More on Inmus Outrage

Imus Is Snoop's Frankenstein Monster
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on April 13, 2007,
Now that Imus is officially out, the question is will Al Sharpton, Jesse Jackson and the civil rights leaders, black professional and women's groups march on say a company such as Koch Records and demand that they pull Snoop Dogg's forthcoming album, The Big Squeeze?

They should, and that means ignoring Snoop's loud protest that he's no Don Imus. He's not, he's worse.

While Imus's "nappy headed hos" slur has been plastered all over creation, the "B" "H," and expletive-laced rant that Snoop unleashed against Imus, has barely got a squint of mention.

His R rated words are so vile they can't be printed in adult company. But here's the gist of what he said. He gave veiled praise to the Rutgers women basketball players as ladies of distinction.

But that's only a ploy. To him, they're the rare exception among black women. Most are Bs and Hs, poor, hood dwelling, rank-losers. In one grotesque sentence in his knock against Imus, Snoop managed to get in all the ancient stereotypes about black women.

Now this is the same Snoop that strolled out of a courtroom moments after copping a no contest plea, being slapped with five years probation and community service on felony drug and firearm charges. He then delivered his self-serving Imus and I "are-two-separate-things" rant.

This is the same Snoop that in the next few weeks will hit the road and promote, The Big Squeeze with such good housekeeping titles as "We Came to Bang Out," "Pop Pop Bang," and "F----in is Good for U."

The album features some Snoop's rap buddies and rivals and gives them a chance to be heard and of course bought. And you can be assured that these rap maestros offer a generous sprinkling of B's and H's and other endearing references to black women.

You can be assured that Snoops's corporate owners will bank millions off it. Unlike the 350,000 MSNBC viewers and the few hundred thousand more CBS radio listeners that cackled with and at Imus's inane trash talk, millions of young and not so young persons will dance to, talk up, and delight in the rapper's skewed descriptions of black women. That talk will be embedded even deeper in the youth and adult lexicon.

Snoop called Imus, and other shock jocks that spew their on-air slurs, tired old white men. Imus paid the price and got canned for it. That wouldn't have happened if civil rights leaders, black professional and women's groups, as well as legions of blacks picketed CBS, threatened sponsor boycotts, and dumped mountains of enraged postings on Internet websites.

Within hours after Imus ladled out his bile against the Rutgers women, my mailbox filled up with these postings demanding his scalp. Yet, I have not received one angry email since Snoop made his B and H dig against Imus.

I haven't heard any outraged calls for Koch Records to pull the album, or threats of a boycott if they don't. I have heard no denunciations from Sharpton, Jackson, the National Association of Black Journalists, and not a peep from women's groups about it and him.

A few years ago the NAACP got called on the carpet for nominating some of the most vile rap women bashers for image awards. The last draw was when the NAACP nominated R. Kelly, who was accused of sex crimes against underage girls.

Though the NAACP voters back peddled fast, and tightened the reins on who got nominations and awards, it set a subtle tone that it's better to ignore gangster rap groups than mount a full court attack on them.

Imus was a different matter. And many blacks have gone through tortured gyrations during the Imus furor to make a Snoop like defense that his offense was different. But Imus on his own would not have slurred the Rutgers women with the pejorative term "nappy headed ho's." He would have demeaned them with something like this, "They're some rough looking broads" or "They're some funny headed chicks."

That would have drawn few squeals. But "nappy headed hos?" That line is beeline straight from the rapper's playbook. The day after Imus was officially canned by MSNBC, the shock jocks that daily feast off on-air bashing and trashing minorities, gays, women, and Muslims, ran wild.

They relentlessly played lyrics from the gangster rappers. This was damage control, and their insidious point was to cancel out the furor over Imus and deflect the finger of guilt for trash talk from them.

In a perverse sense, though, they got it right. Imus paid the price for his bile. On the other hand, Snoop and his buddies simply have upped the price for their records, and profit from them. As long as the outcry from civil rights groups, and blacks remains feeble, scattered, and disjointed, they will continue to jingle the cash registers while self-righteously defying anyone to compare them to Imus.

