Turning a Generation Into a Political Force

By L. Alexis McGill

Hip-hop has always been political: Its lyrics speak of the experiences of a marginalized and disadvantaged generation of urban youth. As a cultural force, hip-hop has always challenged convention. The music highlights struggle, social injustice, and an unyielding legacy of institutionalized discrimination. Even excessive materialism in some songs can be understood in the context of a world lacking economic opportunity.
Beyond music, the term "hip-hop" has come to describe a multicultural generation of young Americans who came of age in the '80s and early '90s. It defines our fashion, our language, and now our politics. Our intent as a cultural force is to challenge convention and to forge a collective voice to fight societal neglect and disregard.
The problem is no one listens. Unlike in our parents' generation, today's dialogue doesn't happen solely in church. It happens in school, in the streets, in clubs, and on the Internet. But if we really want to be heard, our conversation must move to the voting booth.
If hip-hop is about being "real," then the harsh reality in the hip-hop community is that when it comes to youth voter participation, we've performed poorly. According to the US Census, 40 million young voters (18-35) represent 25 percent of the voting population. But only half of those young people were registered to vote in 2000. Moreover, young people (18-24) account for the lowest voter turnout in the country (36 percent) while older Americans (age 65-74) participate at twice that rate (72 percent). Participation is even more dismal for African-American and Latino youth.
Looking at the numbers, it's not difficult to realize the potential voting power of the hip-hop generation. There are more than 40 million of us, and when presidential elections are decided by mere hundreds, we could be a solid swing vote. That's why in 2001, Russell Simmons and Dr. Benjamin Chavis co-founded the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network (HSAN) -- to leverage and empower this modern-day collective. So far, we've registered more than 200,000 young people, but we're aiming for millions. Our goal is eventually to rival the influence of organizations such as the American Association of Retired People.
Hip-Hop Team Vote, launched in 2003, is HSAN's initiative to connect with young voters: It's a national voter registration drive and coordinated grassroots and media campaign designed to organize the hip-hop generation into a political force. The project is based on a simple premise: When their albums drop on any given Tuesday, hip-hop artists mobilize millions of young people to buy their records. The political parallel is obvious. On Nov. 2, these same artists will mobilize their fans and encourage them to move beyond just self-reflection through music and culture and towards self-empowerment through political influence.
To engage my generation, however, will mean more than voter registration. Lack of formal political participation speaks to a fundamental disconnect with the political process. Indeed, cynicism driven by a lack of substantive representation and accountability on the part of elected officials explains part of this disconnect. Poverty, underresourced educational and healthcare systems, as well as racial and cultural profiling within the criminal justice system explain the other part. Put simply, voting can seem like a luxury when you're focused on survival.
The motivation to vote will come from engaging young people about the issues that directly affect their lives and developing a political agenda that speaks to their needs. If HSAN is to harness even a 10th of this generation's billion-dollar consumer power, it must be done by educating young people about how their collective involvement in politics can change policy and, therefore, change their future. Only then will the hip-hop generation become an undeniable political force.
Just like the AARP, our movement is nonpartisan. In the past three years, under the banner "Taking Back Responsibility," HSAN has held Hip-Hop Summits in cities across the country. Artists like Fabolous, Beyonce, Ludacris, and Kanye West attend our summits (not to perform, but to talk). They join industry executives and community activists, providing a forum for young people to express themselves and encouraging them to think about collective empowerment. The price of admission at these otherwise free events is registering to vote or getting a friend or family member to register if age, citizenship status, or felony convictions create ineligibility.
Working in partnership with local organizations on the ground, we've already registered 20,000 young people in Houston; 60,000 in Los Angeles; and 30,000 in Chicago -- this year alone. We'll be in Boston on July 26 to continue our registration drive there.
Ours is just one tributary of a growing hip-hop youth movement. And we believe a direct route to power is in the vote, which can invest young people with a sense of ownership, a sense of agency, and a sense of pride at having achieved significant rates of participation in such a short time. Once we have the vote, our generation cannot be disenfranchised, ignored, or taken for granted. Like true hip-hop, we're priming young people across the nation to collectively "flip the script" and take back responsibility for their future.
L. Alexis McGill is political director of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network.
© Copyright 2004 The Boston GlobeCompany
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Al Gore, Rock Star

By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 25, 2007; Page A01

LOS ANGELES -- In the annals of vice presidential history, tonight will be something different. In his black tux, the man known to his most fervent fans as "The Goracle" will arrive by hybrid eco-limo and, surrounded by fellow Hollywood greenies Cameron Diaz and Leonardo DiCaprio, will stroll down the red carpet at the Academy Awards to answer the immortal question: "Al, who are you wearing?"

What a year it has been for Al Gore and his little indie film

"An Inconvenient Truth," the 100-minute movie that is essentially Gore giving a slide show about global warming, is the third-highest-grossing documentary ever, with a worldwide box office of $45 million, right behind blockbusters "Fahrenheit 9/11" and "March of the Penguins."

"AIT," as Team Gore calls it, is also the hot pick tonight for Best Documentary, and if its director, Davis Guggenheim, wins an Oscar, he plans to bring Gore along with him to the stage to accept the golden statuette and perhaps say a few words about . . . interstitial glacial melting? (More likely, Gore will deliver a favorite line about "political will being a renewable resource.")

In the year since his film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, to a standing ovation, Gore has gone from failed presidential contender -- and a politician who at times gave new meaning to the word cardboard -- to the most unlikely of global celebrities.

Incredible as it may seem, Al Gore is not only totally carbon neutral, but geek-chic cool. No velvet rope can stop him. He rolls with Diddy. He is on first-name basis, for real, with Ludacris. But what does this mean? And how did it happen? Did Gore change? Or did the climate -- political, cultural, natural -- change around him?

In an e-mail exchange with The Goracle himself, "AG" typed to The Washington Post that the Oscar craziness and pageantry of the film premieres has been fun (his word) "but I'm old enough to know that a red carpet is just a rug, so I've been able to enjoy that part of it without losing perspective."

Just a rug, people. Because, Gore continued (this was on Friday during a break from his tux fitting): "Actually, for me, the most moving moments have been in conversations with people who have told me that the movie had a big impact on the way they think and feel about our moral responsibility to protect the Earth."

"He is more popular now than he ever was in office, and he knows it," says Laurie David, one of the producers of "Inconvenient Truth" and a Hollywood environmental activist (and wife of "Seinfeld" co-creator Larry David) who has traveled around the world promoting the film with Gore. "He's a superhero now."

Before the film? He was more Willy Loman than Green Avenger. After his loss in 2000, a battered Gore began to schlep around the country, often solo, flying coach, giving his ever-evolving slide show about climate change, a threat that Gore, now 58, says he has felt strongly about since his Harvard days.

After the film? Says director Guggenheim, "Everywhere I go with him, they treat him like a rock star."

Guggenheim is not being hyperbolic. Take the Cannes Film Festival: Al Gore was mobbed. By French people. He was a presenter at the Grammy Awards, alongside Queen Latifah, where he got one of the biggest welcomes of the night. "Wow. . . . I think they love you, man. You hear that?" the current Queen asked the former veep. Earlier this month, the ticket Web site at the University of Toronto crashed when 23,000 people signed on in three minutes to get a seat to hear Gore do his thing on the oceanic carbon cycle. At Boise State, Gore and his slide show sold out 10,000 seats at the Taco Bell Arena, reportedly "faster than Elton John."

Remember that this is the same Al Gore who even today interrupts himself to explain that while he supports the use of ethanol to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, please, he is not talking about regular ethanol; he is talking about "cellulosic ethanol" (made from wood chips rather than cornstarch).

Also remember that "An Inconvenient Truth" was not on anybody's short list for theatrical release, let alone an Oscar. "I think I was the only person crazy enough to want it," says John Lesher, president of Paramount Vantage, which purchased the film at Sundance. "Everybody else had already passed on it, to be honest, but I thought if we do our job right, this could be a zeitgeist moment.



The film distributor's greatest challenge? "To convince people that it wasn't going to be boring," he says. "We didn't want to sell spinach." His greatest asset? "Al Gore. There was no hiding him."

Lesher explains that, from a marketing and branding perspective, Gore was lugging some very heavy baggage. "Democrats felt disappointed in him, and Republicans didn't like him," he says. "But it worked." How come? What comes through in the film, Lesher says, "is here is this person who has gone through this incredible adversity" -- Florida recount, Supreme Court decision, bye-bye White House -- "and this is what he decides to do," the one-man slide show, "and so you see this massive integrity."

And nobody worked for the film harder than Al Gore, Lesher says: "He was an amazing collaborator, and unlike everyone else in Hollywood, he did everything he said he would do, which is unique in my experience."

Gore worked the premieres in Edinburgh, Helsinki, Oslo, Stockholm, Sydney, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Zurich, Brussels, Berlin and Tokyo. In France, he not only attended the film opening, but presented his 90-minute Apple Keynote lecture to the National Assembly. He did the slide show at the United Nations, the American Geophysical Union, and before conservative activist Grover Norquist's regular Wednesday meeting.

"I am trying to reach out to people in every effective way that I can find," Gore wrote in his e-mail. "In the process, I have had the chance to work with really interesting people from all walks of life." Meaning: eggheads and rappers, movie moguls and prime ministers, and, recently, Bon Jovi. "So, pop culture is an important part of the message delivery system, but far from the only part."

Gore's book, based on the film, has sold 850,000 copies worldwide and translation rights for 24 languages. In Spain, Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero told Gore that the DVDs of the film would be shown in the public schools, following similar proclamations in Scotland and Norway. And speaking of Norway, earlier this month Gore was nominated for a Nobel Peace Prize for his work to alert the world to the dangers of climate change.

"People ask him all the time what does he attribute his recent success to and Gore tells them 'reality,' " says Larry Schweiger, a friend and president of the National Wildlife Federation, who is a leader of Gore's Alliance for Climate Protection, a foundation that seeks to bring evangelicals, hunters, farmers and entrepreneurs to the cause. "They used to ridicule him. They called him a tree-hugger. They don't do that anymore."

