Sunday's Washington Post went back to 2008 form about how Barack Obama's skin color was generating hope and change, celebrating how the blacks of Brazil would delight in the black American president. The headline was "Obama's story resonates in racially diverse Brazil." The webpage also carries the title "Obama has Brazil swooning over the arrival of a black president." Reporter Juan Forero found swooning Brazilians alright:
“In Brazil, we have all kinds of culture, people, and our inner identity comes from black people,” said Melo, 47, a drug abuse counselor in City of God, a favela Obama is expected to visit on Sunday. “That’s why I think Obama is important for the world, because a poor guy suddenly becomes the most important man in the world.”
Obama, a "poor guy"? Didn't Forero show this man Obama's last five years of tax returns, with the millions in book royalties? Even in his childhood, Obama had grandparents sending him to private school in Honolulu. (Forero also spotlighted Melo in a story for NPR.) There were several Chris Matthews stand-ins in the article:
“He is a president the whole world likes, a black president,” she said. “I would give him a hug. I would tell him he is a good president.”
Forero's article shifted strongly into a commercial for the socialist president Lula da Silva and his Bulgarian-born successor Dilma Rousseff. "Brazilians of color" are more likely to be poor and disenfranchised, he wrote, but "like the United States, Brazil has progressed on the racial front -- and in ways many Afro-Brazilians once never thought possible." Then came socialism:
A great leap forward came with the 2002 election of Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva as president. He is white but came from the poor, largely black northeast. As a boy, he shined shoes in the street; he later became a union rabble rouser, operating outside the rigid power establishment.
In his eight years in office, about 30 million people rose into the middle class, and Brazil grew into an economic powerhouse that recently surpassed Italy to become the world’s seventh-largest economy. Lula’s successor, Rousseff, a guerrilla in the late 1960s who was jailed and tortured by the former military dictatorship, took office Jan. 1.
In previous stories, Forero has been more forthright -- Rousseff was a Marxist-Leninist guerrilla nicknamed the "Iron Lady." There was no insistence that the real "resonance" here was between two socialists, just between barrier-breakers.
[Photo from Time]