Imus demeaned a basketball team; Snoop and his pals have demeaned a whole generation of young blacks, and especially young black women, and blacks have let them get away with it. That's why Imus is their Frankenstein.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of the book, The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and the GOP's court of black voters

OBAMA Speaks Out about "Imus in the Morning"

MSNBC Drops Simulcast of Don Imus Show
By , MSNBC.com
Posted on April 12, 2007, Printed on April 12, 2007
http://www.alternet.org/story/50473/
MSNBC said Wednesday it will drop its simulcast of the "Imus in the Morning" radio program, responding to growing outrage about the radio host's racial slur against the Rutgers women's basketball team.

"This decision comes as a result of an ongoing review process, which initially included the announcement of a suspension. It also takes into account many conversations with our own employees," NBC news said in a statement.

Talk-show host Don Imus triggered the uproar on his April 4 show, when he referred to the mostly black Rutgers women's basketball team as "nappy-headed hos." His comments have been widely denounced by civil rights and women's groups.

The decision does not affect Imus' nationally syndicated radio show, and the ultimate decision on the fate of that program will rest with executives at CBS Corp. In a statement, CBS reiterated that Imus will be suspended without pay for two weeks beginning on Monday, and that CBS Radio "will continue to speak with all concerned parties and monitor the situation closely."

MSNBC's action came after a growing list of sponsors -- including American Express Co., Sprint Nextel Corp., Staples Inc., Procter & Gamble Co., and General Motors Corp. -- said they were pulling ads from Imus' show for the indefinite future.

NBC News President Steve Capus said he made the decision after reading thousands of e-mails and having countless discussions with NBC workers and the public, but he denied the potential loss of advertising dollars had anything to do with it.

"I take no joy in this. It's not a particularly happy moment, but it needed to happen," he said. "I can't ignore the fact that there is a very long list of inappropriate comments, of inappropriate banter, and it has to stop."

NBC's decision came at a time when Imus' program on MSNBC was doing better competitively than it ever has been. For the first three months of the year, its audience was nearly identical to CNN's, leading CNN to replace its morning news team last week.

'He's crossed the line'

Calls for Imus' firing from the radio portion of the program have intensified during the past week, and remained strong even after MSNBC's announcment. The show originates from WFAN-AM in New York City and is syndicated nationally by Westwood One, both of which are managed by CBS Corp. MSNBC, which had been simulcasting the show, is a unit of General Electric Co.'s NBC Universal.

Bruce Gordon, former head of the NAACP and a director of CBS Corp., said before MSNBC's decision Wednesday he hoped the broadcasting company would "make the smart decision" by firing Imus.

"He's crossed the line, he's violated our community," Gordon said in a telephone interview with The Associated Press. "He needs to face the consequence of that violation."

Gordon, a longtime telecommunications executive, stepped down in March after 19 months as head of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, one of the foremost U.S. civil rights organizations.

He said he had spoken with CBS chief executive Leslie Moonves and hoped the company, after reviewing the situation, would fire Imus rather than let him return to the air at the end of his suspension.

"We should have a zero tolerance policy when it comes to what I see as irresponsible, racist behavior," Gordon said. "The Imus comments go beyond humor. Maybe he thought it was funny, but that's not what occurred."

A CBS spokesman, Dana McClintock, declined comment on the remarks by Gordon, who is one of at least two minorities on the 13-member board.

The 10 members of the Rutgers team spoke publicly for the first time Tuesday about the on-air comments, made the day after the team lost the NCAA championship game to Tennessee. Some of them wiped away tears as their coach, C. Vivian Stringer, criticized Imus for "racist and sexist remarks that are deplorable, despicable, abominable and unconscionable."

The women, eight of whom are black, agreed to meet with Imus privately and hear his explanation. They held back from saying whether they'd accept Imus' apologies.

Stringer said late Wednesday that she did not call for Imus' firing, but was pleased with the decision by NBC executives.

She said the meeting with Imus was never designed to call for his removal but to give the women on the team the opportunity to meet with him and for him to see the people he had so publicly hurt.

"The young ladies and I needed to put a face behind the remarks... He needs to know who these young ladies are that he hurt," Stringer said.

Imus has apologized repeatedly for his comments. He said Tuesday he hadn't been thinking when making a joke that went "way too far." He also said that those who called for his firing without knowing him, his philanthropic work or what his show was about would be making an "ill-informed" choice.

