MLK, Obama, Race And Health Care Reform

SusanAnne Hiller suggests that Obama sees himself as carrying on the MLK legacy regarding health care reform as a civil right. While, in a sense, true, I think it's a bit more complex than that.

What the GOP fails to realize is that President Obama is fighting so hard on health care reform because the issue, for him, is finishing the work of Martin Luther King and the Civil Rights movement. Obama has some influential company in this belief.

While true enough, I'm not sure it's entirely accurate. I believe Obama sees himself as a post-racial force. While he's perfectly willing to play the race card for tactical advantage, as he did during his campaign, he also knows it's divisive and can be problematic in passing sweeping legislation. He doesn't cast, or perhaps even see, the issue as one of race. It's more a matter of class structure in Obama's post-racial America. He cuts through that early part of the King legacy to focus on what eventually might have become the underlying core of it had King lived to evolve even more. It's about economics.

As King told journalist David Halberstam, "For years I labored with the idea of reforming the existing institutions of the society, a little change here, a little change there. Now I feel quite differently. I think you've got to have a reconstruction of the entire society, a revolution of values." For King, this recognition was not a source of bitterness but a reason to revise his strategy. If one believed that whites basically desired to do the right thing, then a little moral persuasion was sufficient. But if one believed that whites had to be made to behave in the right way, one had to employ substantially more than moral reasoning.

The first half of the paragraph above is post-racial. The second half isn't. And I'm not sure it's fair, or accurate, to frame Obama with the second half of it without really knowing him. And we don't really need to. For practical purposes, Obama is a socialist, or Marxist, if you prefer. I think it better to take him on on those terms, as opposed to injecting racial motivations into it.

As an aside, one might be able to better understand how, in the context of the early Sixties, some suspected King of having ties to communists. Well, he did, actually. But the full extent of any influence their thinking may have had on him isn't clear. So, is Obama carrying on the King legacy? Yes. But is it about race? I'm less certain of that. But his calls for social justice are, in fact, code for a call to socialism, or wealth transfer by government decree. There's really no disputing that, no matter how much lipstick the Progressives wish to apply to what amounts to a government run pig-out at taxpayer expense.

The FBI, under written directive from Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, began telephone tapping King in the Fall of 1963.[44] Concerned that allegations (of Communists in the SCLC), if made public, would derail the Administration's civil rights initiatives, Kennedy warned King to discontinue the suspect associations, and later felt compelled to issue the written directive authorizing the FBI to wiretap King and other leaders of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.[45] J. Edgar Hoover feared Communists were trying to infiltrate the Civil Rights Movement, but when no such evidence emerged, the bureau used the incidental details caught on tape over the next five years in attempts to force King out of the preeminent leadership position

Comments

[Huey]

Obama is pursuing the Health Care (insurance) Reform agenda for the simple purpose of ultimately giving control of Health Care to the Federal Government. He is pursuing this agenda for the same reason he pursues his Education and Energy agendas, i.e., to increase the size and power of the Federal Government.

He is a "true believer," not an ordinary politician who can be counted on to make political choices based on political expediency -- or to save his own political hide -- or to save the political hides of his party. He wants federal control of Health Care simply because he knows that, if he gets it in place, in ANY form, it will, as does EVERY governmental intrusion, GROW, and, ultimately, it will displace all private insurance.

Once that happens, the left will have WON. Not "won for now." Not "won until the next election cycle."

WON.

Once the apparatus is in place, once the American voting public is dependent upon the federal government (and individual representatives) for our health care, no candidate will be able to win on a "get rid of national health care" platform any more than any can win on a "get rid of social security" or "get rid of Medicare" platform even though the beneficiaries of THOSE programs represent only a FRACTION of the voting public, while a fully federalized national health care system would represent the ENTIRE voting public. Every voter, when entering the voting booth, would be forced, out of self-preservation, into voting for the candidate who, at the very worst, didn't REDUCE his health care options, so it would be a race to the left -- just as in Europe.

Reagan knew this. Obama knows this.

Any examination of his political motives which attempt to frame his motivations in any fashion other than this is simply off the mark.

[buck johnson]

Another brave and courageous act dan, like your DC subway ride. King died for beliefs, whil you are afraid to ride a train in DC.

I get a kick out of all you folks who cry about 'government takeover", and 'government welfare" and transfer of wealth. I suppose it did not stop those to claim credits for interest on their tax returns, or taking credits/deductions, for having children, on their income tax return, or filing married thus limiting their tax exposure. All of these are forms of takeover, welfare, and wealth transfers.

[Huey]

buck: So, in your mind, the slim majority of people who actually PAY TAXES should not take their legal deductions and pay even more than the law requires that they pay, else they have no right to object to the fact that one half of the populace is supporting the other half?

I'm thinking that's a losing argument.

[buck johnson]

Huey, do you have a dictionary? Or are you a tea bagger? If you have one, or have access to one, please look up the word hypocrisy.

Sorta of like the health care debate and the so-called socialized medicine and death panels arguments.

If you don not want wealth transfer (single people like myslef have to subsidized folks who are married and/or have children), then do not take the credit/deduction.

