rights vs rights: an improbable collision course

[niyad]

Rights vs. Rights: An Improbable Collision Course

PIONEERS Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Frederick Douglass worked together on abolition, but then had a bitter split over who should be first to get the right to vote — women or blacks.

Bettmann/Corbis
TWO MOVEMENTS Bella Abzug and Gloria Steinem with Jesse Jackson, superstars of their eras.
BARRING some seismic scandal, unforeseen late entry (“Al Who?”), or unlikely surge by John Edwards, it is wholly inevitable that the race for the Democratic nomination will end next August in an epochal first.

Either Senator Barack Obama will be the first African-American or Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton will be the first woman to win the presidential nomination of a major American political party. One of them will take the stage at Denver’s Pepsi Center, specked with confetti and soaked in history as a culminating figure of one of the great ideological movements of the last century — civil rights or women’s rights.

To this point, both Mr. Obama and (to a lesser degree) Mrs. Clinton have been diligent in trying not to identify too closely with either movement. Mr. Obama rarely mentions his race explicitly, leaving the heavy rhetoric of his groundbreaking potential to his wife, Michelle (who in a speech in November spoke of lifting “that veil of impossibility that keeps us down and keeps our children down”). Mrs. Clinton has made more direct appeals to mothers and daughters and “making history,” but has for the most part predicated her candidacy on the masculine virtues of toughness, resolve and her extensive experience in the (male-dominated) realm of politics and government.

Still, whether the candidate wants the mantle or not, whoever wins the nomination will be bestowed (or bludgeoned) with the hopes and legacy of a movement. The victory will be a benchmark moment for the American promise of equality, and the Democrats will add to their partisan quiver a feel-great story that could buoy them in the fall. “Americans are looking for a way to break barriers,” Karl Rove said last week in an interview with National Public Radio (not that Mr. Rove, President Bush’s chief political maharishi, is at risk of helping either Mr. Obama or Mrs. Clinton do this). “They would love to elect a woman president; they would love to elect an African-American president.”

. . . . .


http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/13/weekinreview/13leibovich.html

[Bonobo]

1. Like I said yesterday...

America is a great nation where both the grandson of a black goatherd and the wife of a former 2-term President of the United States and leader of the Free World have an equal chance to become president!

[midnight]

2. This is well written information about the pioneers who

fought for the vulnerable to have a voice. Please remember, what ever rights were fought for and won in this country came because of injustices. Right now people are being murdered because they happen to be in the wrong country. People are being allowed to die, because they happen to need health care. People are going to starve because they happened to have needed a job that was shipped overseas. Please folks don't get distracted by these divisions. Stay focused on keeping all of us feed, employed, at home, and not at war, and healthy.