Niche Marketing

I've been enjoying--as a way of staving off depression about it--the way that the media have been talking about the "white male" vote, and whether Clinton or especially Obama will scare us off. I suppose it's a good thing that we're not being conceptualized as an universal here, that we are demographically identifiable now. But I still have to laugh at insinuations that come through in reportage or interviews that indicate that we are the forgotten children of this campaign, with "no one to represent us."

Are we really so pampered we have to cry about this lack of representation in the Democratic nominee during this one election? Well, yes, I guess we are.

I didn't see the speech where Obama ended racism yesterday, but I saw clips of it. I don't get the furor over Wright's comments, which are generally tiptoed around in the articles I've read, not even saying what they are, only that they're "controversial." (Better to repeat that something is controversial, too hot to touch, than circulate the comments in context and let people decide.) As readers of EL will recall, I am not exactly won over by Obama, but I think it's disgusting the way he's been pressured into denouncing his pastor, assuring that all important white voting bloc he doesn't think in terms of "race" (those were the Sixties man!) but rather in terms of healing divisions in all of society. My girlfriend laughed as The Daily Show covered these issues last night at the fact that so many of us (white people) are shocked that black churches act as fora in which black people discuss issues relevent to them and their communities. The horror! Obama handled the uppity media's minor firestorm as well as could be expected, but I would have liked him to say, "A lot of what my pastor said was perfectly defensible. Deal with it."