A community activist's attempt to inspire young people in New Haven has provoked the ire of America's rightwing media
Clifton Graves seemed amused rather than upset – certainly more amused and less upset than most people could manage after being held up to ridicule by the likes of Glenn Beck, Matt Drudge and other assorted rightwing cranks.
"It's indicative of the venom that exists, and the hostility," Graves told me. "It hasn't much to do with the programme. I think it was just directed at Obama."
We were drinking coffee late on a Friday morning in New Haven,Connecticut, at the Greek Olive, a hotel restaurant off Interstate 95. We had met so I could interview him for a book I'm writing about online community journalism. First, though, I wanted to ask him about his long-distance encounter with Beck and his fellow travellers.
A 57-year-old African-American lawyer and community activist, Graves was singled out for national attention after a video of him leading middle-school students in a Jesse Jackson-style inspirational chant surfaced on YouTube.
What caught the right's eye was that the kids, after denouncing drugs and violence and asserting they could be anything they wanted to be ("President! President! President!"), were led to chant: "For I am an Obama scholar." That was it. But it was enough.
Beck, on his syndicated radio programme, pulled together that and several other audio clips, then launched into one of his signature monologues about "dictatorship", "fascism" and "communism". Drudge linked to the video using the headline "School kids chant: 'I am an Obama scholar'…", as though it were anything more than an attempt to inspire poor kids from a poor city to stay out of gangs and get an education. A less well-known reactionary named Scott Factor referred to the chant as "the scariest" part of the video, and wrote that it depicted Graves "making these kids recite a pledge to President Obama … you read that correctly". (Well, no, actually.) A blog called Ironic Surrealism v3.0 called the video an example of "Dear Leader Obama education indoctrination". The rightwing media-watch site NewsBusters.org said it was "a creepy chant".
New Haven is a tough town where African-Americans and Latinos outnumber whites. Following several years of relative tranquillity, the city is experiencing an upsurge of violence. Graves, active in the local NAACP and other community organizations, proposed a youth-mentoring programme for sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. The idea was to introduce them to successful people of colour, as well as to those whose bad decisions had led them to prison.
But what to name it?
"We could have called it after Dr King," said Graves, who shook the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr's hand when he was nine years old and growing up in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. "But in the aftermath of President Obama's election, I said, 'Gee, why not name the programme after someone young people can relate to?' If I named it after a historical figure, it would be someone they have no direct relation to or connection with other than a picture in a book. Whereas here is a real, live person who actually serves as president." Thus was born the Obama Initiative.
The thunder on the right had more of an effect nationally than it did locally. The city's daily newspaper, the New Haven Register, published a front-page story in which various community leaders defended the programme. An accompanying editorial began: "The conservative criticism of an inner-city mentoring programme in two New Haven schools is as groundless as it is uninformed."
It is unsurprising that Beck would pick up on a story from New Haven. During the mid-1990s, he worked as a disc jockey at one of the city's radio stations. Paul Bass, editor of the New Haven Independent, a non-profit news site, was a freelance political commentator at the station, and he recalls liking Beck – but refusing his invitations to join him on the air.
"He'd do really racist stuff on his show," Bass told me last year. In a portent of the Beck that was to come, Bass said Beck would jokingly refer to him as "a communist from Yale", and once even asked him if he knew Fidel Castro.
Back at the Greek Olive, Graves was reminiscing. A soft-spoken man who often wears a kufi, Graves had a great-grandfather who – incongruously enough – was a cowboy and a federal deputy marshal in the Oklahoma Territory. Graves produced a book with a photograph of his great-grandfather Neely Factory (originally Factor) on horseback, along with his posse, a fellow African-American, a Native American and a Caucasian.
"Long before diversity was politically correct, here you've got four men in Oklahoma Territory, looking out for each other, covering each other's back as partners, as friends, as colleagues. It was just so unique," Graves said.
School will be in session in another month, and, for the moment at least, Graves assumes he'll be invited back, "Obama scholar" chant and all.
"To the credit of the community – the school board and the administration – they got a lot of heat. They got the phone calls, I didn't," Graves said. Of his rightwing critics, he added: "They probably don't know how to get in touch with me. They just saw my picture and my name."
Graves said he has yet to see any of the rightwing criticism, and has turned down suggestions from friends that he contact Beck's producers to tell his side of the story. "Why should I give him that credibility?" he asked.
The problem, of course, is that millions of people do find Beck and his ilk credible. A well-intentioned program is mischaracterized, a good man is smeared and the right lurches off in search of another victim.
For them, it's a game. But for Graves, what's at stake is nothing less than the fate of New Haven's youth.
Over and over, politicians in Washington have condemned “earmarks,” language stuck into bills designed to provide money for special projects supported by individual members of Congress. Yet politicians keep fighting for those earmarks -- and there are some members who denounce earmarks in the abstract but then work hard for those that happen to benefit their folks back home.
That may seem hypocritical, but now we know why politicians do it: Voters like politicians better when they show them the money. A new Pew Research Center/National Journal poll released today found that 53 percent of Americans are more likely to vote for candidates with a record of bringing government money and projects to their districts; only 12 percent were less likely to vote for such candidates. The remaining third say the money makes no difference.
That’s a 4-to-1 ratio in favor of delivering the goods. This suggests that voters themselves may actually welcome it when their members have a double-standard: fight spending in the abstract, but make sure we get our share of what goes out. Alternatively, voters may be cynical enough (or realistic enough -- take your pick) to calculate that if money is going to be passed around, they want a piece of it for their communities. And, yes, there are still voters out there who believe government can do good things, and they especially like it when those good things are tangible and close-to-home. The moral: expect to see a lot of ads this fall in which incumbents facing tough races talk a lot about the projects they’ve won for their districts.
Personally, I wish there were less hypocrisy and phony moralism about the whole thing. Members will always fight for money for their constituents, and I’m weary of empty posturing about earmarks. But I don’t expect it to stop.
But if earmarks help candidates, Sarah Palin does not.
Another striking finding from the poll: 38 percent said they would be less likely to vote for a candidate she campaigned for, while only 18 percent said her support would make them more likely to vote for that candidate. President Obama had a mixed impact: 27 percent said Obama’s campaigning would make them more likely to vote for a candidate, 28 percent less likely.
Within those numbers are two others sets of figures suggesting that a lot of Republicans will ask Palin to stay home: Among independents, 36 percent said Palin would make them less likely to support a candidate, while only 15 percent said her support would help that candidate. And Palin turns off more Democrats than she turns on Republicans: 41 percent of Republicans said they’d be more likely to vote for a Palin-backed candidate, but 58 percent of Democrats say they’d be less likely to support one of her favorites.
On net, association with the Tea Party also hurts a candidate more than it helps: 31 percent said they were less likely to vote for a Tea Party supporter, while 22 percent were more likely to give such a candidate their vote. These numbers are yet another indication that the Tea Party represents roughly the right-wing quarter of the American electorate, which was there long before Obama became president.
The bottom line: Count on many Democratic candidates to associate their Republican opponents with Palin and the Tea Party. These numbers suggest that the influence of both peaked during this year’s Republican primaries. Now, they are a net negative for the GOP. And, yes, count on all incumbents to brag about that bridge or building they brought to a street near you.
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