The Rev. Al Sharpton said in New York that he would put pressure on CBS but that the issue was larger than Imus.

"I think we also have to have now a broad discussion on how the music industry allows this to be used," Sharpton said. "I don't think that we should stop at NBC, and I don't think we should stop at Imus."

Jackson wants more black show hosts

The Rev. Jesse Jackson said he planned to meet with CBS and NBC executives on Thursday with a delegation of other civil rights activists and lawmakers to discuss the Imus situation and diversity in broadcasting.

"Imus is on 1,040 hours a week and yet they have virtually no black show hosts. That is true for other networks as well," Jackson said. "We must raise the ethical standard for all of them."

At the Rutgers campus in New Brunswick, N.J., about 300 students and faculty rallied earlier in the day to cheer for their team, which lost in the national championship game, and add their voices to the crescendo of calls for Imus' ouster. One of the speakers was Chidimma Acholonu, president of the campus chapter of the NAACP.

"This is not a battle against one man. This is a battle against a way of thought," she said. "Don Imus does not understand the power of his words, so it is our responsibility to remind him."

Before the announcement was made, Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) had appeared on the MSNBC program "Hardball," where host David Gregory asked the senator and presidential candidate if he thought Imus should be fired.

"I don't think MSNBC should be carrying the kinds of hateful remarks that Imus uttered the other day," Obama said.

He went on to note that he and his wife have "two daughters who are African-American, gorgeous, tall, and I hope, at some point, are interested enough in sports that they get athletic scholarships. ... I don't want them to be getting a bunch of information that, somehow, they're less than anybody else. And I don't think MSNBC should want to promote that kind of language."

Obama went on to say that he would not be a guest on Imus' show in the future.


© 2007 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

The Price of Being Black of any Shade in the World

April 9, 2007
Editorial Observer
For Obama, Estranged in a Strange Land, Aloha Had Its Limits
By LAWRENCE DOWNES
Reporters have been shuttling across the Pacific lately in search of the early chapters of Senator Barack Obama’s life story. Their guidebook is his memoir, “Dreams From My Father,” in which he describes his adolescence in Honolulu — where he was born and lived through high school, except for a few years in Indonesia — as a difficult time marked by drug use, disaffection and a painful search for identity.

The New York Times listed the ingredients of his young psyche as “racial confusion,” “feelings of alienation” and “disquietude.” The Los Angeles Times suggested that it was not just angst, but boiling angst.

Sounds oddly bleak, doesn’t it? Angst boils up in most people at some point in life, but if there were any place the son of a Kansan and a Kenyan could have fit in, wouldn’t it have been Hawaii? If there is a heaven, it probably looks a lot like Oahu, and the happy souls in it probably go around talking like our national spokesman for racial relaxation, Senator Obama.

So who was this brooding Barry, taking lessons in African-American swagger from a black high-school buddy, Ray, studying black nationalism and going to black parties on Army bases?

His struggle may seem strange in that setting, but the setting itself was strange. Hawaii, where I also grew up in the 1970’s, is famously mellow about race and ethnicity. It’s what you would expect from an ocean crossroads populated by Polynesians and early-20th-century plantation immigrants from across the globe. But tolerant is not the same as oblivious. Hawaii is acutely conscious of — you could say hung up on — racial, ethnic and cultural differences.

People in this motley state, less a melting pot than a tossed salad, invented a host of slang terms for themselves. A pidgin English field guide would list buk-buks, pakes, buddaheads, katonks, mokes, titas, popolos, yobos, blalahs, haoles and portagees. These labels can be affectionate or angry, though they are usually used neutrally or with just mild rudeness, often in the kinds of ethnic jokes that passed out of polite favor on the mainland long ago.

Hawaii’s fixation on social taxonomy is also seen in the local habit of linking identity to diploma. The first question locals ask one another is where they went to high school. Implicit in the answer are a lot of assumptions about ethnicity and class, whether the school is Punahou (elite white and Asian), Iolani (elite Japanese), Farrington (working-class Filipino and Samoan) or whatever.

There is, in this crowded paradise, a slot for everybody.Or almost everybody.

