zFebruary 7, 2007
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Ready for Obama Already
By MARTIN PLISSNER
Washington
WITH Barack Obama expected to announce on Saturday that he’s running for president, if you enter “America,” “ready” and “black president” in a Google search, you’ll get around 125,000 hits. When pollsters bring up those words with random samples of voters — and they’ve done it a lot recently — they get “yes” answers from 62 percent (CNN), 56 percent (Newsweek), 58 percent (Gallup) and 55 percent (CBS).
Most of these surveys, however, ask people only if the rest of America is ready for it to happen, not about being ready themselves to make it happen. When one poll asked Republicans and Democrats if they would vote for a “qualified” black of their own party, barely 5 percent said no — hardly surprising, as doing so would be a frank acknowledgment of prejudice.
A much better poll would consist of giving an actual set of candidates’ names at the end of a real campaign. Fortunately, 10 years ago such a test was actually done.
On Nov. 5, 1996, Voter News Service — the organization hired by the TV networks to do exit polling — asked people at the polls, who had just given Bill Clinton 49 percent of the vote, Bob Dole 41 percent and Ross Perot 8 percent, how they would have voted if the Republican candidate had been Gen. Colin L. Powell. In an exit poll sample of 3,697 (three times the size of a standard high-grade public opinion survey), the result was this:
Powell: 50 percent.
Clinton: 38 percent.
Perot: 9 percent.
This finding, however, was not part of the pooled report shared by all the networks; it was commissioned by CBS News, of which I was then political director. As often happens, however, when there’s a lot of big news, this bit of data got buried in an end-of-night roundup and was quickly forgotten. But it does suggest there was a day when Americans, had they been given a choice of major party candidates, one of whom was black, would very likely have chosen the black one.
Most significantly, General Powell would have won the race because of the support of white voters — Bill Clinton outpolled him 2 to 1 among the blacks surveyed. Among white voters, whom Senator Dole had carried very narrowly (too narrowly for him to win), General Powell clobbered the incumbent, 53 percent to 33 percent.
Any poll analysis has to be hedged with qualifications, and this one more than most. Bill Clinton and Bob Dole had just been through bruising year-long campaigns and exposed to more than $100 million of take-no-prisoners advertising. Colin Powell had not. He was still being acclaimed for his role as the country’s top soldier in its only clear victory since World War II.
Still, even with these qualifiers, there is a pretty good, if not quite conclusive, case that America has for some time been ready to elect a black president. The question for Barack Obama is whether this time around it will be ready for this one.
Martin Plissner is the author of “The Control Room: How Television Calls the Shots in Presidential Election
February 7, 2007
OP-ED CONTRIBUTOR
Right Candidates, Wrong Question
By GLORIA STEINEM
EVEN before Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton threw their exploratory committees into the ring, every reporter seemed to be asking which candidate are Americans more ready for, a white woman or a black man?
With all due respect to the journalistic dilemma of reporting two “firsts” at the same time — two viable presidential candidates who aren’t the usual white faces over collars and ties — I think this is a dumb and destructive question.
It’s dumb because most Americans are smart enough to figure out that a member of a group may or may not represent its interests. After all, many African-Americans opposed the appointment of Clarence Thomas to the Supreme Court in 1991 because they were aware of his record — and the views of his conservative supporters.
Similarly, most women weren’t excited about Elizabeth Dole as a presidential candidate for the 2000 election because she seemed more attached to those in power than those in need of it. Indeed, Elizabeth Dole even got support from people who opposed women making their own reproductive decisions. (If Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice decides to run for president, I imagine that she would face the same fate.)
The question is also destructive because it’s divisive. In fact, women of all races and men of color — who together form an underrepresented majority of this country — have often found themselves in coalition. Both opposed the wars in Vietnam and Iraq more and earlier than their white male counterparts. White women have also been more likely than white men to support pro-equality candidates of color, and people of color have been more likely to support pro-equality white women.
It’s way too early to know which candidate will earn trust or survive Swift-boating, but forcing a choice between race and sex only conceals what’s really going on.
So far, for example, polls show that about 60 percent of African-American Democrats support Hillary Clinton, while only about 20 percent support Barack Obama. These surprising numbers probably have less to do with Senator Obama himself than with whether people feel he’s been around long enough to trust, whether the name “Clinton,” with its associations of racial inclusiveness, is a better bet, and whether a member of one’s own group — a group that has endured a history of discrimination — could win anyway.
