more than their white peers and that the racial dynamic involved is just a perpetration of Jim Crow attitudes. Wrong.

Black quarterbacks don’t suffer because of bias against them; they suffer because they are put on too high of a pedestal.

The truism “no man is an island” never seems to be applied to goalies in hockey and quarterbacks in football. Ignorant and emotionally driven fans and analysts refuse to acknowledge the extent to which these players (like everyone else) are dependent on supportive efforts from teammates and coaching philosophies with a chance of success. Goalies Chris Osgood and Curtis Joseph dealt with shameful lack of fan appreciation throughout their tenures in Detroit and quarterback Tim Couch suffered the slings and arrows of an uneducated fanbase in Cleveland that refused to fathom that a bad organization and coaching staff had stacked the deck against him.

As such, black quarterbacks are not the only players in sports to suffer scrutiny that may become unfair, although their ups and downs are always considered newsworthy by our modern race-obsessed media. But the predominant reason for their struggles eludes everyone, although the dots are very easy to connect.

We at FDH predicted before the season that Vince Young would have some issues this year with lack of support. Certainly, in a purely statistical sense, we knew that he would not be a great fantasy football value and we had him 14^th on our draft board when he showed up 9^th on our “experts’ draft board” (an average of other leading industry websites and magazines). The reason?

Arguably the worst wide receiver corps in the league catching his passes.

Sadly, Young fits a pattern in the NFL that stretches back several years. McNabb never had a legitimate #1 wide receiver before Terrell Owens. Mike Vick, although highly inaccurate and a bad citizen, in all fairness had a bunch of scrubs catching his passes. Byron Leftwich never had anyone worth a pitcher of warm spit hauling in his throws after Jimmy Smith retired (although, frankly, that has far more to do with the rank incompetence of the Jacksonville front office when it comes to evaluating wideouts – they have spent high draft picks and free agency money, but they are hopeless in terms of their talent recruitment). Daunte Culpepper never had anyone who wasn’t a waste of protoplasm playing wide receiver with him after Randy Moss left town.

Essentially, because the terms “black quarterback” and “mobile quarterback” have become one and the same in the public mind, and the concept of the mobile quarterback has become revered in the football world, there is the sense that talented black quarterbacks can do no wrong. NFL front offices take this thought process, such as it is, and run with it. Why bother to spend finite resources on great wide receivers, the logic seems to be, when we can put those resources elsewhere and count on our superstar to succeed offensively all by himself?

And this theory gets propagated year in and year out by well-respected and well-paid pro personnel men!

The Vince Young situation is very simple. I’ll break it down for you here. Yes, he may be having some typical second-year issues in which he must counter-adjust to the adjustments that defenses have made to him. But the vast majority of his problems stem from the fact that his wide receiving core is not even Arena League-worthy. Get him some help and he’ll be a top statistical quarterback who makes several Pro Bowls over the course of his career. Leave him with the dregs he’s got now and he’ll continue to be a piñata for uninformed people who want to bury him when he’s got no chance to succeed.