For Mr. Obama, fitting in at Punahou could have been hard, given its reputation as a cliquish school dominated since missionary days by the rich white people who founded it. Mr. Obama, a scholarship student, wasn’t rich and didn’t look white.

Beyond that, his parents — University of Hawaii graduate students — and his Kansas grandparents, who helped raise him after his father returned to Africa, had no roots in the local culture. He lived in a state that, then as now, had a minuscule African-American population. He seems to have been surrounded by people who knew just enough about black America to be stupidly insensitive, and his family couldn’t help him.

“I was engaged in a fitful interior struggle,” he wrote. “I was trying to raise myself to be a black man in America, and beyond the given of my appearance, no one around me seemed to know exactly what that meant.”

In one sense, he wasn’t alone. Being black isn’t common in Hawaii, but being biracial is. There’s a Hawaiian word for it — hapa, or half — that traditionally refers to combinations of white with Hawaiian or Asian, though many use it for any racial blend. Being hapa is hardly cause for discrimination in mixed-up Hawaii, but it can be problematic. Dwelling on it can tie a person in knots. It can be disorienting to feel forced to choose between identities when you are both and neither. It can be infuriating to be stared at by people trying to puzzle out what you are.

Vexations like these, felt by growing numbers of multiracial Americans, have helped to spur a blossoming of hapa awareness on the mainland. People are trying out the idea of a hapa culture that is greater than the sum of its parts. There are hapa conferences, hapa college clubs and hapa Web sites. More and more people consider the pursuit of hapaness to be the answer to the paradox of bifurcation. Certainly, it is powerful evidence of the irrepressible yearning for identity. So is Mr. Obama’s story, his restless searching for a solace that Hawaii could not offer.

I asked him recently about that search. He described a long process of pulling together the parts of his life before finding a skin he could live in. The multitudes that he contains — Kenya, Kansas, Hawaii, Indonesia, Harvard, Illinois — could have been arranged in infinite ways. But he settled in long ago as an African-American in Chicago, a professor turned politician in one of the most segregated cities in America.

The first thing he asked me was what high school I had gone to.

Martin Luther King Real Message to America Hidden

The Martin Luther King You Don't See on TV
By Norman Solomon and Jeff Cohen, AlterNet
Posted on April 4, 2007, It's become a TV ritual: Every year on April 4, as Americans commemorate Martin Luther King's death, we get perfunctory network news reports about "the slain civil rights leader."

The remarkable thing about these reviews of King's life is that several years -- his last years -- are totally missing, as if flushed down a memory hole.

What TV viewers see is a closed loop of familiar file footage: King battling desegregation in Birmingham (1963); reciting his dream of racial harmony at the rally in Washington (1963); marching for voting rights in Selma, Alabama (1965); and finally, lying dead on the motel balcony in Memphis (1968).

An alert viewer might notice that the chronology jumps from 1965 to 1968. Yet King didn't take a sabbatical near the end of his life. In fact, he was speaking and organizing as diligently as ever.

Almost all of those speeches were filmed or taped. But they're not shown today on TV.

Why?

It's because national news media have never come to terms with what Martin Luther King Jr. stood for during his final years.

In the early 1960s, when King focused his challenge on legalized racial discrimination in the South, most major media were his allies. Network TV and national publications graphically showed the police dogs and bullwhips and cattle prods used against Southern blacks who sought the right to vote or to eat at a public lunch counter.

But after passage of civil rights acts in 1964 and 1965, King began challenging the nation's fundamental priorities. He maintained that civil rights laws were empty without "human rights" -- including economic rights. For people too poor to eat at a restaurant or afford a decent home, King said, anti-discrimination laws were hollow.

Noting that a majority of Americans below the poverty line were white, King developed a class perspective. He decried the huge income gaps between rich and poor, and called for "radical changes in the structure of our society" to redistribute wealth and power.

"True compassion," King declared, "is more than flinging a coin to a beggar; it comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring."

By 1967, King had also become the country's most prominent opponent of the Vietnam War, and a staunch critic of overall U.S. foreign policy, which he deemed militaristic. In his "Beyond Vietnam" speech delivered at New York's Riverside Church on April 4, 1967 -- a year to the day before he was murdered -- King called the United States "the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today."

