Media: Boy Oh Boy, Barrack, We Couldn’t Wait!

In a rural Iowa campaign stop for John Edwards, a genuine or planted audience question finally let the proverbial “Black cat” out of the bag. And believe me, the press has been salivating for the event. Some doddering old bigot in the crowd asked in a seemingly oblique and confused manner how Edwards and the Democrats would deal with the “OJ Simpson” issue. At first, Edwards scratched his head and wondered what in the hell the guy was talking about. In follow up, the audience member pointed out his belief that the jury in the OJ Simpson criminal trial found the Black American defendant innocent as “payback” for the mistreatment of Black Americans in society. In a continued confused ramble, the audience member speculated that if Barrack Obama were elected President, it follows that Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton and Oprah Winfrey would demand recompense for Black Americans because of such maltreatment through Obama.

Well the press rushed to blow up what typically would have been viewed as a crackpot incident at a campaign stump. Instead of giving the incident the lack of attention it deserved, it became a major media event upon which various pundits have speculated that the incident shows that Iowans are basically racists, even if they are hiding that racism in the closet. Others have suggested that the racial issue is a subtext in the Presidential election that will undoubtedly provide grist for the media mill in weeks to come. How this old coot became "representative"of anyone, including Iowans is a confounding question.

It would seem beyond obvious that all Black folks do not think alike or happen to be close allies as the bigoted kook’s question would suggest. No two people's views could be farther apart than the views espoused by Obama and Secretary of State Rice, both of whom happen to be politicians of color. Even if Obama, Jackson, Sharpton and Winfrey held the same view about the OJ Simpson , an assumption that is extremely doubtful - if any of them even give a rat’s patoot about the subject any more, the notion that such commonality would have any relevance to an Obama presidency is totally absurd.

As Edwards pointed out, there are many current and real issues that face the American public, and Black Americans seem to be disproportionately bereft of health care, educational opportunities and health care. Rather than focusing on an irrelevant topic of the OJ trial, we ought to be focused on what can be done now and in the future to address these disparities so that America can perhaps become a land of truly equal opportunity. That was a relatively nice save by Edwards in an embarrassingly difficult situation.

Perhaps the most we can profitably draw from the event is that there still lurk among the voting public a significant number of racist and bigoted political Neanderthals who are opposed to the idea of a Black President [and seem seriously frightened by their ignorance]. Secondly, a fourth estate devoid of scruples and judgment lies in wait for such a salacious and unworthy topic to be raised so that it can be exploited. The media have been feasting on the notion that many similarly retrograde voters are fearful of having a woman in the White House. But these same media representatives have been fearful of bringing up the “N” word. They needed the help of some crackpot bigot in rural Iowa to raise the issue so that they could exploit it.

Hopefully, the event will die a well deserved prompt death and the media can focus on some of the real issues that seriously threaten to undermine our democracy. Cutting off health care and educational funding while demanding billions of dollars for Iraq is a greater concern regarding where government largesse should go than whether Obama is concerned about OJ Simpson. We now know, for example, that various boondoggles like the base in Iraq for which the American public has paid over $31 billion dollars and was never built are all too common. Whether the next President is Black, White, man, woman or frog, we should be asking what the candidates will do to put a stop to such corruption and hemorrhaging of the public treasury. The real issue, as usual, is not Black of White, but a green one.