Leaving aside for a moment the racial connotation of calling Obama "boy," the main thrust of Roberts' comments is that Obama is too exotic, too foreign and not American enough to be president.
This dovetails nicely into the Clinton campaign emails, just leaked, in which Mark Penn urges Hillary Clinton to portray Obama as someone "who is not at his center fundamentally American in his thinking and in his values."
According to Politico:
The Penn memo suggesting that the campaign target Obama’s “lack of American roots” said in part: “All of these articles about his boyhood in Indonesia and his life in Hawaii are geared towards showing his background is diverse, multicultural and putting that in a new light."
There are many layers to these comments by Penn and Roberts, and I don't want to address all of them, but at the bottom of all of this talk is the assumption by East Coasters that somehow they are more American than West Coasters. All the major news organizations, including the three networks, are based in New York. All the mainstream and cable networks have studios in New York and Washington. And of course Florida is where the oldsters from New York and Washington retire. That's how the media defines what is American.
California, where I live, is simply nutso-land to the media and explains the contempt they hold for Nancy Pelosi. To Republicans it is the center of un-American Hollywood liberalism. As for Hawaii, it is treated by East Coasters as if it is not even part of the United States. Puerto Rico (off the East Coast, of course) got more press in the primaries than Hawaii got.
So, coming from this mindset of East Coast insularity, it was easy for Mark Penn and Cokie Roberts to paint the Hawaiian born Obama as insufficiently American. We've never had a president from Hawaii, and he's black for god's sake. How on earth are we in the high and mighty press supposed to cover a race with such an exotic character? Will the Western White House be all the way in Honolulu? Will we have to go there when the president vacations? Horrors!
Cokie Roberts is an idiot.
But Mark Penn – he is simply despicable.
He wasn't just speaking from the narrow mindedness of those who have always lived on the East Coast, or of the New York-Washington press whose entire grasp of the Western United States is that California has earthquakes and movie stars, and Hawaii has volcanoes and luaus.
Penn was doing everything he could to paint an American citizen, a man who rose from humble roots to become a successful lawyer and politician, thanks only to his ability and hard work, as alien. This is the ultimate American success story, but Penn wanted to make Obama into something he most decidedly is not. He wanted to portray him as insufficiently American, because apparently Hawaii, Kansas, and Chicago - not being New York, Washington or Myrtle Beach - are simply not American enough.
I'd love to see one of the major networks move their base of operation to Los Angeles. It might shift the balance of power in this country and spread it across all fifty states. I'd like to see Cokie Roberts and her silly views off of ABC and NPR, and I'd like to see Mark Penn exiled to Russia, where he can learn what it means to live somewhere that is not "fundamentally American."
