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By Repair Man Jack Posted in Liberals — Comments (6) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

When The Reverend knew the mike was live, he had the following to say about his friend, Senator Obama.

"My support for Senator Obama's campaign is wide, deep and unequivocal," he said in his statement. "I cherish this redemptive and historical moment."

The average American would have to be off testing missile systems on Kwajalein Island to not know what Jesse Jackson had to say when he thought the mike was dead. While this isn’t Jesse’s first bad experience with non-off-the record commentary, it was gratuitous and over-the top like a bad Stallone movie.

Jesse Jackson has reasons that are both ideological and personal to be angry at some recent statements by Senator Obama. Obama has recently channeled Bill Cosby and spoken out on behalf of individual responsibility being exercised by residents of poor, urban neighborhoods that generally run between 60-100% African-American.

Some, like Mickey Kaus, see this as a condescending and insulting thing for him to be doing. While Kaus has a point; I’ll defend Senator Obama for as long as he continues the practice.

If his actual platform matched his words, I’d have a much tougher choice of who to vote for this Fall. In neighborhoods where the census data suggests that illegitimate births outnumber births to couples in wedlock by a vast amount, the Senator sings from a decent sheet of music.

Barack Obama, if he believes the things he recently said to an audience in Georgia for longer than two news cycles, has a set of views on family responsibility that a sane and reasonable man would hold. The question then becomes, why do common sense and realism bother Jesse Jackson like a case of the Cedar Fever?

Jackson’s personal gripes with Obama are both venal and obvious. It’s hard for Jackson to remain a serious community leader, when the most powerful man in Black America demands a lifestyle from people that The Reverend doesn’t quite seem moral enough to lead himself. It’s almost as if Barack Obama isn’t allowing him to be cynical, lazy and uninvolved anymore. Obama has had the temerity to demand that parents be parents.

The candidate regularly voices a "tough love" message in front of all groups –- telling parents to turn off the video games, get off the sofa, and if their child is in trouble in school to "not cuss out the teacher."

All of this seems alien to Jesse Jackson, who paid a handsome stipend to Karin Stanford, the mother of his most recent by-blow, to stay far away from his life. It has to get under his skin to hear his own brand hypocrisy fulsomely condemned to the roaring approval of an audience. Particularly, an audience that Jackson pretty much assumes he should own.

Jackson also probably has a bone to pick with Senator Obama’s condescending style. This riff on what the typical American knows about foreign languages typifies the jerk side of Senator Obama’s public persona, and could be part of what has Jesse reaching for the sharpened shears.

You know, it's embarrassing when Europeans come over here, they all speak English, they speak French, they speak German. And then we go over to Europe, and all we can say [is], "Merci beaucoup." Right?

It’s barf-inducing, and makes anyone that Barack has accused of holding false consciousness (that’s the trendy academic way of calling someone an idiot) feel royally peeved. So, Jesse Jackson, like any other adult, hates being lectured by someone with a thin resume, a big mouth, and a tremendously unearned sense of entitlement. Yet that never stopped Jesse Jackson from telling the rest of us at which stop we should disembark from the train.

Jesse Jackson sees Barack Obama’s message as a threat to his racket. Barack’s message of personal responsibility is the last thing Jesse Jackson wants audiences of poor, minority Americans hearing. Jesse Jackson makes his living off these people’s sense of inferiority. He goes on TV and bemoans the fact that “they have dope in their veins, not hope in their brains.”

Jesse Jackson lives to protect these people from Racist America. Take Racist America out of the picture, and Jesse would have an awful hard time blackmailing any major corporations into giving each of his legitimate children a beer distributorship. Which brings us to why Barack Obama’s rhetoric will never inspire a single piece of public policy that President Obama wouldn’t treat the same way Bill Clinton treated the first two iterations of welfare reform.

Barack Obama has stood on Jesse Jackson’s shoulders. He wins with Jackson’s coalition. He can talk personal responsibility all he wants. However, he and everyone else in favor of a big intrusive government, would lose tremendous power if people actually took any message of personal responsibility seriously. Neither Liberal nor Conservative compassion sells to an audience of educated consumers.

A nation of people who save themselves does not sit around waiting for Barack Obama to take their cynicism away and make them get off their butts. They’ve gone to work already and are more worried about what Washington, DC will let them keep; not what government can do for them.

This makes Jesse Jackson’s histrionics useful to Barack Obama’s campaign. He gets to have his cake and eat it too. He, like Jesse Jackson, relies on his ability to convince a large group of voters to vote for him in the expectation of him doling out a lot of material rewards for them and their group. However, he needs someone else’s very public face associated with the mode of behavior exhibited by these voters, so that he does not get tagged as a “Pander Bear.”

I view my cynicism as a healthy thing, not something a politician should ever take away. It is in this vein, that the entire incident seems almost contrived. Obama gets to push off of Jesse Jackson and triangulate. Jesse Jackson gets to flash around how Bill O’Liely and Faux News took advantage of his honor, (Pfft!) and intentionally took his comments out of context. Perhaps the Reverend can enlighten us on how you can threaten someone with castration and not mean anything nasty or pejorative by the words.

Thus, the suffering dysfunction of urban America gets used by another generation of politicians. Like bulls dividing the up the rights to the haunches of a bovine heard, these supposedly grown men threaten to amputate certain portions one another’s anatomy. Another good, Christian Reverend preaches the same gospel Don Corlioni used to preach when it was time to put someone else down for getting uppity.

In the end, Barack Obama has a better than 50% chance of being President. In the end, Jesse Jackson has a better than 99% chance of keeping his grubby empire. Barack Obama will make no positive difference to the community he professed to organize.

The people of that community will have to organize themselves. And if they ever did, Senator Obama and Reverend Jackson would no longer being running for elected office. They’d have to run for the hills instead.

Cross-Posted:THE MINORITY REPORT