Guggenheim explains: "People say to me that Al Gore is so different now. Why wasn't he like this when he ran for president?" Meaning that Gore now appears relaxed, confident, happy, and not stiff, robotic, pinched. "They say Al has changed. But I don't think so. We've changed. The setting has changed. He's the same. When you're running for office, you're a target every moment you are in front of the camera. Now, he's in a different place and we see him in a different way."

There might be something to this. Earlier this month in Los Angeles, accompanied by booming house techno bass beat, Gore announced his plan for a global "Live Earth" day of mega-concerts this summer, to be held simultaneously on all seven continents, with 100 of the world's most popular musical acts -- Snoop Dogg, Kelly Clarkson, Bon Jovi, Korn -- to promote awareness about climate change. Gore was surrounded by a grinning Cameron Diaz (she hugged him) and a nodding Pharrell Williams, the rap-producing impresario, and though Gore perhaps went on for a few paragraphs too long about how many tons of carbon a day are entering the oceans, the riser of international press and paparazzi were clearly gorging on the glamorama. Gore was his usual earnest self. A nerd? Maybe, but he was the nerd with Cameron and Pharrell, talking about the carbon cycle and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. It was the mixology -- high-wattage celebrity and energy-efficient light bulbs -- that helps the medicine go down.

"Is being president better than this?" muses Simon Rosenberg, head of the New Democratic Network. "I think what Gore's figured out how to do is something that a lot of people want to do. He's living a life of great freedom and pursuing his interests, and he's having an impact on public policy. He's been able to start a bunch of companies and do the movie and he's got this great life right now."

"I agree" Gore typed, "that the Zeitgeist has begun to change. I think it reflects the increased popular will to confront and solve this crisis. It's an extraordinary experience to see this issue -- which the conventional wisdom used to say was politically marginal -- become central for so many people. As it should. I also think that people see candidates through a different lens, and that is a factor. But I also think there is at least a grain of truth to the old cliche that 'what doesn't kill you makes you stronger.' So maybe I've gotten a little stronger in the last six or seven years."

Gore is escaping the fate of most former politicians, says Matt Bennett, a consultant for Democrats who worked closely with Gore during his vice presidency. "Usually defeated -- or allegedly defeated -- party nominees become pariahs. Look at Mike Dukakis or John Kerry. Or they just go out to pasture like Bob Dole. Gore has pulled off a feat unknown in modern times, which is to completely rehabilitate his image in the public mind very quickly."

Bennett credits savvy handling by people around Gore, including the documentary-makers. And he says the world is catching up with Gore. "Look, this guy was a visionary. He was right about everything, even the stuff he was ridiculed for," Bennett says. "He was right about the Internet, he was right about the first Gulf War, he was sure as hell right about the Iraq war. And he was right about global warming."

At the "Live Earth" press conference, Gore once again affirmed that he is not planning to enter the 2008 presidential fray, though this has not stopped the lefty blogosphere from imagining the jaw-dropping holy cow if The Goracle announces his run on Oscar night. That, say Gore's most intimate insiders, is most definitely not going to happen.

As for whom Gore will be wearing, his people reveal: It'll be Ralph Lauren

Sharpton's Ancestor Was Owned by Thurmond's

By Robin Shulman
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 26, 2007; Page A01

NEW YORK, Feb. 25 -- The Rev. Al Sharpton, the prominent civil rights activist, is descended from a slave owned by relatives of the late senator and one-time segregationist Strom Thurmond, a genealogical study released Sunday reported.

"It was probably the most shocking thing of my life," Sharpton said of learning the findings, which were requested and published Sunday by the New York Daily News. He called a news conference to respond publicly to the report. "I couldn't describe to you the emotions I have had . . . everything from anger to outrage to reflection to some pride and glory."


Sharpton, 52, said he had suspected that his forebears may have been slaves but had never attempted to confirm that or find out any details.

"I had never really traced my family history, particularly on my father's side, since my parents separated when I was going on 10 years old," he said.

The newfound knowledge that his great-grandfather was a slave, Sharpton added, gave him a new perspective on his life.

"You think about the distance that you've come, you think about how brutal it was, you think about how life must have been like for him. And then you start wondering whether or not he would be proud or disappointed in what we have done," Sharpton said, with his eldest daughter, Dominique, 20, at his side.

The revelation was particularly stunning for the juxtaposition of the two men's public lives.

Sharpton, known for his fiery rhetoric and a tendency to intervene as an advocate in racially charged incidents, ran for president in 2004 on a ticket promoting racial justice. Thurmond made his own bid for the presidency in 1948, promising to preserve racial segregation, and in 1957 he filibustered for more than 24 hours against a civil rights bill.

After his death in 2003, though, it became clear that Thurmond had a complicated history with issues of race. A 78-year-old retired schoolteacher, Essie Mae Washington-Williams, revealed that she was the offspring of his extramarital relationship with his family's black housekeeper.

"In the story of the Thurmonds and the Sharptons is the story of the shame and the glory of America," Sharpton said Sunday.

The genealogy study was produced by researchers for the Web site Ancestry.com. Daily News reporter Austin Fenner initially asked them to research his own roots. He then approached Sharpton and asked if he would permit an investigation of his family history as well, for use in a story. Sharpton agreed. Neither the Daily News nor Sharpton paid for the research.

The research was led by chief Ancestry.com genealogist Megan Smolenyak, who was also the lead researcher for the 1997 PBS series "Ancestors" and has written several books on the subject. She was assisted by researchers including Tony Burroughs, who has been honored by the National Genealogical Society. They used documents including census, marriage, death and military records over a three-week period to examine Sharpton's family roots.
They found that Sharpton's great-grandfather, Coleman Sharpton, was a slave owned by Strom Thurmond's distant cousin.

Coleman Sharpton was given as a gift to Julia Thurmond, whose grandfather was the late senator's great-great-grandfather, said Mike Ward, a spokesman for Ancestry.com. Coleman Sharpton was later freed.




Al Sharpton met Strom Thurmond once with his friend James Brown, the late singer, who knew Thurmond and wanted to pay him a visit while in Washington.

"I was not happy to visit him because of what he had been all his life," Sharpton said.

Sharpton said his family origins in Edgefield County, S.C., brought him nearer to his closest mentors, Brown and the Rev. Jesse Jackson, who had lived nearby. Sharpton said he mused with Brown's family about whether their families might have a shared past.

"I told his daughters last night about this, and we all wondered whether some of James Brown's family might have been slaves with my great-grandfather," Sharpton said.

While some of Thurmond's relatives contacted by the Daily News expressed skepticism about the report, Doris Strom Costner, a cousin of the late senator, said Sharpton should be proud to know his family's connection to hers. "He's in a mighty good family," she said by telephone from Edgefield, S.C.

Asked how she feels to learn of evidence that her family owned slaves, she said: "I can't help it. I'm 74 years old, and I certainly can't help it. I don't feel one way or the other." Most white South Carolinians at the time owned slaves, she said.

Sharpton said he hoped the news of his roots would help heal the lingering wounds of slavery.

"If we open the scars just to leave them open, we've done a misdeed to both sides," Sharpton said. "We should open them and deal with them toward healing them so we can come together on some genuine level."

Staff writer Rob Stein and staff researcher Rena Kirsch in Washington contributed to this report.

Section 1 ROOTS: PERSPECTIVES ON HISTORY
1 Harry Allen Dreams Of A Final Theory
2 Anthony "Amde" Hamilton of the Watts Prophets Nommo
3 Marc Bamuthi Joseph (Yet Another) Letter To A Young Poet
4 Jorge POPMASTER FABEL Pabon Physical Graffiti: A History Of Hip-Hop Dance
5 Joe Schloss The Art of Battling: An Interview With Alien Ness
6 Greg Tate, Vijay Prashad, Mark Anthony Neal, Brian Cross Got Next: A Roundtable on Identity and Aesthetics after Multiculturalism Roundtable


Section 2 FLIPPING THE SCRIPT: BEYOND THE FOUR ELEMENTS
7 The Pure Movement and the Crooked Line: An Interview with Rennie Harris
8 Eisa Davis Found In Translation: The Emergence of Hip-Hop Theatre
9 Marc Bamuthi Joseph, Kamilah Forbes, Traci Bartlow, and Javier Reyes From The Dope Spot To Broadway: A Roundtable on Hip-Hop Theatre, Dance, and Performance
10 Adam Mansbach On Lit Hop
11 Bill Adler Who Shot Ya: A History of Hip-Hop Photography
12 Cey Adams, Brent Rollins, and Sacha Jenkins Words And Images: A Roundtable on Graphic Design
13 Lydia Yee, with Nadine Robinson, Sanford Biggers, Luis Gispert, and Jackie Salloum Between the Studio and the Street: A Roundtable on Hip-Hop Visual Arts
14 Paul D. Miller The City In Public Vs. Private: Through a Scanner Darkly


Section 3 THE REAL: IDENTITY IN FLUX
15 Oliver Wang It Was Written: The Aesthetics of Hip-Hop Journalism
16 Kevin Coval "L-vis Is A Pioneer" or Legacy, the VH1 Special
17 Dave Tompkins Burn Rubber on Plastic Bubbles: The Art of Dave Funkenklein
18 Danyel Smith Black Talk and Hot Sex: Why Street Lit is Literature
19 Juba Kalamka and Tim'm West It's All One: A Conversation
20 Joel Tan Homothugdragsterism
21 robert karimi how I found my inner DJ
22 Joan Morgan and Mark Anthony Neal A Brand New Feminism: A Conversation


Section 4 WORLDWIDE: HIP-HOP ARTS BEYOND BORDERS
23 Suheir Hammad Brooklyn
24 Staceyann Chin Falling For Bob Marley
25 Eli Jacobs-Fantauzzi Inventos Hip-Hop: An Interview
26 Shaheen Ariefdien and Nazli Abrahams Cape Flats Alchemy
27 Raquel Cepeda Afro-Blue: Incanting Yoruba Gods in Hip-Hop's Isms
28 Cristina Verán with Darryl DLT Thompson, Litefoot, Grant Leigh Saunders, Mohammed Yunus Rafiq, and JAAS Native Tongues: A Roundtable on Hip-Hop's Global Indigenous Movement


