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By Kenneth J. Cooper

Sarah Palin joked she was a pit bull with lipstick. She sure came off that way in speech accepting the vice presidential nomination at the Republican convention.

She began by talking about her family life. It was warm and affecting stuff, yes. She mentioned her infant son, Trig, who has Down syndrome, and vowed to be an advocate for children with special needs. Being a loving mother, daughter and wife, though, doesn’t qualify anyone to be vice president.

Before Alaska’s governor laid out her own experience in political office, she attacked Barack Obama on his credentials and consistency. Palin disparaged his job, right out of college, as a community organizer, contrasting it unfavorably to her role much later in her life as a mayor.

“I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a ‘community organizer,’ except that you have actual responsibilities,” she said.

Some African Americans, particularly those who came of age during the civil rights movement, may take exception to her comment. In their younger years, they may have done that kind of organizing and felt responsible for improving people’s lives without the power or resources of a government.

No national holiday honors a mayor, from a small town or a big city, but one does honor a community organizer. His name was Martin Luther King Jr. Anyone who studies the intensity of his facial expressions can see he felt burdened by responsibilities.

Usually, it is a mistake for politicians to introduce themselves to the public by attacking their opponents. It’s particularly risky at a time like this election year, when negative politics has turned off many voters. Will Palin and running mate John McCain pay a noticeable price in the polls?

Besides Palin, women did not have as prominent roles in the Republican convention as they did at the Democratic convention. They made up about a third of Republican delegates, compared with more than half of Democratic delegates.

Women who addressed the Republican convention included Dr. Elena Rios, president of the National Hispanic Medical Association, and Renee Amoore, a black businesswoman from Pennsylvania.

Rios made an important contribution in talking about health disparities, normally not a big topic of conversation in Republican circles.

“Twice as many Hispanics have diabetes than non-Hispanic whites,” she noted. “The incidence of HIV/AIDS among Hispanic women is five times that of whites. African Americans face higher rates of mortality for heart disease and cancer.”

Rios listed a number of reasons that she said compound the disparities “poverty, language and cultural barriers, and limited access to health information” as well as delayed treatment in hospital emergency rooms, lower rates of childhood immunization and the cost of medical insurance.

Curiously, the leader of the national organization of Hispanic doctors left out one cause of health disparities, the “unequal treatment” that minorities receive from the health system. That racial-ethnic discrimination was documented five years ago in a report from the prestigious Institute of Medicine.
 
Amoore talked some about the health services provided by business, the Amoore Group near Philadelphia. But most of her speech was a rallying cry for McCain.

She ended this way: “I’m proud to be an African American woman. I’m proud to be a Republican, and I’m proud to be voting for John McCain.”

Few seated in the convention hall could say the same. African-American delegates numbered 36, way down from 167 four years ago, according to the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
 

By Kenneth J. Cooper

If it wasn’t, “We Are Family” should have been declared the official theme song of the Democratic convention. The tune was played often enough, and its unifying message fits Barack Obama’s call for Americans to come together, despite differences of race, class, region or party.

That was the obvious political message Democrats were trying to send. A subtler one was resonating with some portion of half the nation’s voters. “We Are Family” is a 1970s tune by Sister Sledge about sisters being together.

So apt for a national political convention where women were more prominent than ever before. The first night’s biggest speech was Michelle Obama’s, the second’s was Hillary Rodham Clinton’s. Only a single speech by a woman, Geraldine Ferraro’s as the vice presidential nominee in 1984, compares in the amount of public attention either received.

From the podium in Denver, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi guided official business with light taps of her gavel. Memorial tributes to Congresswoman Stephanie Tubbs Jones, who died last week in Cleveland, flowed from Hillary Clinton and other speakers. For the first time, women made up a majority of the party’s convention delegates.

Lesser-known women rose to score political points for the party. The curiously-named Quincy Lucas, a black teacher from Delaware, offered her senator, Joe Biden, as the nominee for vice president. She began, stiffly, by noting her sister had been killed by an ex-boyfriend five years ago. Why did she start with a personal tragedy? Biden, she pointed out, wrote the Violence Against Women Act to combat domestic violence.

A humble “grandmother from Alabama,” Lily Ledbetter, conceded in her drawl that she was a surprising choice to speak at the convention. She told how, after years as a supervisor at a Goodyear plant, she learned she had long been paid less than men doing the same job. She sued, and won, until the Supreme Court ruled last year she should have sued within six months of the first pay disparity–even though she didn’t know about it.

Ledbetter called for equal pay for equal work, a cause usually associated with feminists who are younger and from big cities like New York or San Francisco. To hear it from a retired white woman from Alabama busted up that stereotype.