This disease of doubt plays a big role: 81 percent of black voters tell pollsters that a white man will get the Democratic nomination, while only 58 percent of white voters do. Such doubt also helps to explain why women are more likely than men to support Hillary Clinton, but also more likely to say she can’t win.
Still, the larger question is: Why compare allies and ignore the opposition? Both Senators Clinton and Obama are civil rights advocates, feminists, environmentalists and critics of the war in Iraq, though she voted early and wrong, and he spoke out early and right. Both have resisted pandering to the right, something that sets them apart from any Republican candidate, including John McCain. Both have Washington and foreign policy experience; George W. Bush did not when he first ran for president.
But the greatest reason for progressives to refuse to be drawn into an irrelevant debate about Senators Clinton and Obama is that it is destructive. We can accomplish much more if we act as a coalition. Think, for instance, of the powerful 19th-century coalition for universal adult suffrage. The parallels between being a chattel slave by race and chattel as a wife, daughter or indentured worker turned abolitionists into suffragists, and vice versa. This coalition against a caste system based on race and sex turned the country on its head — until it was divided by giving the vote to its smallest part, Negro men.
Sojourner Truth famously warned that this division would cripple the movement for decades to come — and it did. Only a half-century later did white and black women get the vote, by then tarnished by the racist rhetoric of some white women and diminished by racist restrictions and violence at polls. And only decades after that, in the 1960s, did the civil rights movement start a new wave of equality that spread into feminism, the Native American movement, the gay and lesbian movement, and much more.
But those activists were reinventing the wheel. They were rediscovering Gunnar Myrdal’s verdict of the 1940s that “the parallel between women and Negroes is the deepest truth of American life, for together they form the unpaid or underpaid labor on which America runs.”
This time, we could learn from history. We could double our chances by working for one of these candidates, not against the other. For now, I’ve figured out how to answer reporters when they ask if I’m supporting Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama.
I just say yes.
February 6, 2007
RIO DE JANEIRO JOURNAL
Drawing Lines Across the Sand, Between Classes
By LARRY ROHTER
RIO DE JANEIRO — Brazilians like to say that the beach is their country’s “most democratic space.” But some bodies — and some beaches — are more equal than others.
In the Brazilian imagination, the beach has traditionally been regarded as the great leveler, “the place where the general, the teacher, the politician, the millionaire and the poor student” were all equal, said Roberto da Matta, an anthropologist and newspaper columnist who is a leading social commentator. “Their bodies were all made equally humble,” he said, by the near-naked proximity of “one body with others, all of them without defense or disguise.”
But here in Brazil’s postcard city, where the summer vacation season is in full swing, the hierarchy, in which both class and skin color play a part, is clear to all. The beaches facing the ocean in elite neighborhoods on the south side and those who frequent them rank higher than those on the north side, fronting the polluted Guanabara Bay.
In Rio, 59 beaches spread out along 110 miles of sand. Even the city’s most elite beaches, Ipanema and Copacabana, and their lesser-known extensions, Leblon and Leme, are informally subdivided into sectors, demarcated by a dozen lifeguard stations called postos, each about a half-mile from the next. Each posto, numbered 1 to 12, has a culture of its own, appeals to a different “tribe” and can be inhospitable to interlopers.
Brazil has nearly 5,000 miles of tropical coastline, and “by law, the beach is always public property and never private,” said Patrícia Farias, author of “Grabbing Some Color at the Beach,” a study of race relations on Rio’s beaches. “The discourse is always one of, ‘We all live together democratically,’ but the second, unspoken part of that is ‘but it has to be by my rules.’ ”
In Rio, Posto 9 has been at the top of the heap for more than 30 years. It is favored by left-wing intellectuals, who fly the flag of the governing Workers’ Party there, as well as by entertainers and former hippies.
The area between Postos 11 and 12 in Leblon is the redoubt of upper-middle-class mothers and their small children. That phenomenon emerged about 20 years ago, when a sidewalk kiosk selling coconuts and drinks installed a diaper-changing station and a small playground in hopes of seeing business grow.