[buck johnson]

Huey, do you have a dictionary? Or are you a tea bagger? If you have one, or have access to one, please look up the word hypocrisy.

Sorta of like the health care debate and the so-called socialized medicine and death panels arguments.

If you do not want wealth transfer (single people like myself have to subsidized folks who are married and/or have children), then do not take the credit/deduction

Also, I think that for dan to take potshots at MLK, a man brave enough to die for his belief, is hypocrisy at its fullest. dan, who is scared to ride a DC subway.

[Huey]

buck: Yes, I have a dictionary. Let me demonstrate:

It's "Sort of like" or "Sorta like" -- not "Sorta of like."

It's "single people like [me] have to subsidize[] folks" not "single people like myself have to subsidized folks"

And, no. I don't engage in that particular sexual practice. (NTTAWWIIYKWIM) I don't know why you associate that sexual practice with the ownership/possession of a dictionary, but -- that's on you.

And, just for future reference: When someone objects to adding more of something which already exists, that is not an endorsement of the current reality, nor is it a complete rejection of that "something" entirely.

For example: Most "conservatives" believe in small government. That doesn't mean that they believe in NO government. It just means that they believe is LESS government than do some who believe in MORE government. When "conservatives" object to a GROWTH in the power and size of government, they aren't REJECTING government; they're just saying that IT'S TOO BIG. So, too, when "conservatives" (or anyone else, for that matter) say that they don't want any more socialism, that doesn't mean that they reject ALL applications of "socialism" (especially ones which are firmly entrenched and would cause incredible hardship to displace), they are saying, for the most part, that they don't want any MORE.

There. All fixed now.

[buck johnson]

Sorry Huey, first this is an Internet blog. No one is interested in any grammar lessons. Though my sixth grade English teacher Mrs. Briet would be in horror, no one cares about past participle forms. I know I don't, at least not in this format. And as much as I needed the English lesson, you need a history lesson. Conservatives keep talking about socialism...but have no idea what an actual socialist government does to the governed. Read your history books about what folks endured under a true socialist government.

Finally, to get back to dan's blog, I objected to him trying to tie MLK to communists. If true, what was wrong with that? Communists have always believed in social justice and equality among the races, a goal MLK was also after.

[David R. Graham]

Right but ...

It may be tactically ill-advised to raise the race issue, focusing instead on the socialism factor. Probably is .... I'm no expert, surely.

However, the race issue is so patently and vigorously present that trying to elide it can be as much a liability as an asset, tactically speaking, so it seems to me. One can say as so many of his supporters did of POTUS GWB, "You fight terrorists overseas and invite them to the White House for lunch and install them as chief advisors at DOD, DOS and DHS?"

Eliding the race issue risks broadcasting that one isn't serious about getting the personality and the like others that accompany it out of office.

MLK was a womanizer, he was assassinated emerging from a meet. He tried to hide it, and other negativities. He was not a hero deserving a national holiday.

He was an orator and he didn't need a teleprompter.

But he was not an Afro-Hegemonist or an ideological racist. Nor was he on a personal power and government tyranny trip, whether one calls it socialist or fascist -- and the current example is both in the sense that it is simply tyranny but with the added attraction of central racial character. ("You crackers is going to be ruled by the black man, get used to is, you won't have another chance.")

MLK came from a completely different background compared to the cat occupying the White House and their mate. His people despised Jesse Jackson for what he was and remains, a thief, an idler, a cheat and a charlatan.

The cat occupying the White House is to the character and intent of MLK as fire is to a forest, shot to a eagle, poison to a fish, nerve gas to an atmosphere.

[Huey]

buck: You're correct. I looked it up. This IS an "internet blog" (although, I'm not sure of what OTHER kind of "blog" exists...)

That, of course, would explain your decision to insult me, using the lame "do you own a dictionary" offering, then slapping on the "teabagger" tag-line (a non sequitur which is only rational in a fevered mind).

Your notion that "conservatives don't know what socialism does to the governed" is, again, a belief which exists only in your mind, unsupported by any facts (which, of course, is a good definition of "irrational.") Like your obligitory "teabagger" reference, you appear to believe that only liberals (perhaps only you) have a full understanding of ... well ... anything.

But, when it comes down to it, you (and most liberals) simply don't have any cogent argument on any substantive issue; you have insults. Sans argument, "debate" for liberals is reduced to an internet version of "the dozens."

And, like every over-used insult, the effectiveness of it dulls with use and time so that "raaaaacist" and "homophobe" and "teabagger" are just noise meaning nothing to anyone -- even to the one hurling the insult.

It's sad, really. There was a time when being called a raaaaacist was an insult; then it became a badge of honor; and, finally an invitation to a yawn.

Yawn.

[xerocky]

" It's more a matter of class structure in Obama's post-racial America. "

No. Otherwise Holder wouldn't have dropped the black panther voter intimidation case. That was a calculated move to piss off white people. Why? Just to show who's in charge now. Believe it.

[Generic viagra]

The first half of the paragraph above is post-racial. The second half isn't. And I'm not sure it's fair, or accurate, to frame Obama with the second half of it without really knowing him.