Section 5 NEXT ELEMENTS: HIP-HOP ARTS AND FUTURE AESTHETICS
29 Walidah Imarisha Untitled Poem
30 Roberta Uno Theatres Crossing The Divide: A Baby Boomer's Defense of Hip-Hop Aesthetics
31 Eric Arnold, with Rachel Raimist, Kevin Epps, and Michael Wanguhu Put Your Camera Where My Eyes Can See: A Hip-Hop Film Roundtable
32 Codes And The B-Boy's Stigmata: An Interview with Jeffrey DOZE Green
33 Revolution: An Interview with Brett Cook-Dizney
34 Rha Goddess Scarcity & Exploitation: The Myth & Reality of the Struggling Hip-Hop Artist
35 Danny Hoch Towards A Hip-Hop Aesthetic: A Manifesto for the Hip-Hop Arts Movement

Excerpt
Hip-hop is one of the big ideas of this generation, a grand expression of our collective creative powers. But, when recognized at all, the hip-hop arts have often been divided into subcategorical themes—"spoken word poetry", "street literature", "post-multicultural theatre", "post-black art", "urban outsider art"—by critics trained to classify trees while lost in the forest. Perhaps this is simply because the hip-hop arts movement did not undertake to formally announce itself in such circles, as in Antonin Artaud's 1938 manifesto The Theater And Its Double or the 1971 Black Arts Movement anthology, The Black Aesthetic. Perhaps this is simply because, despite all the interest in the talking, the hip-hop arts movement has been chiefly concerned with doing, which is just what it has done, organically, for over three decades now.

Harry Allen, the pioneering hip-hop critic and the first self-proclaimed "hip-hop activist", likens the movement's development to the Big Bang. Its vanishing point is in the Bronx, somewhere around '68. Its "epoch of inflation" is the six-year period before recorded rap. Sometime between the middle and the end of that epoch, Afrika Bambaataa famously articulated the outlines of the hip-hop aesthetic by defining four primary "elements", its founding genres: DJing, MCing, graffiti writing, and b-boying/b-girling. In Allen's formulation, before 1979, together these constituted "one, never-to-reappear 'superforce,'" After that, anything could happen.

Sure enough, upon its Athena-like downtown appearance at the turn of the 80s, hip-hop seemed to have already outrun the avant-garde. Graffiti art was celebrated as a reaction to minimalism and conceptualism, an "outsider" art that correlated to postindustrial dislocation, confronted “drop-dead” government with kids-eye creativity, and encapsulated all that was transgressive and progressive in the moment. B-boying’s radically democratic reclamation of public space and its aggressive athleticism reinvigorated modern dance. DJing brought the noise for the postmodernists’ interest in rupture, repetition, and bricolage, and MCing seemed perfectly tailored for the poststructuralists’ obsession with textuality.

Hip-hop's internal creative force does not rest. In the time that it takes for a group of kids in the neighborhood to go from wide-eyed young'n's to confident teen arbiters of style, slang, swing, and swagger to grown-folk moving on and out (and then declaring the next set of kids to be the murderers of their natural-born hip-hop, which, of course, is completely true), the culture has turned over again, leaving the universe with a whole lot of new matter to deal with. So from kids battling in roller rinks, shopping malls, and city centers to teens showcasing in cultural centers and nightclubs, we have adults taking over the performance space, the theater stage, and the soundstage. From kids painting graffiti on trains to teens customizing canvases, we have adults rethinking painting, sculpture, graphic design, installation art, and architecture.

Why not? The alternative to an outsourcing, McJob world is to get busy. Maybe the new hip-hop universe must expand to fill the vacuum left by the old. If the hip-hop generation was the first to enjoy the freedoms of a post-civil rights world, they were also the first to see the repeal of many of those same freedoms. In the word of the Cuban rappers, we adopt the spirit of inventos, not merely building on the advantages afforded by the ever-shrinking revolution, but recognizing the necessity of starting fresh, making the something that we want to grow the nearly nothing that we got from the other thing that we were promised.

Enter the hip-hop artists. They share a desire to continue to break down boundaries between so-called high- and low-art, to bring the street into the art-space and the art-space into the street, to make urgent, truth-telling work that reflects the lives, loves, histories, hopes, and fears of their generation, the hip-hop generation. Heir to the Black Arts, the postmodernist and multiculturalist movements, head high amidst all of the terms batted about to try to frame the imperatives and urgencies of Now—such as post-Blackness, polyculturalism, globalism, and transnationalism—hip-hop is where flux, identity, revolution, and the masses mix, and keep on expanding.

Q: To what extent have the last three decades in American history shaped hip-hop and to what extent has hip-hop shaped American history?

Hip-hop shows how deeply the last thirty years of American history have been affected by the politics of abandonment. These inner cities where hip-hop took root were abandoned by government, business, and frankly, the white middle class. What comes out of that is this intense mass longing to create history, to paraphrase Don Delillo, a deep desire to crush invisibility, to make culture that impacts the world and says "we're here". That's hip-hop.

In the mid-80s, there are little bans on breakdancing and boomboxes. Kind of a joke, really, but then they start adding on curfews, anti-cruising ordinances, and sweep laws against young people who have literally taken over public space with hip-hop. A decade later, there are vast gang databases that might include the names of two-thirds of a city's black youth males, and unconstitutional anti-loitering ordinances that go back in spirit to slavery and Jim Crow. After the politics of abandonment have turned inner cities into places where all the rot and horror of American Cold War militarism comes home to roost, a politics of containment takes shape. One way to understand the hip-hop movement and the hip-hop generation is to put it back into the space and time of the politics of abandonment and the politics of containment.

Q: I was watching an MTV clip where P-Diddy was rolling through town in a Bentley encouraging people to vote, and Trick Daddy was registering voters in Florida. To what extent do you think hip-hop is a force for political change?

A: Without question, hip-hop is a political force. The question is: what kind of political movement are we looking at? Media will focus on celebrities. They'll say that when you stand Russell Simmons and P-Diddy and Trick Daddy against Rosa Parks, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. there's no comparison. There isn't. It's comparing apples to oranges.

In my book, I focus on the grass-roots movements. Hip-hop activists and organizers have elected and deposed politicians, stopped multimillion-dollar juvenile jails from being built, convinced taxpayers to vote for millions in youth services, and much more. They're just not marching on Washington. Hip-hop activists and organizers fight below the radar, at the local level, and the mainstream media never talks about it. So there's a false perception that the only political actors in this generation are the visible millionaires. How progressive politics is being remade day-to-day, block by block, city by city, is another great untold story of the hip-hop generation.

Ford Goes Private Sector: Joins Merrill Lynch

It looks like Congressman Ford is going to be staying pretty busy. While already accepting a visiting professorship at Vandy and the head job at the DLC, Ford now has now joined Wall Street by signing onto the Merrill Lynch team.

The Commercial Appeal has more:

Former Congressman Harold Ford Jr. of Memphis, recently named chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, will become a vice chairman and senior policy advisor at Merrill Lynch and Co. Inc., the New York investment banking firm announced this afternoon.

Ford, 36, lost his bid to be a U.S. Senator from Tennessee in November and was named to the centrist Democratic think tank last month. He will also be teaching at Vanderbilt University in Nashville while he awaits what he says will be another run for public office.

"We are delighted to have a dynamic, energetic visionary like Harold Ford join Merrill Lynch," Stan O'Neal, the company's chairman and chief executive officer, said in a prepared statement.

"At a young age, Harold has excelled in virtually every assignment he has ever taken on, distinguishing himself in the Congress and bringing fresh ideas and solutions to government that transcended partisan politics. We have every expectation that Harold will be equally successful supporting Merrill Lynch in its efforts to pursue new business opportunities and be responsive to the communities we serve around the world."

Ford could not be reached yesterday when the first rumors of the new job prospect reached The Commercial Appeal. His closest advisors declined to confirm reports that he was going to a Wall Street investment banking firm.

"I'm thrilled to be joining the executive team at Merrill Lynch," Ford said in the company's statement. "For generations, the Merrill Lynch brand has represented the path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans and citizens the world over. It's a great tradition that I look forward to helping build on during my tenure with the firm."

Statement from Merrill Lynch:

Merrill Lynch & Co., Inc. (NYSE: MER) today announced that Harold E. Ford, Jr., former congressman, Ninth District of Tennessee, will join the company as vice chairman and senior policy advisor, effective March 5. Mr. Ford will advise senior management on domestic policy issues, serve as a member of the firm's public policy and social responsibility management committee, and support a variety of business development initiatives in the institutional and retail markets. He will report to Greg Fleming, president of the firm's Global Markets and Investment Banking group, and maintain offices in New York and Nashville.
Mr. Ford was elected to Congress in 1996 at age 26 and served five terms. He sat on the House Budget Committee and the House Committee on Financial Services. In addition, Mr. Ford co-chaired the Congressional Savings and Ownership Caucus, a bipartisan coalition dedicated to advancing policies to build savings and assets for all Americans, and low-income Americans in particular, and the Community Solutions and Initiatives Caucus, a bipartisan group of lawmakers that seeks to help faith and community-based groups solve social challenges. Earlier this year, he was elected chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council, the progressive policy and issues advocacy organization, succeeding Iowa Governor Thomas Vilsack, who resigned to take steps in advance of a run for the presidency.

"We are delighted to have a dynamic, energetic visionary like Harold Ford join Merrill Lynch," said Stan O'Neal, the company's chairman and chief executive officer. "At a young age, Harold has excelled in virtually every assignment he has ever taken on, distinguishing himself in the Congress and bringing fresh ideas and solutions to government that transcended partisan politics. We have every expectation that Harold will be equally successful supporting Merrill Lynch in its efforts to pursue new business opportunities and be responsive to the communities we serve around the world."

"Harold's experience, enthusiasm and perspective make him a valuable addition to our management team," said Mr. Fleming. "We look forward to his contributions to Merrill Lynch's business development efforts and expect to benefit greatly from his government experience and personal insight as we address the public policy implications of our various business activities over the next few years."