“Ipanema is always in the vanguard, but Leblon has more of a family vibe,” João Fontes, of the Leblon community association, said when asked to compare the two beaches, which are separated by only a narrow canal. “We’d rather be quiet and unassuming than to brag.”
At the other end of Ipanema, Posto 7 is a favorite gathering spot for local surfers. But it also draws outsiders, many of them dark-skinned, from working-class suburbs up to a three-hour bus ride away, especially on weekends, when entire families station themselves on the sand.
The bulk of these suburban bus passengers get off at the first bus stops in Ipanema, near Posto 7. The outsiders are known pejoratively as “farofeiros,” because they are said to prefer to bring picnic lunches that include farofa, a toasted flour made from yucca. They are also the butt of gibes because they sit on drab straw mats rather than colorful cloth towels and apply a cheap red tanning lotion instead of buying more expensive sunscreens.
“Most people treat you O.K., but some are really prejudiced, even racist,” said Jefferson Luiz Santos Fonseca, 27, who occasionally goes to Ipanema on summer weekends with his wife and children.
Among themselves, Brazilians often criticize their society as one in which selective disobedience of laws and rules is generalized, in ways small and large. Cars routinely run red lights and park on sidewalks, and protected forests are felled for their timber or occupied by squatters.
In many respects, the beach is no different. Paddleball players at water’s edge, dog owners playing fetch with their pets and surfers who threaten to run over swimmers all routinely flout restrictions on their activities, “and nobody does a thing about it, not the municipal guard and certainly not the defenseless sunbather,” complained Joana Guimarães, the mother of two small children.
That is not to say there are no limits on behavior. Despite Brazil’s reputation for sexual tolerance, both the toplessness and nudity increasingly seen on European beaches are frowned upon here. When a group of young women tried going topless in Ipanema a few years ago, people poured beer on them, insulted them and called the police.
But what really worries beachgoers are the “sweeps” in which large groups of young men from the favelas, or squatter slums in the hills overlooking the beach, raid the shore and rob beachgoers. That began in the early 1990s, and, though it has diminished in recent years as the police have responded, it lingers as a source of unease with a clearly racial component.
“If you’re sitting there with your wife and kids, your watch and your money hidden in an obvious place, and a group of dark-skinned teenagers with that dyed blond hair come by, you start to get nervous,” said Antônio Bezerra Andrade, an Ipanema resident.
Some luxury beachfront hotels have in recent years equipped security guards with binoculars, to watch from their upper floors and communicate by walkie-talkie to colleagues on the beach. They also try to shoo away the freelance prostitutes, known in some parts of Brazil as “Cinderellas of the sand.”
Still, “what amazes me is that in a society that represents itself as being so highly disorganized, the beach is astonishingly organized,” Mr. da Matta said. But order, and the comforts that go with it, could not be maintained without what can only be described as a servant class.
Beachgoers are served by strolling vendors who have made the long commute from the working-class suburbs to sell wares like soft drinks, ice cream, sunglasses, clothes and tanning lotion.
“Sometimes you get these groups of really hot upper-class babes putting down their boyfriends or talking about their sex lives right in front of you,” said one vendor, who asked not to be identified because he feared offending regular clients. “It’s like you’re not even there, like you’re invisible or not a person.”
Many of Brazil’s cultural and social trends and movements are born in Rio, with the beach serving as their stage. When, in the early 1970s, for example, the actress Leila Diniz wore a skimpy bikini to Posto 9 while gloriously pregnant and unmarried, traditionalists were horrified. But feminists point to the episode as a galvanizing moment in their efforts to gain equal rights.
A few years later, with a military dictatorship still in power, Fernando Gabeira, today a writer and a prominent member of Congress representing the Green Party, returned from exile in Europe and signaled his generation’s split from the Stalinist left by wearing the briefest of crocheted trunks to the beach.
More recently, gays have staked out an area near Posto 9, which now flies the rainbow flag that is the emblem of their movement.
“Why, after years in which homosexuals congregated discreetly near the Copacabana Palace Hotel, do you all of a sudden have a gay beach at Farme de Amoedo Street?” Ms. Farias, the author, said. “It’s because groups use the beach to acquire visibility, to say ‘Hey, I’m here, too.’ In order to do that, they need a spot on the beach that they can say is theirs.”
Posts