From Vietnam to South Africa to Latin America, King said, the U.S. was "on the wrong side of a world revolution." King questioned "our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America," and asked why the U.S. was suppressing revolutions "of the shirtless and barefoot people" in the Third World, instead of supporting them.

In foreign policy, King also offered an economic critique, complaining about "capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries."

You haven't heard the "Beyond Vietnam" speech on network news retrospectives, but national media heard it loud and clear back in 1967 -- and loudly denounced it. Time magazine called it "demagogic slander that sounded like a script for Radio Hanoi." The Washington Post patronized that "King has diminished his usefulness to his cause, his country, his people."

In his last months, King was organizing the most militant project of his life: the Poor People's Campaign. He crisscrossed the country to assemble "a multiracial army of the poor" that would descend on Washington -- engaging in nonviolent civil disobedience at the Capitol, if need be -- until Congress enacted a poor people's bill of rights. Reader's Digest warned of an "insurrection."

King's economic bill of rights called for massive government jobs programs to rebuild America's cities. He saw a crying need to confront a Congress that had demonstrated its "hostility to the poor" -- appropriating "military funds with alacrity and generosity," but providing "poverty funds with miserliness."

How familiar that sounds today, nearly 40 years after King's efforts on behalf of the poor people's mobilization were cut short by an assassin's bullet.

In 2007, in this nation of immense wealth, the White House and most in Congress continue to accept the perpetuation of poverty. They fund foreign wars with "alacrity and generosity," while being miserly in dispensing funds for education and healthcare and environmental cleanup.

And those priorities are largely unquestioned by mainstream media. No surprise that they tell us so little about the last years of Martin Luther King's life.

Norman Solomon is the author of the new book, "War Made Easy: How Presidents and Pundits Keep Spinning Us to Death." Jeff Cohen is the author of "Cable News Confidential: My Misadventures in Corporate Media."

Why Blacks are Hesitant about Barack

Jesse's Nod Won't Help Obama
By Earl Ofari Hutchinson, New America Media
Posted on April 3, 2007, Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama beamed as he sat beside Jesse Jackson as Jesse announced that he was formally endorsing Obama's candidacy. The idea was that Jackson's endorsement would give Obama a rocket boost with black voters.

It won't. And there are two glaring reasons why.

The first is Jackson himself. While some polls show that Jackson is still popular among many blacks, he's not the Jackson of a decade ago or even four years ago. That Jackson could instantly heat up a crowd with a timely slogan, catchy rhyme, or well-timed phrase and he had the instant ear of presidents and heads of state.

However, the taint of sexual scandal and his fade from the headlines has wiped much of the luster off of his racial star. Jackson belongs to the older civil rights generation, and he's found it tough sledding trying to sell his civil rights pitch to upwardly mobile, younger blacks that have little inkling of past civil rights struggles.

Jackson hinted at that in his little talk endorsing Obama, when he said that it was time to pass the torch to a new generation of black politicians. That was self-serving and disingenuous. Jackson has no intention of passing any torch on now. He will continue to do everything he can to micromanage a role for himself on the national political scene. In the next breath he boasted that he'd work with whichever Democrat ultimately emerges on top and that he is talking to the other Democratic contenders about his agenda.

The second problem is Obama. Even if Jackson was a rock solid Obama man, and still had the sheen on his leadership badge, he wouldn't be much help to him. A Democratic presidential contender must not be afraid to dump strategies on the nation's public policy table to combat the astronomical high black unemployment rate, soaring incarceration for black men, the HIV/AIDS plague, and failing public schools, as well as a plan for drug and criminal justice system overhaul.

These are the issues that stir the political juices of most blacks. Obama hasn't as yet stirred them on these issues. Obama is a good liberal with a commendable record on some issues. The problem is there's just not enough of a record to gauge his effectiveness as a presidential possibility, or even as a good Senator at this still very early point in his jump to the national political stage.

Black voters, indeed all voters, crave and deserve a candidate with a proven track record or at least a defined plan for dealing with the crucial issues. The initial reluctance of many black voters, top black Democrats, civil rights leaders, and that includes Jackson for a while; to leap on the Obama bandwagon is due to the freshman Senator's paper thin legislative record.

