Obama 2012 is yours to publish

Prologue to Obama 2012 We approachthe future walking backwards, our gaze forever fixated on the past. Predicting the future is not a passive exercise; we invent it everyday with our actions. I began thesketches for what would ultimately become the core of Obama 2012 in March 2007, a month after Barack Obama declared his candidacy. Ihad spent much of the previous 18 months living abroad as anentrepreneur and statesman of sorts, and I was slightly out of touchwith the pulse of life on the street in the United States. I learntabout Sen. Barack Obama’s Springfield, IL speech formally declaringhis candidacy for president of the United States through one of theinternational cable news channels and thought how great it would beto have a fresh start after years of mediocrity in Washington and aplummeting reputation around the world. By September,after what seemed like raising a six-month-old child, my sketches hadturned into Why the Democrats Will Win in 2008 the Road to anObama White House . It was my answer to the burning questioneveryone had back in March: Can he really win? Actually, noteveryone thought it was a question. For many people, including MarkPenn, director of the Clinton campaign, the answer was an easy “noway.” This strategic blunder made it that much easier for theClinton campaign to be defeated. Then there were Black pundits likeShelby Steele, a fellow at the Hoover Institution, who came out witha 2007 book entitled A Bound Man, Why Obama Can't Win . Being Black didseem to be an automatic disqualification, but then why did someoneneed to write an entire book arguing what should have been patentlyobvious? Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Colin Powell came to my mind andI remembered that he could have run for president in 1992 as a warhero. But Colin Powell was Ronald Reagan’s protégé and got aspecial pass on the race question. Black conservatives like JusticeThomas, Condoleezza Rice and Colin Powell were careful todisassociate themselves from liberal thinkers and activists likeJesse Jackson, who lost, as expected, the 1984 and 1988 Democraticprimaries. Ultimately, Colin Powell, in spite of all his honors,declined to run for president. His wife Alma feared for his safety. Common sense said that a candidate like Obama, for numerousinsurmountable reasons, didn't stand a chance of winning theDemocratic primary, let alone a general election in which 10% of theelectorate is African American and Republicans controlled the WhiteHouse for 20 of the preceding 28 years. But I decided that Obama'schances merited a closer examination. In it, I would bring to bearmy gambling skills. I went to NewYork to meet Obama the candidate, and in a Soho apartment he told asmall group of us that his middle name was Hussein. I thought he wastelling a joke. Barack Hussein Obama, a liberal Black senator with aname on loan from Al Qaeda…for U.S. president? Is he out of hismind? Then I reallywanted to know whether his campaign was worth getting my hopes up forand investing my time in. I appliedtechniques used in predicting financial markets and researchedtheories of voting behavior. I applied the theories, in my own way,to the upcoming primary and general elections. I learnt as I wentalong. The result was an analytical and quantitative studyconcluding, with gaps filled in by some admittedly fuzzy logic, thatnot only could Obama win, but, in fact, he would win because thestars lined up in his favor. Call it God’s Will. I reached myconclusion and told everyone who would listen that I had a strongcase to make for victory, and that I could prove there was indeedhope. Hope is essential to any difficult endeavor. But hope as a campaign slogan is not good enough; hope needs firepower. No onebecomes heavyweight champion of the world, an astronaut or thepresident by accident or dumb luck. By the time mybook making the case for an Obama victory was first printed in bulk,in October, 2007, Obama was 20 points behind Clinton in the polls andI was dismissed by just about everyone in the New York DemocraticParty establishment and the media. Ambitious, clueless, elitist andsnooty Democratic Party insiders like New York Electoral Collegemembers Deb Slott and Terrence Yang did all they could to make meshut-up and go away. Big-time Obama fundraising bundler andmillionaire Virginia Davies ordered her 12th Street rooftop penthouseminimum-wage flunkies to turn off the elevator when I attempted to goupstairs to an Obama fundraiser on April 9, 2008. Yang and Daviesturned down my $250 check from a Black Masonic lodge and barred mefrom the premises because it was their private property and Yangdidn’t like my “hostile attitude” or my “look,” i.e. Iwouldn’t kiss his bourgeois ass or grin to reassure him I wasn’ta dangerous Negro. The irony of it! For them, Obama was bought andpaid for that night and only invited celebrities like actor Lucy Liuand others on Yang’s exclusive clipboard could enter their covetedpenthouse. Imposters like these are a big part of the problem inAmerica, not the solution. Limousine Liberals jockey for positionand the Democratic Party becomes indistinguishable from theRepublican Party except at election time. But even inHarlem I was on the defensive. Harlem was Hillary country . Boldface name Black celebrities like Maya Angelou, Magic Johnson andTavis Smiley came out for Hillary. Then in January 2008, BobJohnson, the billionaire founder of Black Entertainment Television,made this statement: “And to me, asan African-American, I am frankly insulted that the Obama campaignwould imply that we are so stupid that we would think Hillary andBill Clinton, who have been deeply and emotionally involved in blackissues since Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood –­and I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in the book –­when they have been involved. That kind of campaign behavior does notresonate with me, for a guy who says, ‘I want to be a reasonable,likable, Sidney Poitier ‘Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’ And I’mthinking, I’m thinking to myself, this ain’t a movie, Sidney.This is real life.” I was indignant. Here was a man who had made a fabulous fortune peddling andreinforcing the worst