"I'm thrilled to be joining the executive team at Merrill Lynch," said Mr. Ford. "For generations, the Merrill Lynch brand has represented the path to economic opportunity for millions of Americans and citizens the world over. It's a great tradition that I look forward to helping build on during my tenure with the firm."

Mr. Ford earned a law degree from the University of Michigan Law School and a bachelor's degree in American history from the University of Pennsylvania.

Merrill Lynch is one of the world's leading wealth management, capital markets and advisory companies with offices in 38 countries and territories and total client assets of approximately $1.6 trillion. As an investment bank, it is a leading global trader and underwriter of securities and derivatives across a broad range of asset classes and serves as a strategic advisor to corporations, governments, institutions and individuals worldwide. Merrill Lynch owns approximately half of BlackRock, one of the world's largest publicly traded investment management companies, with more than $1 trillion in assets under management. For more information on Merrill Lynch, please visit www.ml.com.

HILL'S HIRE CALLING

By IAN BISHOP
SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY: Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton yesterday joins South Carolina state Sen. Darrell Jackson at a rally in Columbia, S.C.. He announced his support of her after his firm was tapped to work for her campaign.
February 20, 2007 -- COLUMBIA, S.C. - Hillary Rodham Clinton stood shoulder to shoulder yesterday with a controversial "supporter for hire" as she appeared here before a mostly African-American crowd.

South Carolina state Sen. Darrell Jackson - who endorsed Sen. Clinton last week just days after her presidential campaign agreed to give him a consulting contract that could be worth over $200,000 - kicked off her town-hall-style session at historically black Allen University.

Jackson, an influential black pastor of a 10,000-member church, has been embroiled in controversy since it was revealed that his coveted endorsement of Clinton came after he bagged a $10,000-per-month consulting deal for his public-relations firm from the former first lady.

Commenting on the matter for the first time, Clinton insisted that her team struck no side deal with the state senator.

"Sen. Jackson has worked in Clinton campaigns going back to 1992," she told The Associated Press.

Still, the endorsement raised eyebrows by creating the appearance that his support was bought by the highest bidder.

Jackson insists that Clinton's rivals Sen. Barack Obama and former Sen. John Edwards had offered similar, or better, consulting contracts.

Jackson told The Post yesterday: "It's not a controversy to me. It's someone else's issue. I'm fine."

"I think the national media should spend more time here, and they would see I have got a lot of friends here. But they may have helped us get a great crowd today," added Jackson, whose company is now the state's oldest and largest black-owned p.r. firm.

Jackson stood by Clinton's side as she made a pitch to African-American voters who make up the majority of the South Carolina's Democratic Party by emphasizing domestic issues - and calling for the Confederate flag to be removed from the nearby State House.

"I personally would like to see it removed from the State House grounds," she said in an interview.

Clinton, who swooped into South Carolina two days after arch-rival Obama, emphasized the bread-and-butter domestic issues of health care, education and energy.

The crowd of 3,000, about two-thirds of whom were African-American, gave Clinton hearty rounds of applause, none more thunderous than when she cast her presidential bid in historic terms.

"I believe this presidential campaign is about breaking barriers," she said. "This is the campaign, and I am the candidate."

HILL'S NEW P.R. $$ PAL RIPS 'RACIST' FOES

By IAN BISHOP, Post Correspondent
February 17, 2007 -- WASHINGTON - The key black South Carolina leader who scored a big payday for his consulting firm just before he endorsed Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential bid said any allegations of impropriety are laced with racism.

"I'm somewhat offended in the sense that . . . the national media thinks that an African-American in my position cannot support a candidate without being paid off," huffed state Sen. Darrell Jackson, a well-connected lawmaker and pastor whose support is coveted by national campaigns.

His public-relations and consulting firm, Sunrise Enterprises, snagged a deal with Clinton's campaign for $10,000 per month through the 2008 primary.

"They seem to have a hard time believing that in South Carolina there could be a legitimate African-American public-relations firm that's not a hustler," he fumed.

"If there was no contract, I'd still endorse Clinton. This was having thought about the process, who is best able to lead and, quite honestly, which Democrat I think will be strongest come November. It's not about the contract," he told The State newspaper.

Jackson told the Post and Courier newspaper that he had "offers on the table" from Clinton's Democratic White House rivals Barack Obama and John Edwards - "all of them were for at least the very same amount as the Sen. Clinton offer."

Jackson, the pastor of a church with more than 10,000 members, admits his financial marriage with Camp Clinton should have been disclosed before his endorsement of Clinton was revealed Tuesday by a South Carolina colleague.

Meanwhile, an e-mail chain between Obama aides and Jackson's representatives showed a deal was all but signed when Jackson's secretary abruptly wrote that her boss was taking new information "into consideration" - a likely last-minute foray from Clinton, according to news reports.

The flap comes as Obama yesterday swooped into the Palmetto State for the first time, with a rally in the capital of Columbia, to be followed today by an event at the historically black Claflin University.

Clinton will open her South Carolina campaign Monday with a town hall-style forum with voters at Allen University, another historically black college.

SHOCKING 200G HILL DEAL

By MAGGIE HABERMAN
INFLUENCE GAME: Hillary Rodham Clinton, due to campaign in South Carolina this weekend, "jumped at the chance" to enlist Jackson, a spokesman said.February 15, 2007 -- Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign reached a deal to pay a key South Carolina black leader's consulting firm more than $200,000 just days before he agreed to endorse her run for president, it was revealed yesterday.

The arrangement involves South Carolina state Sen. Darrell Jackson, a well-connected African-American leader and pastor whose support is coveted by national campaigns.

Jackson confirmed to The Post yesterday that his public-relations firm struck a deal with the Clinton campaign just days ago for a contract worth up to $10,000 a month through the 2008 elections.

Jackson had also been in talks with Sen. Barack Obama's campaign about endorsing him and entering into a consulting contract for more than $5,000, sources said - raising questions about whether Jackson's endorsement was bought by a higher bidder.

Jackson acknowledged that his financial dealings with the Clinton camp should have been mentioned on Tuesday, when his support for the Democratic front-runner was revealed by a South Carolina colleague.

But Jackson balked at suggestions that his political support for sale.

"It's not about the money - there were some other candidates who offered to double [Clinton's] offer," Jackson told The Post, though he declined to say which candidates. He said his firm, Sunrise Enterprises, is the "oldest, largest and the best" in the state.

"I could work for any candidate right now for more money . . . It's not a matter that we chose the Clintons. I have offers from every major candidate," he added, suggesting the issue was being raised as sour grapes by Clinton rivals whom he had turned down.

Jackson said he was heavily courted by Obama personally, along with Edwards, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson. He said he doesn't draw a salary from Sunrise, but he gets to drive a company car.

Jackson worked for Edwards in 2004, and for Bill Clinton in 1992.

Obama aides declined comment. Clinton's camp would not directly address questions about the appearance that they had received Jackson's backing in exchange for a contract.

BILL SNARES OBAMA GUY

By MAGGIE HABERMAN
February 14, 2007 -- Former President Bill Clinton helped his wife, Hillary, secure a key endorsement from an African-American leader who was being courted by Illinois Sen. Barack Obama.

South Carolina state Sen. Robert Ford said yesterday he was backing Sen. Clinton's 2008 presidential run and that he was swayed, in part, by a personal call from Bill Clinton. Ford told The Post he also received calls from the senator.

"That made somebody like me feel real honored," he said.

Ford supported fellow Southerner John Edwards in 2004 and said he had been lobbied by him again this time.

It's the first direct sign that Bill Clinton - whom author Toni Morrison once dubbed the "first black president" - is interceding directly with officials who are on the fence for 2008.

Sen. Clinton also picked up the backing of South Carolina state Sen. Darrell Jackson, who, like Ford, had been lobbied by Obama.

Support from African-American voters is key in South Carolina, where 49 percent of the Democratic presidential primary vote in 2004 came from blacks. The state will host the first Southern primaries for both Republicans and Democrats in 2008.

Bill Clinton is slated to appear at New York's black and Hispanic caucus meeting this weekend - which one supporter of Sen. Clinton said "definitely sends a signal" that he's looking to make sure her black support is secure.

Ford said he likes Obama, but "I think that African-Americans on a large scale are supporting Hillary Clinton because of who she is . . . This is her time, more so than anybody else who's running."

Clinton insiders said the former president has been making calls on her behalf to various people, not only black leaders, in the weeks since she declared her candidacy.

But his enduring popularity with black voters will likely be a boon to his wife, who already has strong black support in her own right.


Meanwhile, a new USA Today/Gallup poll showed Sen. Clinton stretching her lead over Obama, 40 percent to 21 percent, while Republican Rudy Giuliani is leading Arizona Sen. John McCain, 40 percent to 16 percent.

Clinton's lead last month had been 11 points, while Giuliani's had been 4 points. The poll was of 435 Republicans and GOP-leaning independent voters nationwide, and 495 Democrats and Dem-leaning independents, from Feb. 9- 11. The primary numbers have a 5-point margin of error.

February 24, 2007 -- IT isn't just presidential politics that has David Geffen bad-mouthing Sen. Hillary Clinton and throwing his support behind Sen. Barack Obama.

Sources say the diminutive movie mogul is motivated by jealousy because his old friend Bill Clinton now prefers the company of supermarket billionaire Ron Burkle. Geffen's animosity is also fueled by Burkle's attempt to buy the Los Angeles Times, which Geffen had wanted to purchase for himself.

"It's all about Bill Clinton's relationship with Burkle, and it all started because Burkle went after the Los Angeles Times," said one West Coast source. "Geffen is on a jihad right now."

Bill Clinton used to stay at Geffen's mansion (once owned by Jack Warner), but now he stays at Burkle's estate (the former home of silent film star Harold Lloyd) whenever he's in town.

The former president is also a partner in Burkle's Yucaipa Companies, which buys and invests in various ventures. While the exact arrangements have never been disclosed, it is believed that Clinton could earn many millions of dollars from his relationship with Burkle.

Insiders say Geffen - a billionaire who started in the music industry and co-founded DreamWorks with Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg - moved quickly to host a fund-raiser for Obama when he learned that an L.A. event for Hillary Clinton had been scheduled.