As Obama's rock star allure fades in the gruel and heat of the presidential campaign, the questions will loom bigger about his plan for an exit from Iraq, nuclear proliferation, stimulating the economy, battling inflation, environmental and labor problems, campaign finance reform and the always explosive minefield of racial relations.

The contrast between Obama and his Democratic presidential rival John Edwards on the issues has been glaring. Edwards was a full term senator, a seasoned presidential ticket campaigner in 2004, and in the years since the election has barnstormed the country talking and listening to labor and health care advocates about working conditions and the urgent need for affordable health care for the estimated fifty million uninsured Americans.

Blacks and Latinos make up a significant percent of the uninsured. He's crafted a thoughtful and detailed comprehensive plan for national health care and has talked it up at campaign stops in Iowa and New Hampshire. At a Democratic presidential candidates forum in Las Vegas in March he spelled out the plan.

Obama has detailed no plan on health care, and stumbled badly when asked about it at the Las Vegas confab. Obama backers counter that the knock that their candidate lacks political seasoning and a firm handle on the issues is unfair. They say that Bush was equally inexperienced in national and international problem solving before grabbing the Oval Office.

That's a lame counter. The White House is no place for on-the-job-training. Voters, and even top Republicans, should have demanded more of candidate Bush. They didn't, and his towering public policy fumbles, initially on the war on terrorism, and on Iraq, Social Security and Tax reform has been nothing short of disastrous, has cost taxpayers dearly, and has caused much political and public rancor and division.

When the presidential campaign turns torrid in next year's primaries, Obama will have to spell out clearly where he stands on the hot-button issues, and tell how he'll make things work in the White House if he gets there. The voters will and should demand that much of him as well as the other candidates. Jackson can't and won't help Obama there.

Earl Ofari Hutchinson is a political analyst and social issues commentator, and the author of the book, The Emerging Black GOP Majority (Middle Passage Press, September 2006), a hard-hitting look at Bush and the GOP's court of black

Right Questions to ask Obama and Clinton

Hillary and Barack: Right Candidates, Wrong Question
By Gloria Steinem, Women's Media Center
Posted on April 4, 2007,

This commentary is reprinted from a column published in The New York Times, February 7, 2007, and updated on the Women's Media Center, March 20th, 2007.

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. In February polls, about 60 percent of African-American Democrats supported Hillary Clinton, while only about 20 percent supported Barack Obama. These surprising numbers probably had less to do with Senator Obama himself than with whether people felt he'd been around long enough to trust, whether the name "Clinton," with its associations of racial inclusiveness, was 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.) Sure enough, by mid-March, after both candidates had spoken at the civil rights celebration in Selma on March 5, the polls shifted, with Obama leading Clinton among African American voters 44 to 30.

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. Indeed, Hillary Clinton has something no presidential candidate in history has been able to claim: eight years of on-the-job training.


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.

Gloria Steinem is co-founder of the Women's Media Center.

How Obama built his Donor Network

Obama Built Donor Network From Roots Up
By CHRISTOPHER DREW and MIKE McINTIRE
CHICAGO — When Barack Obama announced to friends over brunch in 2002 that he planned to run for the United States Senate, one of their first questions was how he could possibly raise the necessary millions.

After all, two and a half years after he had taken quite a “spanking,” as he put it, in his bid to unseat an incumbent congressman, he was still struggling to pay off a $20,000 debt, eking out donations of $1,000 here, $2,000 there.

Improbably, Mr. Obama, running as something of an outsider, wound up raising $15 million and winning that 2004 Senate race. Now that he is running for president, his fund-raising prowess has helped make him the chief rival to Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York.

[Aides said Monday that he had collected more than $20 million in donations in the first three months of the campaign, enough to ratchet up the anxiety in the Clinton camp, which announced it had raised $26 million. Mr. Obama’s campaign has yet to release precise information on its total donations or contributors.]

A look at his 2004 Senate race shows how he laid the foundation for his current fund-raising drive. Even as he cultivated an image as an unconventional candidate devoted to the people, not the establishment, he systematically built a sophisticated, and in many ways quite conventional, money machine.