stereotypes about his own people as dangerousdrug dealers, thieves, thugs and rapists; had provided a launch padfor a thousand materialistic, misogynistic hip-hop videos thatglorify the murder of young black men for trivial slights real andimagined; directed his vast entertainment empire to appeal to thelowest common denominator in order to maximize profits, and whenconfronted with protests from the Black community, retorted that "BETstands for Black entertainment television, not Black education television . The production of these videosoutside of BET notwithstanding, I thought about the millionsof viewer-hours that Black children (many of them obese) wastedimbibing BET programming and its emphasis on anti-social andself-destructive behavior to gratify primeval instincts of lust andgreed. Mr. Johnson made himself the heir to and then continued thetradition of 19th-century popular American culture and journalismthat portrayed Africans and their descendents as prurient savages whowould still be swinging from trees had they not been saved byEuropean colonialism and slavery. In true late 20th-century Americanform, Johnson, an African-American, was given the equal opportunityto exploit this tradition in Horatio Alger fashion and become whatwas hitherto an oxymoron: a Black billionaire. Tyve,portrayed brilliantly by Zero Mostel in the musical A fiddler onthe Roof and typical of the “music videos” my mother exposedme to as a boy before companies like MTV and BET came on the scene ageneration later, laments that "when you're rich, they think youreally know." It is clearthat in spite of his great wealth, Bob Johnson does not have a clue. Maybe he was exposed to BET programming in his formative years. Obama the Outlier The election ofBarack Obama is analogous to a “black swan”event; it was notsupposed to happen. Now that it has, the charts are indeliblyshifted in his direction. In my 2007 book I argued thatmacroeconomic forces and cyclical patterns would bring on a recessionand electoral realignment, culminating in his election. In thatsense, his election was not a surprise. Now Obama as a concept larger than the man himself is a new novel form of power and hasa reflexive relationship with other sources of power in all theirvariety, including the power of the subconscious mind in largenumbers of people. We would call this conditioned power. As we haveseen, Black Entertainment Television wields conditioned power throughits ability to manipulate images that penetrate the subconscious andgo on to influence people's behavior without their knowledge andcreate the illusion of acting of one's own “free will.” Conditioned power, like compensatory power (money), is neither goodnor evil; it is a force to be harnessed. Theconservative cultural and political shift that dominated Washingtonand the American frame of debate since the 1980s is now in ruinsbecause the election of Obama is much more significant than the mereelection of another liberal to the White House. The convergence ofhis identity with the position he holds as the face of America to theworld alters the essence of what it means to be an American, areal American, not just someone with United States citizenshipresulting from accidents of history and geography. It isdifficult to overestimate the repercussions this will have over timebut some of the effects on the culture are already apparent. I have seenmore Black/White interracial couples in midtown Manhattan during thelast week of April 2009 than I saw in all of New York during 2008. In what has long appeared to me to be the most race and casteconscious large city in America once you get past the diversitywindow dressing of Black receptionists, security guards and bouncersprotecting all-white offices and night spots, Latino cheap labor andAsian immigrant mom-and-pop service industries, I now see Blacks andWhites actually socializing with each other in public places likeBryant Park during their free time. Some even hold hands. New Yorkis starting to look like London ten years ago. Still, in 2009, themost fashionable Manhattan nightspots in Chelsea and the Meat-PackingDistrict like Cipriani’s and Pink Elephant have an unwritten “NoBlacks Allowed” admittance policy, and its often the 300 lbs. Blackbouncer at the door charged with enforcing this policy under theguise of face-control and dress codes. Black celebrities, of course,are post-racial and get the red carpet unless applying for theprestigious Harmonie Club, which has never admitted a non-white, noteven as a token. Bloomberg wisely resigned from this club and Obamarefused to speak before it while running for office. In Americancinema 20 years ago, Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing and JungleFever , both set in New York and brimming with explosive racialtension, were box office hits. A generation before Spike Lee therewas Guess Who's Coming to Dinner , A Patch of Blue , ToKill a Mockingbird and Imitation of Life . Now,naturalized American supermodel Heidi Klum and her African husband Seal (Henry Olusegun Olumide Adeola Samuel) are onthe front cover of tabloids because they are expecting a baby and themovie The Dance Flick opened in theaters on May 22, 2009. Miscegenation has becomefashionable. Nevertheless, in 2009 more Black men and women thanever are headed for prison. America has 25% of the world’sprisoners and millions of de-facto orphans, mostly Black boys. Thiscomplex problem is far worse now than it was 100 years ago. Whatwould W.E.B. Dubois have to say? Theory is far behind reality andmust now catch up. DANIEL BRUNO SANZ Thisessay is the prologue to Obama 2012, a collection of essays to bepublished later this year. DanielBruno Sanz writes about financial and political affairs. His areasof expertise include currencies, stock markets, Latin America, Japanand Russia. In early 2007, he predicted that Obama would win theDemocratic primary when polls showed him 20 points behind SenatorClinton. He also forecast Obama would win 52% of the popular voteand beat the Republican nominee in the general election. Today heforecasts an Obama victory in 2012. His 2007 book and other writingsare available at DanielBrunoSanz.com. He is a native of New YorkCity.

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