Then, Geffen went public, calling Bill a "reckless guy" and Hillary an "incredibly polarizing figure." "Everybody in politics lies, but they [the Clintons] do it with such ease, it's troubling," Geffen said.

Hillary's camp demanded that Obama renounce Geffen and return his campaign contributions. "They all look really stupid," said one politically connected Californian. "It's hurting the Democratic Party nationwide."

Another Democratic source scoffed at Geffen's explanation for his disenchantment with Bill Clinton, attributing it to Clinton's pardon of tax fugitive Marc Rich while failing to pardon American Indian activist Leonard Peltier, who was convicted of murdering two FBI agents.

"I never believed the pardon was the issue," said this politico. "Geffen is looking for a platform. He's frustrated and bitter. He's got all these billions, but he's still trying to prove his relevance."

Romney Enjoys Democratic Rivals' Dust-Up

By GLEN JOHNSON
The Associated Press
Friday, February 23, 2007; 10:24 PM

MERRIMACK, N.H. -- Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney said Friday that he relishes the infighting that has consumed two of his potential Democratic opponents, Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York and Barack Obama of Illinois.

"It's great, isn't it?" Romney said to peals of laughter from a crowd of employees at a solar-related equipment plant on the newly declared candidate's first visit to the leadoff presidential primary state. "I love to see it when it happens on the other side."


The former Massachusetts governor described his leading Republican rivals, Sen. John McCain of Arizona and former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani, as "friends" and "national heroes," before adding: "I respect them. I'm sure we'll disagree on issues from time to time, but I doubt you'll see the rancor that apparently may exist elsewhere."

Earlier this week, Clinton aides called on Obama to repudiate criticism of the former first lady leveled by Hollywood producer David Geffen, a former Clinton backer now supporting Obama. Obama refused, saying Geffen spoke for himself.

Romney's main message to workers during the visit was that it doesn't make sense for the country to send its oil dollars to nations that dislike the United States, so he's developing a plan for energy independence in the not-too-distant future.

Expanding the use of wind, solar, nuclear and improved coal technologies could help the nation create as much energy as it uses within 20 to 30 years, some experts believe, a timeframe Romney cited but would not embrace until he delivers his formal speech on the subject at some future date.

"It doesn't make sense for us not to become increasingly energy independent, and for that to happen, we're going to have to rely on technology, innovation of the same kind that you're seeing right here," Romney told about 100 employees at GT Solar Inc., which makes equipment used to construct solar energy panels.

"It will be the vision of that program to have America to produce as much energy as we use," he added.

Romney had been scheduled to visit New Hampshire amid a campaign announcement tour that took him to early voting Iowa, South Carolina, Florida and Michigan, but he had to postpone his trip after a heavy snow storm closed schools and highways.

Obama Takes First Campaign Trip South

Democratic Candidate Tailors Message to Reflect a Connection to Civil Rights Struggles

By Michael D. Shear
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 18, 2007; Page A09

ORANGEBURG, S.C., Feb. 17 -- Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.) took his presidential campaign to the heart of the Deep South for the first time this weekend, tailoring his campaign message to associate himself with the civil rights movement.

With a Kenyan father who was not descended from African slaves, Obama is unlike Southern black candidates, steeped in the slavery and civil rights struggles that tore at the region for more than a century. Neither is he like the white politicians, whose skin color automatically disqualifies them from the black experience.



Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), left, accepts the endorsement of Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) in Richmond for the 2008 presidential campaign. (By Steve Helber -- Associated Press)

And so, on his maiden presidential visit to South Carolina and Virginia, Obama was greeted with not only enthusiasm but also a bit of curiosity.

"Not only people in the black community, but people in the white community are going to be looking at this man and trying to figure out: Is he one of us? Does he understand what we've come through? What we're still confronting now?" said Vivian A. Glover, an assistant vice president at Claflin University, a historically black school in Orangeburg. "He's not bringing that with him. He's going to need to present it in some form or fashion."

It was Orangeburg where three black college students were gunned down in 1968 as they pressed to integrate the small town's only bowling alley. Speaking Saturday at Claflin to residents of the town and a new generation of students, Obama brought the primarily black crowd of about 2,000 to its feet by evoking that era.

"At every juncture in our history, there's been somebody that's said we can't. There's been somebody's said you can't overcome slavery. There's been somebody who said you can't overcome Jim Crow," Obama told the South Carolina crowd. "If I have your support, if I have your energy and involvement and commitment and ideas, then I'm here to tell you, 'Yes we can in '08.' "

Later Saturday, Obama and his wife, Michelle, traveled to Richmond and accepted the endorsement of Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D). Obama told reporters that his presidential campaign is a symbol for improving race relations in America.

"Here we are in the heart of what was the Confederacy," Obama said, looking out over the Virginia statehouse, which housed the Confederate Congress during the Civil War. "For me to be able to stand here as an African American reflects the enormous progress this country has made."

He then continued a busy day by addressing more than 4,000 Democratic activists at the state party's annual Jefferson-Jackson Day dinner.

A Democrat has not won Virginia's electoral votes in decades. But Kaine, in becoming the first sitting governor to make a 2008 endorsement, said that could change with Obama as the party's nominee. He called the Illinois senator "a proud American but also a citizen of the world."

In both states, audiences greeted Obama more like a celebrity than a politician looking for their vote. In Orangeburg, cellphone cameras snapped pictures the moment he entered the gymnasium and did not stop during his speech, which was cut short to a half-hour because of Saturday's Senate vote on a resolution on Iraq.

"I like his message of togetherness," said Frank Loadholt, 56, a social worker from Orangeburg who said he will "absolutely" vote for Obama. "I look at him as the best candidate out there with the best message."

South Carolina state Rep. Gilda Cobb-Hunter (D) said it is "totally ludicrous" to worry about Obama's lack of a history in the civil rights movement. "Look at the man's record," she said. "It shows he has an understanding of issues like that."

But many in the crowd seemed more hesitant and said they were not yet certain they will vote for Obama next year.



Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill.), left, accepts the endorsement of Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine (D) in Richmond for the 2008 presidential campaign. (By Steve Helber -- Associated Press)

"I believe in listening to all of the candidates," said Wilhemina James, 58, from Florence. "This old gut hasn't failed me yet."

South Carolina has one of the nation's first presidential primaries, and African Americans make up about half of the state's Democratic electorate, so black support here is particularly critical.

Obama is vying with Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (N.Y.) and former North Carolina senator John Edwards for that backing. All three camps are wooing prominent black politicians and courting black religious leaders, with varying degrees of success.

That push seemed reflected not only in Obama's Orangeburg speech but also in one he delivered to a more racially diverse crowd of almost 3,000 in Columbia on Friday.

"When folks were saying we're going to march for our freedom, somebody said, 'You can't do that.' And we did," Obama said Friday, sparking raucous applause. "And somebody said, 'Don't sit at the lunch counter.' . . . We did. When somebody said, 'Women belong in the kitchen, not in the boardroom,' they said we can't do that. Yes we did!"

Carol Singletary, 55, a retired social worker from Columbia, said that part of Obama's speech was important to her.

"I was raised in the civil rights era," said Singletary, who is black. "We came through a lot of ups and downs. South Carolina is one of those places that really did struggle. And still does struggle."

But she said Obama's background should not be a barrier to African Americans like her. "I don't hold that against him," she said after watching his speech. "I thought he was wonderful."

Edwards came to Charleston last week, and Clinton is scheduled to visit South Carolina on Monday.

Hollywood Gives Obama Both Cash and Credibility

By Matthew Mosk
Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, February 21, 2007; Page A04

Hollywood has always gravitated to the fresh face, so the crushing turnout there yesterday at a rally and a series of fundraisers for presidential contender Barack Obama followed a familiar Tinseltown story line.

The Democratic senator from Illinois drew thousands to a South Los Angeles park, then headed to Beverly Hills for a fundraising double feature that organizers said yielded him an estimated $1.3 million.



Movie stars Tom Hanks, Jennifer Aniston and Denzel Washington wrote checks, and scores of producers and agents paid $4,600 per couple -- the maximum allowed -- to jam a hotel ballroom for a two-hour, closed-door cocktail reception hosted by entertainment moguls Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen.

Those who collected $46,000 in checks for the event, which attracted 300 people, were invited to Geffen's house for a more intimate sit-down dinner with Obama.

Organizers said they expected the freshman senator to leave town flush not only with money but also with valuable connections in a city that has for decades served as a lifeline for Democratic presidential contenders.

Money collected now could provide an important boost, in that it will appear on Obama's first quarterly earnings report. Those figures, when released in April, will help signal his campaign's viability.

A clear undercurrent to yesterday's high-profile Hollywood swing was the ease with which Obama swept up support from entertainment industry titans who had once been squarely with President Bill Clinton and Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.).

"There will be lots of excitement about her," Donna Bojarsky, a Hollywood-based political consultant who attended last night's Obama event, said of Hillary Clinton. "But with him, there's this overwhelming sense that people could be getting in at the ground floor of a historic journey."

That is not to say Hollywood is leaving Hillary Clinton behind. Spielberg is one of many who have pledged to raise money for Obama, Clinton and former senator John Edwards. Next month, former supermarket magnate Ron Burkle will host a major fundraiser for Clinton.

"Senator Clinton has been a box-office hit in this town for 15 years," said Chad Griffin, a Hollywood-based political strategist and staff member in the Clinton White House. "Anyone who can survive the industry for 15 years has lasting power."

2008 PRESIDENTIAL CAMPAIGN: Nevada gets early caucus

Diverse state moved to No. 2 spot on Democratic calendar

By KATHLEEN HENNESSEY
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean, left, applauds the Rev. Jesse Jackson after Jackson addressed members of the DNC during their summer meeting Saturday in Chicago. The DNC added Nevada and South Carolina to the early presidential voting states.
Photos by The Associated Press,


Lois DeBerry, left, speaker pro-tem of the Tennessee House, talks with Democratic National Committee chairman Howard Dean during the DNC summer meeting Saturday in Chicago. The DNC added Nevada and South Carolina to the early presidential voting states. The change is designed to address a nagging problem for Democrats: How to give a greater voice in selecting a presidential nominee to minorities who are among the party's most loyal supporters.


