The Kenyan media have belatedly discovered the phenomenon which I refer to as the Obama Whisper Campaign: the allegations floating around the Internet that the senator is a crypto-Muslim. The writer of the (report? op-ed?) doesn't cover any new ground on that topic. However, there are a few areas which contain information new to me.
The first concerns the relationship between Obama and Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga.
“It is true that the Prime Minister and the senator are related. Senator Obama comes from a family and clan to which the Prime Minister’s mother belongs, and they are cousins,” he said.So the two might not be blood relatives.In the American sense, a cousin is the child of your parents’ siblings. But in Luo culture, the members of your father’s or mother’s clans are your cousins.
A clan would typically have hundreds of thousands of members, and the relationship is more social than biological. [SNIP]
The Obama campaign denies that the senator and Mr Odinga are cousins. And three Kenya experts interviewed by Politifact also dismissed this claim, Ms Hollyfield reports.
The second issue is more interesting.
A conservative Internet commentator, Michael Gaynor, speculated earlier this month that Senator Clinton’s campaign might play “the Kenya card” against Mr Obama.I doubt that Senator Clinton is that short-sighted. But if she is...Mr Gaynor says “the Kenya card” involves unspecified connections between the Kenyan-American senator and “the radical Kenyan prime minister.”
Are both of the Democrat candidates so intent on gaining power that they would risk splitting this country down racial lines? Because Obama has already risked this and if Clinton were to use this tactic, the estrangement would be nearly complete.
From the Gaynor op-ed:
With exits polls showing that rookie United States Senator and now front-running Democrat presidential hopeful Barack Hussein Obama, Jr. is taking more than 90% of the black vote against Hillary, will the Clintons finally play the Kenya card? [SNIP][S]crutiny of Obama associations came only AFTER he had become the Democrat frontrunner, too late for Team Clinton, and Team Clinton has NOT played the Kenya card to show how politically extreme Obama really is and how Obama is tied to the radical Kenyan Prime Minister Raila Odinga (who told the BBC that he is Obama's cousin on his father's side [sic] and who ran an unsuccessful race for president of Kenya posing as an apostle of change).
Unfortunately for Team Clinton, the media has not compared and contrasted the Odinga and Obama presidential campaigns and scrutinized the Odinga-Obama connection, although it certainly should have.Well the Big Media hasn't.
Though it pains me to admit the following, I must: one would probably have better luck finding such a compare/contrast series at blogs authored by people whom I have ridiculed for looking suspiciously at the Odinga-Obama connection. Yes, being half Luo myself, I took their suspicions personally.
I'm yet not ready to totally absolve some of them of cultural prejudice because some of them did willfully lie (absolution is not mine to give anyway), but I will apologize for being wrong if it is discovered that the Obama-Odinga relationship is more than meets the eye.
In light of sheer numbers, one might be forgiven for believing that about almost every relationship the good senator has--genetically, incidentally and purposefully.
