Embedded In Texas - NPR News & Notes Segment

cross-posted to Jack & Jill Politics

First of all, big up to rikyrah and the entire JJP fam for holding it down while I walked the streets of South Dallas for Obama over the past few days. This site continues to grow and impress me. Apologies to all for my absence. I'm still exhausted but am ready to start my steady comeback like Hillary ;)

Today, I returned to News & Notes, and it was energetic as a mug. I shared the mic with Arlene Fenton (Shecodes) of Black Women Vote and Kevin Ross of Three Brothers and a Sister. Add two bloggers to your blogroll and bookmarks because these two were incredible.

Here's a link to our segment (13min) plus photos from my time in Dallas.

As always, there is never enough time to do justice to our topics, but I got most of my main points for the topics we did hit.

• The mood in Dallas after the results: frustration and determination to go to PA


• The late-breaking Clinton voters responding to Clinton negativity


• The media bias that actually favors Clinton by continually resetting success for her despite such continued and massive losses


• The pattern of insults from the Clinton campaign toward Obama based on exploiting race and fear


• The calculated charge of media bias coming from Hillary which echoes the cries of conservatives and provokes an unjustified reaction by the media afraid of being painted as biased. Further victimhood by Hillary


• "No great leader has ever lead by whining"

We had some great discussion on how aggressive Obama can get, the blackened up Obama in the Clinton ad, the role of black bloggers as we interpret these events beyond the limits of the MSM and a few more things

I have so much more to share about my time in Dallas (including video), so please stay tuned over the next few days as I get my thoughts together and publish them. A little teaser

• My door-to-door experience in all-black and mostly poor South Dallas


• Helping run the primary for a precinct. Yes, run. I set up voting machines because no one else knew how to do it


• Helping run the caucus for a precinct


• Video interviews with campaign volunteers


• More photos

Respect

Comments

[Robert Swann]

Baratunde! For those of you following the blog, I'm one of the four men (the local guy) who responded to Baratunde's call to unload food and drink when he first rolled up to the Dallas Headquarters from NYC.

To add to your impressions of the Texas Primary, here's what I think is the biggest (almost) unreported story from the Primary/Caucus:

HRC's "win" in Texas is being credited to fears inspired by the "red telephone" ad and to last minute doubts about Barack's experience. As a Dallas native who canvassed seven turfs in South Dallas and Pleasant Grove (see video at dallasnews.com or google "canvassing dallas news"--our video is #1 for that search term) and then went to his own precint caucus in very Republican, very white Highland Park, I can assure you there were NO last minute doubts about Barack. Better than 90% of hundreds of doors I knocked on were strongly supporting Obama, both at Primary polls and at Caucus.

At my own Caucus location, all four precincts went resoundingly for Obama, with margins varying from 7 to 5 up to 11 to 3. My own precinct, 1226, went 9 to 4 for Obama. This trend held across the state of Texas, resulting in a caucus win for Barack. So where did all these Primary votes for Hillary Clinton come from?

Answer: REPUBLICANS!

Sabotage or "mischief" voting across party lines in the open primary is as old as Texas politics. We here in Texas know this. We want to be sure that voters in the upcoming primaries understand that what they saw in Texas was NOT a show of support for HRC, but rather an attempt by cynical Republicans (who have nothing interesting to attract them to their OWN primary in Texas) to choose a Democratic nominee (Hillary Clinton) that McCain can beat in November.

The Republicans in my neighborhood were smirking and winking at each other as they went in to cast their Clinton votes. Ask any Texan who watched the polls in Republican precints. Why didn't they do the same thing at the Caucus Tuesday night? Because at the Caucus, you have to show your face in order to participate. We tend to know our neighbors around here, and it would be hard to fool anybody about one's true convictions in an open Caucus. The real vote, the principled vote, in the Democratic Primary in Texas in 2008, was the vote we cast at Precinct Convention (same thing as Caucus, for those of you observing Texas and scratching your heads.)

In this neck o' the woods, a vote for Hillary Clinton is considered to be a vote for John McCain. The only thing Texas Republicans (those not already supporting Obama, and I met quite a few of them on my turf walks) fear is having to run against Senator Barack Obama in November. Those favoring Hillary Clinton in Mississippi and Wyoming and Pennsylvania (to name just a few) should think long and hard about this unless they want to see 4 more years of Bush/McCain.

HRC likes to claim that caucuses discriminate against working class folks. She can't really believe that, and if you'd been with Baratunde and Greer and all the rest of us to see the Caucus lines in South Dallas and Pleasant Grove and Duncanville and Desoto and Oak Cliff, you wouldn't believe it either.

Sent Barack another $25 last night. Time for all of us to do the same.

Robert Swann
Dallas, Texas