This is handing Republicans a political battle axe.

Few who aren't already Democrats will be impressed by the reference to Hughes' poem. Yet, at least a dozen lines from that splendid work look very awkward when taken out of context. ("America never was America to me"...etc). Should it matter that Hughes was a black gay socialist atheist? No. But consider how that will play nationally, especially in the south. Brit Hume's already got a week's worth of "grapevine" segments ready to go on this. The right wing will knock this meatball out of the park.

But that goes both ways. Probably the only people who are frightened by black gay socialist atheists, and are frightened enough that the poem will affect how they feel about Kerry, are people already in Bush's base.

Hughes was one of the three writers (along with Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman, I think) that Laura Bush wanted to discuss at her ill-fated summit of poets. I thought it was pretty funny that she'd choose such a group -- either she was ignorant of Hughes' and Whitman's lives and politics, or else she's got a subversive streak to her.

Comments

As usual Kerry will dumb it down and not deal with racism, the poem's core theme, at all -- it will be a slogan without content, in his hands.

Yet how typical. The poor and dispossessed do the work, the rich appropriate it.

Larry-- Considering he quoted it specifically in response to the anniversary of Brown v. Board, this is a bit of a cheap shot. He won't quote the hardest core parts of the poem, but he is specifically using it in the context of the US's racist history.

I'm not taking shots, I'm making a prediction based on trajectory. If the media article about this line is true, after Kerry used it for a Brown v Board memorial, he's since used the tag line with several varied audiences, always as his personal slogan, never again (at least as reported) in a context relating to discrimination or racism. He's appropriating someone else's work, stripping out the core theme, and using it for his own benefit.

"let america be america?" which one? north...south...central? cross the border to the north or south and tell people you are an american and they will ask you......which one?

For those doubters, I suggest you read the entire poem. It's a prayer for an idea (the "principle" as Ralph Ellison said) that's been the engine of all that's been positive in the past 200 years, always resisted and now under siege.