Interviews and campaign finance reports show Mr. Obama drew crucial early support from Chicago’s thriving black professional class, using it as a springboard to other rainmakers within the broader party establishment. Soon he was drawing money — and, just as valuable, buzz — among wealthy Chicago families like the Crowns and the Pritzkers, as well as friends from Harvard Law School and the University of Chicago, where Mr. Obama taught constitutional law and his wife worked in community relations. As his popularity surged after his rousing speech at the Democratic National Convention in July 2004, big fund-raisers on Wall Street and in Hollywood hopped aboard, and grass-roots contributions began pouring in as well.

Mr. Obama has written that at the beginning he felt uncomfortable asking for money, but he developed a skill at cultivating donors, often with the same disarming directness he uses on the campaign trail.

“I met him on the first hole,” Steven S. Rogers, a former business owner who teaches at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University, recalled recently about a golf game in 2001. “By the sixth hole, he said, ‘Steve, I want to run for the Senate.’ And by the ninth hole, he said he needed help to clear up some debts.”

Mr. Obama’s breakthrough in the 2004 Senate race was also made possible by a new wrinkle in the election laws. Faced with a self-financed opponent in the Democratic primary, Blair Hull, who pumped more than $28 million of his own money into the race, Mr. Obama was able to accept up to $12,000 from each donor, or six times the limit at that time.

As a result, nearly half of the more than $5 million that Mr. Obama raised in the primary came from just 300 donors. In a stroke of luck, he had just enough money to pay for a television advertising blitz in the final weeks as Mr. Hull’s campaign crumbled amid accusations that he had abused a former wife.

Some longtime Obama donors said they were glad to be able to exploit the financing loophole to help him.

James S. Crown, a senior member of the Crown family, said that despite the “formidable competition” in the Senate primary, he was so impressed after meeting Mr. Obama for breakfast in early 2003 that he quickly lent his support.

“I was just taken with his sensibility, his intelligence, his values and how he conducted himself during that campaign,” said Mr. Crown, who is Mr. Obama’s chief presidential fund-raiser in Illinois.

Mr. Obama appears to have such a firm hold on so many of Chicago’s big donors that Mrs. Clinton, who grew up in a Chicago suburb, did not even have a fund-raiser here during the crucial first quarter of this year. At the same time, Mr. Obama’s campaign says its grass-roots support is expanding rapidly, in part through $25-a-ticket fund-raisers designed for a new generation of donors.

Mr. Obama declined to be interviewed for this article. But in his book “The Audacity of Hope,” he sounded prescient about the dangers of the money chase, noting that he could not assume it “didn’t alter me in some ways.” At the simplest level, he wrote, it “eliminated any sense of shame” about asking for donations.

But, he added, he also worries that spending so much time courting wealthy donors has caused him to spend “more and more time above the fray,” away from the concerns of ordinary voters.

Mr. Obama, who grew up mostly in Hawaii, began making political contacts in Chicago as a community organizer in the 1980s. After graduating from Harvard Law School in 1991, he returned to Chicago and led a drive that registered more than 100,000 voters for the 1992 elections.

Mr. Obama asked John R. Schmidt, a lawyer who was co-chairman of Bill Clinton’s Illinois fund-raising operation, to raise money for the voter drive. Mr. Schmidt said he invited donors to meet Mr. Obama over lunch at the University Club of Chicago, and he and some of the others later became major donors to his political campaigns.

But perhaps Mr. Obama’s most crucial early support came from the city’s longstanding cadre of highly successful black executives and entrepreneurs.

John W. Rogers Jr., chief executive of Ariel Capital Management, which oversees $16 billion in investments, played basketball with Mr. Obama’s brother-in-law at Princeton University. Quintin E. Primo III, who made a fortune financing commercial real-estate deals, and Louis A. Holland, an investment manager, have also contributed to nearly all the senator’s races.

Under its first black mayor, Harold Washington, the City of Chicago had expanded its contracts with minority business in the 1980s. But, Mr. Rogers said, the state “was not as open and inclusive as it could be.” As a state senator, he said, Mr. Obama pushed to open up more contracting and to give minority investment companies a greater stake in managing state pension funds.