Nevada politicos celebrated Saturday as their state became an important stop on the presidential campaign trail.

"Our world is about to change," said Nevada's Democratic candidate for governor, Dina Titus, shortly after Democrats meeting in Chicago approved a 2008 presidential nomination schedule that puts the state in the No. 2 spot on the calendar and guarantees its voters a front seat for the prescreening of presidential wannabes.

"They're already starting to call me," Titus, a state senator, said, adding that she got special attention from national leaders at the weekend Democratic National Committee meeting. "They introduced me around as the great victor of the primary. I think this will help in the governor's race. It will help me to get them raising money and get them fired up about this election."

The committee agreed to sandwich a Jan. 19 Nevada caucus between the Jan. 14 Iowa caucus and a Jan. 22 New Hampshire primary. It also added a Jan. 29 primary in South Carolina. The shake-up was backed by Democratic leaders who want to add more Hispanic and black voters to the voter pool picking the party nominee.

Supporters of the new plan also hope the switch will give Democrats an early foothold in the West, a region increasingly seen as a key to winning the general election.

The shift also will create a group of Nevada powerbrokers whose endorsements will be courted with campaign contributions and face time.

Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid is expected to be chief among them, though Reid spokesman Jon Summers said the Nevada senator has promised not to play early favorites.

"Every candidate that comes to Nevada will come to the state on equal footing," Summers said.

Another winner from Saturday's decision was the state's Hispanic community, which makes up about 23 percent of the population. One in seven voters in Clark County, home to two-thirds of the state's registered voters, is Hispanic, according to county estimates.

"Hispanics will play a major role in deciding who wins this caucus," said Andres Ramirez, a Las Vegas political consultant and community organizer.

Ramirez predicted the switch would force candidates to take stronger positions on energy, water, economic development, education and -- if Congress doesn't act on proposed reforms soon -- immigration.

But presidential hopefuls also will have to brush up on some Nevada issues.

"When we were in the spotlight in 2004 they got away with mostly (talking about) Yucca Mountain, and didn't go much beyond that," said Dennis Myers, news editor at the weekly Reno News and Review and a longtime political reporter.

In 2008, candidates will have to become well-versed in rural Nevada's political dialogue -- which has nothing to do with ethanol, he said.

"The rural here is a different rural than in Iowa or New Hampshire. It's not agriculture, it's mining," Myers said. "The mining law of 1872 is an article of faith out there."

State Sen. Steven Horsford, D-Las Vegas, agreed the decision would force politicians to focus on issues confronting Nevada and the West.

"It's really great for Nevada and for Democrats across the country," he said by phone from Chicago.

Nevada's political class has been sensitive to outsiders who've scoffed at the notion of caucusing in casinos, and shuddered at the thought of blackjack dealers and strippers picking the next nominee.

"We also have nurses and firefighters and casino workers, and they deserve to select the next president of the United States as much as anybody else does," said Horsford, who helped lobby for the change.

Nevada's balanced voter registration numbers and ethnic and cultural diversity meshed well with the diversity the Democratic National Committee is seeking for the nomination process, Horsford said.

Myers notes the state parties have long held caucuses, officially called "precinct meetings." The meetings have been held in saloons, but also in high schools. They've garnered the most attendees when hot issues, such as the Vietnam War, dominated the discussion. The presidential caucuses brought out about 9,000 Democrats in February 2004.

But this shouldn't be confused with a "caucus tradition" on par with Iowa, experts said.

"Nothing is culturally ingrained in Nevada. The population growth is so rapid and the turnover so great that at any given time there are more new residents here than in any other state," Myers said.

What the state lacks in institutional knowledge and party organization it makes up for in strong unions and the Reid network.

Reid and the Culinary Union, representing 60,000 cooks, maids, waitresses and bellmen at casino resorts on the Las Vegas Strip, led the fight for the early contest.

Both saw their political stock rise with Saturday's voice vote.

"This will be an enormous undertaking, but our state party is up to the challenge that comes along with this incredible opportunity," Reid said in a statement. "We will make Democrats proud as the national political spotlight prepares to shine on our state. I look forward to welcoming all presidential candidates to Nevada."

Review-Journal writer Lawrence Mower contributed to this report.

Clinton Camp to Obama: Cut Ties & Return Cash After Top Booster's Vicious Attacks

As Obama rails against "slash & burn" politics, his top Hollywood fundraiser - David Geffen - personally attacks Hillary & her family
Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson issued the following statement today demanding that Barack Obama disavow personal attacks that his campaign finance chair made against Senator Clinton in this morning's New York Times:

"While Senator Obama was denouncing slash and burn politics yesterday, his campaign's finance chair was viciously and personally attacking Senator Clinton and her husband.

"If Senator Obama is indeed sincere about his repeated claims to change the tone of our politics, he should immediately denounce these remarks, remove Mr. Geffen from his campaign and return his money.

"While Democrats should engage in a vigorous debate on the issues, there is no place in our party or our politics for the kind of personal insults made by Senator Obama's principal fundraiser.

----------------------------------------

Obama Embraces Slash & Burn Politics

Clinton Communications Director Howard Wolfson issued the following statement today:

"By refusing to disavow the personal attacks from his biggest fundraiser against Senator Clinton and President Clinton, Senator Obama has called into serious question whether he really believes his own rhetoric. How can Senator Obama denounce the politics of slash & burn yesterday while his own campaign is espousing the politics of trash today?

"When one of Senator Clinton's supporters made an inappropriate statement, her campaign disavowed it immediately and the supporter apologized for his words. Why won't Senator Obama do the same?"

Obama speaks against 'slash and burn' politics

February 18, 2007 (LAS VEGAS) - Sen. Barack Obama on Sunday railed against "slash and burn" politics in Washington in a brief stop in Nevada, his first since declaring his presidential ambitions.

"We've got to get beyond the small politics, ... the slash and burn politics that have become the custom in Washington," the Illinois senator told a crowd of about 3,500 gathered at an outdoor amphitheater in Las Vegas.
Obama promised to restore a sense of hope and community to the country.

"We all have a stake in each other. We are bound together, we are mutually responsible to make sure that every child has an opportunity, to make sure that every family has the capacity to support their children and look for a better future," he said.

He repeated his calls for more education funding and for the return of significant numbers of U.S. troops from Iraq by March 31. He also promised to reform the health care system in his first term in the White House.

(Copyright 2007 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)

Hillary is not David Geffen’s dreamgirl

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.

.

“Whoever is the nominee is going to win, so the stakes are very high,” says Mr. Geffen, the Hollywood mogul and sultan of “Dreamgirls,” as he sits by a crackling fire beneath a Jasper Johns flag and a matched pair of de Koonings in the house that Jack Warner built (which old-time Hollywood stars joked was the house that God would have built). “Not since the Vietnam War has there been this level of disappointment in the behavior of America throughout the world, and I don’t think that another incredibly polarizing figure, no matter how smart she is and no matter how ambitious she is — and God knows, is there anybody more ambitious than Hillary Clinton? — can bring the country together.

“Obama is inspirational, and he’s not from the Bush royal family or the Clinton royal family. Americans are dying every day in Iraq. And I’m tired of hearing James Carville on television.”

Barack Obama has made an entrance in Hollywood unmatched since Scarlett O’Hara swept into the Twelve Oaks barbecue. Instead of the Tarleton twins, the Illinois senator is flirting with the Dreamworks trio: Mr. Geffen, Steven Spielberg and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave him a party last night that raised $1.3 million and Hillary’s hackles.

She didn’t stand outside the gates to the Geffen mansion, where glitterati wolfed down Wolfgang Puck savories, singing the Jennifer Hudson protest anthem “And I Am Telling You I’m Not Going.” But she’s not exactly Little Miss Sunshine, either. Hillary loyalists have hissed at defecting donors to remember the good old days of jumping on the Lincoln Bedroom bed.

“Hillary is livid that Obama’s getting the first big fund-raiser here,” one friend of hers said.

Who can pay attention to the Oscar battle between “The Queen” and “Dreamgirls” when you’ve got a political battle between a Queen and a Dreamboy?

Terry McAuliffe and First Groupie Bill have tried to hoard the best A.T.M. machine in politics for the Missus, but there’s some Clinton fatigue among fatigued Clinton donors, who fret that Bill will “pull the focus” and shelve his wife’s campaign.

“I don’t think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person,” Mr. Geffen says, adding that if Republicans are digging up dirt, they’ll wait until Hillary’s the nominee to use it. “I think they believe she’s the easiest to defeat.”

She is overproduced and overscripted. “It’s not a very big thing to say, ‘I made a mistake’ on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can’t,” Mr. Geffen says. “She’s so advised by so many smart advisers who are covering every base. I think that America was better served when the candidates were chosen in smoke-filled rooms.”

The babble here is not about “Babel”; it’s about the battle of the billionaires. Not only have Ron Burkle and David Geffen been vying to buy The Los Angeles Times — they have been vying to raise money for competing candidates. Mr. Burkle, a supermarket magnate, is close to the Clintons, and is helping Hillary parry Barry Obama by arranging a fund-raiser for her in March, with a contribution from Mr. Spielberg.

Did Mr. Spielberg get in trouble with the Clintons for helping Senator Obama? “Yes,” Mr. Geffen replies, slyly. Can Obambi stand up to Clinton Inc.? “I hope so,” he says, “because that machine is going to be very unpleasant and unattractive and effective.”

Once, David Geffen and Bill Clinton were tight as ticks. Mr. Geffen helped raise some $18 million for Bill and slept in the Lincoln Bedroom twice. Bill chilled at Chateau Geffen. Now, the Dreamworks co-chairman calls the former president “a reckless guy” who “gave his enemies a lot of ammunition to hurt him and to distract the country.”

They fell out in 2000, when Mr. Clinton gave a pardon to Marc Rich after rebuffing Mr. Geffen’s request for one for Leonard Peltier. “Marc Rich getting pardoned? An oil-profiteer expatriate who left the country rather than pay taxes or face justice?” Mr. Geffen says. “Yet another time when the Clintons were unwilling to stand for the things that they genuinely believe in. Everybody in politics lies, but they do it with such ease, it’s troubling.”

