Burger Chef Friday! And Race vs. Sex? Come on...

For all those who are or aren't (more likely the latter) reading this, hi ya and welcome to Calm Over Calamity. My name's Colin, and C.A.B. are my initials. Hmmm...where to go from here? Ah!

Today's Friday, or as it should be known, Burger Chef Fridays! Fridays are the best days of the week cause you get that nervous, "It's almost time" sort of feeling, either because you're going to do something on Friday, see a movie, go to a restaurant, or if you're like me, you're going to watch the 24 hr news stations, just to try to catch a weird story that made the news, like the horse that got stuck in the mud, or the latest Britney story, or even more depressing...how quickly the Democratic Primary itself got stuck in the mud. Hillary's tears were fake and calculated to win New Hampshire, implies Obama co-chair Jesse Jackson, Jr. And Clinton supporter Andrew Cuomo says the candidates can't "shuck and jive" to win voters over.

Overload! Overload!

This is too much idiocy for one person to take.

Someone help me with this...

I'm struggling right now to calm the restive anger I have over the apparent divisions between race activists and feminists, in the current campaign, where Clinton supporters have been routinely sniping at Sen. Obama, many times using racial coding like the shuck and jive comment, and Obama staffers have pilloried Sen. Clinton's campaign on non-substantive issues, questioning her tears as the latest issue.

While I am an Obama guy nominally, I get weird shivers and not in the good way when I see people engage in identity politics, not just because it's divisive, but because for a young, emotion-driven person like myself with a stake in such politics, it's a bit alluring. It's like trying to stay on the light side of the Force. I know that the movement to get a progressive president means we have to stay together, but part of me, like the Gollum to my Smeagol, tells me that it's "time" for America, after 43 white presidents to have one (1) non-white president. One more like me and less like Bush. It's a thought I regret when I think on it later, when people of grayer hairs and longer term chastise me for it.

As I think about the "issues", though the differences between the candidates on these are largely superficial, I even start to see myself leaning Edwards, not because he has my views on every issue, but on the issue of HOW he will run a general election campaign, I get more faith from him that we will have an assertive candidate, not a naive one, nor a desperately low one.

It seems to always be then, when I feel like leaving my support for Obama on the doorstep of his glass house, that he seems to get into a stone-throwing match with Hillary Clinton, as though he's trying to get Hillary to get on him about his race so that he can rally black support. Now I don't seriously believe Senator Obama or Senator Clinton are trying to dupe me and other voters to engage in identity warfare with other progressives I should be fighting alongside, but my question is WHY? Why in a Democratic primary are two frontrunners for the highest office in the land starting to foment the seeds for sex/race division? It's a narrow-minded strategy; wouldn't the very nature of such a dirty contest undercut the messages they're trying to deliver to the American people, that they have the best "judgment"?

NOTE: There was an interesting op-ed on the 8th by Gloria Steinem about sex and race, and well, you take a look:

Gender is probably the most restricting force in American life, whether the question is who must be in the kitchen or who could be in the White House.

I wonder how one could qualify this statement...

Black men were given the vote a half-century before women of any race were allowed to mark a ballot, and generally have ascended to positions of power, from the military to the boardroom, before any women (with the possible exception of obedient family members in the latter).

Ah ha. That's right. Once they got the right to vote, those former rebels and slaveowners were just jumping for joy at the opportunity to let blacks vote.

Sigh. Burgers on the house.