When Mr. Obama decided to run for Congress in 2000 against the former Black Panther Bobby Rush, he used a $9,500 personal loan to help finance the campaign. When he lost, he found himself broke and fielding questions from the Federal Election Commission about his campaign finances. He later had to lend his campaign committee $11,100 more to cover refunds to donors who had inadvertently given too much.

It took him two years to repay his own loans, mostly with small checks from black executives who agreed to help him prepare for another run.

Robert D. Blackwell Sr., a management consultant whose family contributed a few thousand dollars to Mr. Obama then, said that after the House race, it would have been natural for some supporters to hesitate.

“But Barack has almost devout followers who are people of action,” Mr. Blackwell said, “and they rallied behind him.”

When Mr. Obama told his closest friends about his Senate plans, Valerie Jarrett, a Chicago businesswoman who led his finance committee, said: “Our initial reaction was, ‘It’s too soon. You just lost, and if you lose again, where are you?’ ”

Ms. Jarrett said Mr. Obama replied that he was willing to gamble all on one more shot. David Axelrod, Mr. Obama’s strategist for his Senate and presidential campaigns, said Mr. Obama believed that if he polled well among blacks and white liberals, he would have a chance.

At least initially, few donors seemed to agree. Besides Mr. Hull, a former securities trader, another opponent was the state comptroller, Dan Hynes, whose father had been a major Illinois political figure.

After three months of calling longtime supporters and other Democratic donors, Mr. Obama had raised only $250,000. Even some Harvard friends were wondering if the race made sense.

David B. Wilkins, a Harvard law professor and friend of Mr. Obama, recalled, “I held one of his first fund-raisers here in Cambridge, and I had to beg people to come, because they said: ‘What is this? This guy thinks he’s going to win? Come on.’ ”

At first, only a handful of Obama supporters took advantage of the increased contribution limits, newly available under a so-called millionaire’s amendment to federal campaign laws.

From his Chicago circle of black professionals came John Rogers, who gave $11,000. Among the other investment managers, Mr. Primo and his wife gave $18,000. And Mr. Holland, his wife and two of his partners donated a total of $35,000.

At Harvard, Mr. Wilkins helped tap into professors and alumni, including George Haywood, an investor who, with his wife, Cheryl, contributed $12,000 in April 2003.

Mr. Haywood and Mr. Obama became friends, and it was Mr. Haywood whom then-Senator Obama turned to in early 2005 when he needed a broker to help manage money from a book deal. Mr. Haywood’s broker later invested $100,000 of Mr. Obama’s cash in two speculative stocks that Mr. Haywood owned.

Antoin Rezko, a Chicago businessman who was later involved in a land deal with the Obamas, gave $10,500.

Mr. Obama’s support also widened among Chicago’s business elite. Members of the Pritzker family, which founded the Hyatt Hotel chain, donated $40,000; Penny Pritzker is now the senator’s national finance chairwoman.

Mr. Crown, whose family’s investments include a major stake in the military contractor General Dynamics, said family members normally avoided taking sides in a primary, in part because it was not good for business. But with Mr. Obama, they made an exception, with 10 family members giving a total of $112,500.

“I was just so personally impressed with Barack that it was worth the risk,” Mr. Crown said.

Mr. Obama also attracted major national Democratic donors, including George Soros and members of his family, who gave a total of $60,000.

Other major donors included executives at a Texas-based securities firm, Tejas Inc., who gave $56,000. Its chairman, John Gorman, told The Austin American-Statesman in 2004 that he had been introduced to Mr. Obama by Vernon E. Jordan Jr., the Washington power broker.

Though he helped raise money for Mr. Obama in 2004, Mr. Jordan, a longtime Clinton friend and confidant, is now aligned with Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign. In fact, many people who once backed both Mr. Obama’s Senate campaign and the Clintons are now having to choose sides.

Some traditional Clinton supporters, including the Rev. Jesse Jackson, David Geffen, the Hollywood mogul, and Michael Froman, a Citigroup executive, have migrated to Mr. Obama.

And Chicago has become almost completely an Obama town. Though Democrats here still express respect for Mrs. Clinton, "if she’s raising any money in Chicago, I don’t know who’s doing it," said Mr. Schmidt, the lawyer who was once co-chairman of President Clinton’s fund-raising here.