August 19, 2007 Sunday

Barack vs. Hillary, at length

By C.B. Hanif
Palm Beach Post

It was during the 1984 National Association of Black Journalists convention in Atlanta that the city's former mayor, Andrew Young, referred to presidential candidate Walter Mondale's smug staff as a bunch of "smart-assed white boys." This year, national news editors generally didn't think a sufficiently outrageous or worthy statement was made to constitute news from NABJ's meeting in Las Vegas. Some of us who inspected two top presidential candidates in Sin City last week disagree.

Sens. Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama spoke on consecutive days to NABJ's full membership. After their addresses, they held smaller sessions with our Trotter Group of African-American columnists. No other candidate from either party made himself available. But the depth and breadth of what we heard was more than the sound-bite driven televised debates and poll-focused news coverage have delivered.

Sen. Clinton finished her plenary session talk with my Trotter colleague Richard Prince agreeing with me that she had come across strong, as when she spanked a young Republican blogger who asked why she was advocating socialized medicine. When he persisted, despite her retort that her health-care approach has been mischaracterized for 15 years, she invited him to meet with her staff "if you're interested in being educated instead of being rhetorical."

Sen. Clinton dropped another deft line during our Trotter session when asked about her use of black dialect during a Selma, Ala., speech this year. "I do live in Arkansas," she said, among more serious comments, adding, "Plus, I am in this interracial marriage," a play on the joke about her husband having been the first black president.

Yet Sen. Clinton's comments in both sessions only underscored that she's a known entity. Even with her advantage of Bill -- her two-term former presidential hubby, who probably could be elected again if he could run -- she's perceived by some Democrats as not enough. Her high negatives among some voters, for example, clearly are a negative. Americans generally are already in tune with her, or not. So a lot of folks are wanting to know whether there's anything better on the horizon. Like some others at NABJ, I came away feeling that there may be.

Certified Hillary-ites, Barack-o-philes and other interested readers can find detailed reporting on NABJ's meeting, including the candidates' comments in our full session and to the Trotters, as well as links to my colleagues' columns, archived at Mr. Prince's Journalisms site (www.maynardije.org/columns/dickprince).

But readers often say they're interested in my thoughts through the prism of my various perspectives as a red-blooded American and aficionado of our popular culture, who's also of African descent, a Muslim, a husband and father, with an insatiable appetite for knowledge of the diverse cultures and experiences outside my own, and as someone not inclined to be doctrinaire, or "stuck." Well, my up-close look at the son of a black father from Kenya and white mother from Kansas left me as intrigued as many of you have been.

Sen. Obama showed the absurdity of the "Is he black enough?" question, and showed that he was down to earth, too, in tackling it head-on. Capitalizing on black folks' old inside joke about "colored people" always being late, and the fact that our business meeting and his itinerary had the program off-schedule, he walked in quipping, "I want to apologize for being a little late, but you guys keep asking whether I am black enough."

"I don't get that in the 'hood," he later told the Trotters. At the barbershop, on the basketball court, during parades, "I get high-fives." The "black enough" distraction "is an easy thing to write and a lazy story to write," he said. He might have asked: How black is Sen. Clinton?

Sen. Obama was on to something when he pointed out that "the media develop a narrative, and once the narrative develops, it's hard to break out of." His has morphed, he noted, from Rock Star to Looks And Talks Good With Pretty Wife But No Substance to Inexperienced. One recent suggestion was "that I would just invite Hugo Chávez over to my house, and pop open a beer and start talking," he said. "That's a lack of preparation. There's nobody who would meet with another head of state without preparation. But preconditions refer to something very specific," and "the world generally sees us as intransigent because the terms of talking are that you agree to everything that we want. Now, that's a substantive disagreement, and I am absolutely confident that I am right on that and I will keep pressing that."

It's early, of course, but my take was that Sen. Obama may hold the most promise not for just African-Americans but all Americans who hope for healing in a torn nation, and who hope to see America fully live up to its promise to the world. In contrast, Sen. Clinton seems a more sensitive and enlightened expression of politics as usual.

Floridians know, of course, that the politics-as-usual assessment was made of Gov. Crist. He ran as the second coming of Jeb Bush. He has proven to be anything but while seemingly positioning himself to be the ideal moderate for the No. 2 spot on someone's presidential ticket.

Is that Sen. Obama calling?

C.B. Hanif is an editorial writer and ombudsman for The Palm Beach Post. His e-mail address is cb_hanif@pbpost.com