The mogul knows it’s easy to mock Hollywood — “people with Priuses and private planes” — and agrees with George Clooney that it’s probably not helpful for stars to campaign for candidates, given the caricatures of Hollywood.

I ask what he will say if he ever runs into Bill Clinton again. “ ‘Hi,’ ” he replies. And will he be upset if Hillary wins and he never gets to sleep in the Lincoln Bedroom again?

“No,” he says with a puckish smile. “It’s not as nice as my bedroom.”

Clinton, Obama Camps' Feud Is Out in the Open

By Chris Cillizza and Dan Balz
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, February 22, 2007; Page A01

An increasingly acrimonious competition between Sens. Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton to enlist the Democratic Party's leading fundraisers and operatives burst into the open yesterday, overshadowing what was billed as the presidential campaign's first gathering of candidates in Nevada.

While Clinton (N.Y.) and Obama (Ill.) have not for the most part taken their competition public, their campaigns in recent weeks have been trumpeting each victory, such as the recruitment of a major Boston-based rainmaker by Obama and a prominent African American state senator from South Carolina by Clinton.



The back-and-forth between the two campaigns has largely been fodder for political insiders. Yesterday, however, David Geffen, the music and film producer who is one of the party's most prominent donors, made the fight more public. In an interview with New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd, Geffen said that Clinton is "the easiest to beat" of the Democratic field and skewered her unwillingness to apologize for her 2002 vote to use force in Iraq. "It's not a very big thing to say 'I made a mistake' on the war, and typical of Hillary Clinton that she can't," Geffen said.

Geffen, who was a co-host of an Obama fundraiser Tuesday night in Los Angeles, saved even sharper criticism for former president Bill Clinton, to whom he was close before a falling-out over the pardoning of financier Marc Rich at the end of Clinton's second term. "I don't think anybody believes that in the last six years, all of a sudden Bill Clinton has become a different person," Geffen said in an oblique reference to questions surrounding the former president's private life.

After seeing the comments yesterday morning, the Clinton campaign immediately issued a call for Obama to disavow Geffen's remarks and return his $2,300 donation, arguing that they were contrary to Obama's pledge to run a positive campaign.

"A day after Barack Obama goes out and eschews the politics of slash-and-burn, his campaign embraces the politics of trash," said Phil Singer, Clinton's deputy communications director, referring to a speech Obama made Tuesday in Las Vegas.

Obama communications director Robert Gibbs took a markedly different course. After refusing to get in the "middle of a disagreement between the Clintons and someone who was once one of their biggest supporters," Gibbs pointed out that Hillary Clinton had recently praised Robert Ford, another South Carolina state senator who endorsed her and said the Democratic ticket would be in serious trouble if Obama was the nominee because of the color of his skin. Clinton distanced herself from that remark, and Ford later apologized for it.

Obama weighed in later. "It's not clear to me why I would be apologizing for someone else's remarks," he said in Iowa, where he had gone instead of the candidates forum because of a prior commitment. "My sense is that Mr. Geffen may have differences with the Clintons, but that doesn't really have anything to do with our campaign."

At the forum in Carson City, Nev., ABC's George Stephanopoulos, the moderator, asked Clinton whether she agreed with her campaign spokesman that Obama should disavow Geffen's comments.

Clinton did not answer directly. "I want to run a very positive campaign, and I sure don't want Democrats or supporters of Democrats to be engaging in the politics of personal destruction," she said. "I think we should stay focused on what we're going to do for America." She then added, to applause: "And, you know, I believe Bill Clinton was a good president. I'm very proud of the record of his two terms."

New Mexico Gov. Bill Richardson sided with Clinton and called on Obama to denounce Geffen's comments. "I think these name-callings are not good," he said. "I don't know Mr. Geffen. I don't know what was said. . . . But we don't need that. We Democrats should sign a pledge that we all be positive. That's what the American people want."

While her campaign was on the attack against Obama, Clinton found herself on the defensive once more over Iraq. She was challenged again to explain her vote for the 2002 resolution authorizing the war and her reluctance to call that vote a mistake or to express regret for it.

SHOCKING 200G HILL DEAL

By MAGGIE HABERMAN


INFLUENCE GAME: Hillary Rodham Clinton, due to campaign in South Carolina this weekend, "jumped at the chance" to enlist Jackson, a spokesman said.February 15, 2007 -- Hillary Rodham Clinton's campaign reached a deal to pay a key South Carolina black leader's consulting firm more than $200,000 just days before he agreed to endorse her run for president, it was revealed yesterday.

The arrangement involves South Carolina state Sen. Darrell Jackson, a well-connected African-American leader and pastor whose support is coveted by national campaigns.

Jackson confirmed to The Post yesterday that his public-relations firm struck a deal with the Clinton campaign just days ago for a contract worth up to $10,000 a month through the 2008 elections.

Jackson had also been in talks with Sen. Barack Obama's campaign about endorsing him and entering into a consulting contract for more than $5,000, sources said - raising questions about whether Jackson's endorsement was bought by a higher bidder.

Jackson acknowledged that his financial dealings with the Clinton camp should have been mentioned on Tuesday, when his support for the Democratic front-runner was revealed by a South Carolina colleague.

But Jackson balked at suggestions that his political support for sale.

"It's not about the money - there were some other candidates who offered to double [Clinton's] offer," Jackson told The Post, though he declined to say which candidates. He said his firm, Sunrise Enterprises, is the "oldest, largest and the best" in the state.

"I could work for any candidate right now for more money . . . It's not a matter that we chose the Clintons. I have offers from every major candidate," he added, suggesting the issue was being raised as sour grapes by Clinton rivals whom he had turned down.

Jackson said he was heavily courted by Obama personally, along with Edwards, Joe Biden and Bill Richardson. He said he doesn't draw a salary from Sunrise, but he gets to drive a company car.

Jackson worked for Edwards in 2004, and for Bill Clinton in 1992.

Obama aides declined comment. Clinton's camp would not directly address questions about the appearance that they had received Jackson's backing in exchange for a contract.

Bill O'Reilly - Enemy of Hip Hop - Part One!

Bill O'Reilly vs. Ludacris
"I was single for a long time. I was all over the world covering wars and met thousands of women."

-- Bill O'Reilly
Playboy interview, May 2002

"I've got ho's in different area codes."

-- Ludacris
"Area Codes"

While Bill O'Reilly's mother Angela explained to the Washington Post that her son "grew up in Westbury, Long Island, a middle-class suburb," Bill O'Reilly used to claim that he grew up in a more proletarian locale, the nearby suburb of Levittown. In the first chapter of his book "The O'Reilly Factor," he writes of his "working-class" background, and suggests that his family was "pretty far down the social totem pole." And it's true that the O'Reillys could only afford to go on Florida vacations once a year, and that his dad did hard, grimy, back-breaking labor as an accountant.

But the family also had enough money to send O'Reilly to private school, and then college (with a year abroad in England), and then college again. "You don't come from any lower than I came from on an economic scale," O'Reilly once told the New York Observer. "I fully realize that blacks in the ghetto, and all that, had a much rougher life than I had. But I started from ground zero. When I got out of B.U., I had not a nickel."

Here, you have to give O'Reilly his due: if you ask the average employer, "Hey, who are you most likely to hire -- a black from the ghetto, or a white guy with a master's degree from Boston University, the employer will reply, 'Whoever's got the nickel!'"

But is O'Reilly really the salt-of-the-earth type he plays on his very popular, very entertaining TV series? O'Reilly says his show on Fox News looks at "things from a blue-collar, workingman's point of view." To convey that view, O'Reilly says things like "corporate America, in my opinion, needs to rethink their responsibility to their country" and "I'm in the vanguard on television of our search-and-destroy mission about the elite media...They don't want to hear from [regular people]. They don't want to address our concerns..."

Interestingly enough, Bill O'Reilly is married to a woman named Maureen McPhilmy, vice president of DWJ Television, a company that specializes in producing commercials for big, rich, powerful corporate clients like Sun Microsystems and Kellogg's, and then passing these commercials off as genuine news stories on channels like Fox News. And, of course, O'Reilly makes a lot of money from one of the world's biggest media conglomerates to portray a regular guy -- $4 million a year, according to the Boston Globe.

So given the shaky foundation on which Bill O'Reilly's blue-collar, workingman's persona rests, his recent vendetta against 24-year-old Chris Bridges, aka Ludacris, is somewhat surprising. After all, Bridges appears to hail from relatively modest origins himself: he grew up in College Park, Georgia, a town of 20,000 near the Atlanta airport, where the median household income is $38,558. (O'Reilly famously exclaimed that his father, who retired in either 1978 or 1980 -- I've seen both listed -- never made more than $35,000 a year.)

Bridges attended Banneker High School, a public institution where the student body is 97% black. At the age of 8, he exclaimed to his mother, "Mom, I love music and whether I am in front of a microphone or behind it, I will be in the music industry." In pursuit of this dream, his mom says, he obtained "internships in radio and entertainment law." Eventually, he turned an internship at an Atlanta radio station into a job as a producer there. At the age of 21, he bought his first house. At the age of 23, he created his own record label and produced his first album. Now, at 25, he's a platinum-selling artist.

I'm not sure if Ludacris ever had to suffer the indignity of having only two sports coats to wear to school -- according to the Washington Post, O'Reilly frequently cites his own memories of such hardship -- but I'd say that he certainly qualifies as a hard-working, self-made man.

On a certain level, then, you'd think Bill O'Reilly would recognize Chris Bridges, aka Ludacris, as a kindred soul. But apparently that's not the case: on August 27th, during the "Talking Points" portion of his TV show, O'Reilly described Ludacris as "a man who is demeaning just about everybody, and is peddling antisocial behavior." O'Reilly then blasted Pepsi for using Ludacris as a commercial pitchman: "I'm calling for all responsible Americans to fight back and punish Pepsi for using a man who degrades women, who encourages substance abuse, and does all the things that hurt particularly the poor in our society." A day later, Pepsi announced that it was discontinuing its ad campaign with Ludacris.

It's true that Ludacris is probably not the best choice to serve as spokesperson for a large corporation that wants to convey hipness in a completely safe, antiseptic, non-controversial way. In addition to penning some funny, clever rhymes, he writes lyrics like "Move bitch, get out the way/Get out the way bitch, get out the way/OH NO! The fight's out/I'ma 'bout to punch yo...lights out." And: "I gotta big weed stash, pocket full of cash/Just seen a big ol' ass, it's Saturday/Sticky, icky, icky, icky/Sticky, icky, icky, icky."

But of course it seems fairly unlikely that Pepsi planned to use any lyrics like that in its commercials featuring Ludacris. And while O'Reilly argued that Pepsi was "rewarding" Ludacris for rapping about "anti-social behavior," the truth is that it was rewarding him for being popular with the demographic it wants to reach.

So why focus on Ludacris? If O'Reilly truly believes that celebrities shouldn't be rewarded for their anti-social behavior, why not target someone whose commercial appearances actually celebrate his real-life misdeeds? One good candidate, as hip-hop commentator Davey D. has already pointed out: temperamental basketball coach (and rape enjoyment counselor) Bobby Knight, who was fired from Indiana University for habitually assaulting folding chairs and players, then hired by Clorox to smash dishes against a wall in a Glad trashbag commercial.

Or how about Tonya Harding? After she approved of her boyfriend's plan to cripple Nancy Kerrigan, O'Reilly's then-employer Inside Edition reportedly paid her $375,000 to appear on O'Reilly's show. Back then, he was so enamored of the concept of rewarding anti-social behavior with big money -- aka "checkbook journalism," the practice of paying people like Joey Buttafuoco to share their sins with the news media -- that he wrote a glowing op-ed piece about it for the New York Times.

And then of course there's Britney Spears, whom Pepsi has employed for some time now as a spokes-dancer, most memorably in that creepy, almost Lynchian spot where Bob Dole barked at his cock ("Down, boy!") while Spears did her standard Tribute-To-The-Ladies-Of-Hooters crotch-grinding. But even though Spears has helped introduce the Vivid Girl aesthetic to her millions of prepubescent fans, O'Reilly thinks her call-girl-next-door persona is just "immature and silly."

"I don't feel Britney Spears is a threat to the nation," he said on his TV show. "She may not be a good role model, but I don't think she's going to do any permanent damage to anybody, whereas [Ludacris] is."

So what is it, exactly, about Ludacris that makes O'Reilly think such dark, dark thoughts?

While O'Reilly acknowledges that the 25-year-old rapper is "not as bad as [genocidal Cambodian dictator] Pol Pot," he does believe that Ludacris is pretty darn bad. According to O'Reilly, Ludacris is:




a "dangerous" man whose message is "Look, be an outlaw. Take narcotics. Abuse people. Punch people. Hurt people."


"a dumb idiot who got lucky and exploits the system."


"subverting the values of the United States."


Plus he "hurts children." Given Ludacris' status as O'Reilly Enemy #1, I expected to find quite a bit of information detailing his arrest record, his criminal past, and his nefarious plot to subvert American values by turning schoolchildren into violent Communist junkies. So far, however, I haven't found anything like that -- except perhaps for one or two mentions of a mysterious institution known as the Ludacris Foundation. Allegedly created to "provide gifts, grants, and scholarships to Foster Care Shelters, Stay-in-School and High School athletics programs, Book Drives/Reading and Art Appreciation programs and many other initiatives," it sounds a hell of a lot like a drug-and-prostitution ring to me.

But other than that, what?

Given that O'Reilly heads up the most popular series on the most popular cable news network, he must have plenty of investigative resources at his disposal. And given that the FoxNews corporate slogan is "We report, you decide," I can only conclude that O'Reilly and his reporters did the in-depth background check that one would expect any responsible news organization to do if it were planning to describe someone as a dangerous, subversive individual who hurts children. And since O'Reilly has made no mention of Ludacris' criminal record or anything like that, I can only conclude that his investigation didn't actually turn up anything too damning.

Except for Ludacris' aforementioned lyrics, that is.

But even there, O'Reilly sees things that don't really exist. Indeed, O'Reilly repeatedly characterizes Ludacris as a decidely emphatic prosyletizer: "Take narcotics. Abuse people. Punch people. Hurt people." But I couldn't find any lyrics where he explicitly encourages people to do any of these things. He talks about his own drug and alcohol use, his own violent exploits, and his own misogynistic treatment of women, yes, but such blustery boasting isn't the same thing as insisting to others that they should do the same.

More importantly, O'Reilly seems to betray no suspicions whatsoever that (a) Ludacris' lyrics aren't necessarily based in fact, and (b) Ludacris' lexicon isn't necessarily literal.

When a guest on O'Reilly's show asked him if any hip-hop figure might make an acceptable Pepsi spokesperson, O'Reilly replied "Chubby Checker." Surprisingly enough, Chubby Checker is still alive and still performing regularly, but of course he's not a hip-hop figure by any stretch of the imagination, unless that imagination simplistically equates black skin with hip-hop. So what does O'Reilly's answer say? That he has either a deep ignorance or a deep contempt for the genre, or possibly both.

So perhaps O'Reilly doesn't realize that a hip-hop lyric should not be automatically interpreted as a deposition: it can be fictional, hyperbolic, metaphorical. Ludacris is a character that Chris Bridges invented. Like many rappers, he rhymes in a deliberately over-the-top, hyper-aggressive way. And for the record, he's actually mostly known as a comic presence - more crazy, bugged-out prankster than thugged-out gangster. "I grew up watching Richard Pryor, The Three Stooges and Dolemite," he explained to one interviewer. "I've always been the funny dude in my crew, so I wanted to put that humor into my lyrics."

(Memo to O'Reilly: has anyone taught more children to be violent than the Three Stooges? You need to stop those guys!)

Now, O'Reilly might not think that lyrics like "Just keep on pissin me off, like a weak kidney/And you will find your family reading your obituary" are particularly funny. But does he really think Ludacris murders anyone who gets on his nerves?

To promote his own show, O'Reilly uses similar (albeit not as clever) vocabulary. One of his favorite adjectives to describe his work is "hard-hitting." He talks about "hammering" Alan Iverson and other public figures. In a Playboy interview, he says he "slapped around" Jerry Falwell on his show. In the same interview, he says he "smashed" Michael Kinsley when Kinsley visited "The O'Reilly Factor," and follows up with this anecdote: "When I went home to the neighborhood, people who saw the show came up to me and asked, 'How come you didn't punch him?' I had to explain that he was in Washington and I was in New York and I couldn't go through the camera. They said, 'We would have fucking killed him.'"

(Memo to Ludacris: Wanna know how to get Bill O'Reilly off your back? Just make sure you identify Michael Kinsley as your target whenever you write a violent lyric.)

Clearly a double standard is at work here. When Bill O'Reilly uses violent imagery to promote his persona, it's marketing. And when Ludacris does it, it's a subversive threat to American values.

Similarly, when Bill O'Reilly writes a novel that includes plenty of sex and violence, it's harmless entertainment. But when Ludacris writes a rap lyric that includes plenty of sex and violence, it's "dangerous" advocacy of a destructive lifestyle. In 1998, O'Reilly published Those Who Trespass, a novel that stars, in the words of its back-jacket promo copy, "a low-profile killer, brutally sadistic and maddeningly professional." The story is further enlivened by a "triangle of erotic suspense." In truth, there is little eroticism and little suspense in this brutally generic and maddeningly delusional book. But there are passages like these ones:


"Goddamn bitch. She'll be sorry. Goddamn Clinton and his stupid family. What the fuck am I doing here?"

"Costello tasted the salty flavor of blood running in his throat...The assailant's right hand, now holding the oval base of the spoon, rocketed upward, jamming the stainless stem through the roof of Ron Costello's mouth. The soft tissue gave way quickly and the steel penetrated the correspondent's brain stem."

"She tried not to stare at his crotch, even though she saw movement there."

"Then he slipped here panties down her legs and, within seconds, his tongue was inside her, moving rapidly."

"He was speaking hushed tones, telling her how much he enjoyed her body, using words that in polite conversation would have been vulgar, but in this context were extremely erotic. His hands firmly gripped her buttocks."

"Silence circled the room like a starving turkey buzzard."

"These TV guys really are pricks..."



How does the novel as a whole stack up against Ludacris' Word of Mouf album? Consider the following chart:







If O'Reilly's novel actually features more murders than Ludacris' CD, why isn't he boycotting himself? My guess is that O'Reilly would probably defend his novel in the same way that he defends The Sopranos: "Is the program a corrupting influence on America? The answer is no, because the terrible acts that Tony and his thugs commit are not condoned or encouraged on the show..."

And it's true that in Those Who Trespass, after depicting numerous sadistic murders, and explaining how the victims did kind of deserve it (because they were mean!), O'Reilly is careful to dramatize the fact that Crime Doesn't Pay.

Nonetheless, his comments about his book's success clearly suggest that he knows it's not the triumph of law and order that his readers are buying: "[My publisher is] telling me to write another one quick. Kill more people!" he exclaimed to the Dallas Morning News with apparent glee. So far, killing people in print has been a profitable undertaking for him: Those Who Trespass has had several printings to date, and Mel Gibson is planning to turn it into a feature film.

Which is great for O'Reilly: I, for one, believe that people should be allowed to pursue all kinds of different projects, for different audiences and different venues, and with different standards of decorum informing them. O'Reilly has proven that he can do a Fox News broadcast without blurting out sentiments like "His hands firmly gripped her buttocks," so I think he should be allowed to write erotic murder fantasies about killing his peers in the media world if that's what makes him happy. And since Ludacris has demonstrated that he can in fact write a rap song without using the words "bitch," "ho," or "motherfucker," then I think he actually can function as a commercial spokesperson.

But I know there are a lot of people out there who aren't as open-minded as I am. And those people are probably wondering why it's OK for Fox News to employ a man who brags about "slapping" and "slamming" his adversaries, and also enjoys day-dreaming about ways to murder characters based on real-life people he has known, while it's wrong for Pepsi to employ a man who engages in similar literary transgressions. The answer is simple, however: in America, we expect far more moral accountability from our soft drink manufacturers than we do from the news media.