Women carried much the party’s message on the big issue of health care. Their stories about people struggling with health problems carried an emotional load that the same anecdotes, if told by men, would not. Who, after all, usually cares for a sick child or, for that matter, a parent?

Perhaps the most touching passage in Michelle Obama’s speech was remembrance of her father, who was diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis in his 30s but coped for years without complaint.

“As he got sicker, it got harder for him to walk. It took him longer to get dressed in the morning,” she recalled. “But if he was in pain, he never let on. He never stopped smiling and laughing, even while struggling to button his shirt, even while using two canes to get himself across the room to give my mom a kiss. He just woke up a little earlier and worked a little harder.”
 
Hillary Clinton related a memorable meeting at a campaign stop. “I will always remember the single mom who had adopted two kids with autism, didn’t have health insurance and discovered she had cancer,” Clinton recalled. “But she greeted me with her bald head painted with my name on it and asked me to fight for health care.”

Congresswoman Louise Slaughter from New York decried the millions without health insurance after reading aloud this letter from a Nevada woman:  “My husband has Parkinson’s and was forced to retire. He has been on disability for three years and Medicare doesn’t meet his prescription needs. I have to pay my own insurance premium so our Medicare expenses are quite high. Our health care system doesn’t work.”

Women played a major role in showing the party has family values–and doesn’t just talk about them, in the intolerant way conservative Republicans do.

Cameras showed Michelle Obama in tears as she listened to Beau Biden, Delaware’s attorney general and the senator’s son, talk about being a little boy when his biological mother and a sister were killed in a car accident–as the mother was taking her children to buy a Christmas tree.

After her speech, Michelle Obama walked daughters Malia and Sasha over to a video screen where Barack Obama appeared. The girls called him “Daddy.” That night technology united a family separated by 600 miles.

White TV commentators rushed to put the family into a context viewers would grasp, comparing the Obamas to the only Kennedys ever to live in the White House, or the Huxtables on the Cosby Show. That a metaphor was needed at all suggests the commentators, and many white viewers, have trouble seeing the Obamas as individuals or recognizing them as an ordinary family with educated parents and happy children.

They’re a family, an American family.

Kenneth J. Cooper is a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist.

By Iyanla Vanzant

In this instance, honor means honoring yourself by speaking what’s
on your heart, aka telling the truth about what you feel and know. It
means asking for what you need and letting others know what works and
what does not work for you. In the business of life, it is very easy to
forget that you are the only one who gets to say what goes on in your
life. 

Anna Deavere Smith is taking her trailblazing blend of journalistic interviewing, engaged listening and artistic interpretation to explore the body as the vehicle for life and the human will as its fuelin her new one-woman show, “Let Me Down Easy.”  Smith’s riveting characters are based on scores of interviews.

“The constant question I’m pursuing is: Is there anything in our human experience beyond the human body?” she says. “We chronicle life from when the body emerges to when the body is gone. But the spirit must be a part of who we are and what we are. Love is obviously a part of who we are. But our feeling and will are what keep us going. They’re the fuel that keeps us in motion.”
 
Smith conceived the project while interviewing patients at Yale University School of Medicine as a visiting professor. “When I talked to people about their bodies, they’d go on and on,” she recalls. “Usually, we’re so full of our thoughts and aspiration and our fears–we’re always trying to move forward–that we don’t think about our bodies. But if you have a toothache, and I don’t cut you off, you’ll talk at length about it. I thought it’d be very interesting to talk to people who are extremely aware of what’s going on in their body because they are suffering or because they are using it to make a living.”
 
Smith listened to patients at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, survivors of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans and wounded U.S. soldiers at Landstuhl Regional Medical Center in Germany. “I talked to a swimmer about what it meant to lose a race by two-one-hundredths of a second,” she says. “I talked to boxers about what it means to be a champion. I talked to a mother leaving a hospital with her cancer-free child after two years. The body is a vehicle. What happens when the vehicle stops working?”
 
Smith is known for theatrical works on life in the United States, especially on controversial racial issues. In her award-winning “Fires in the Mirror,” she used the words of black and Jewish residents to portray the racial tension of the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn, New York, in 1991. Likewise, her 1992 play, “Twilight,” catalogued sentiments in Los Angeles, after police were acquitted in the beating of motorist Rodney King.
 
In “Let Me Down Easy,” however, Smith goes beyond the nation’s borders to examine the human will. She included the stories of South African children impacted by AIDS. She also visited Rwanda, the site of brutal tribal genocide in 1994.
 
“I talked to both tribes–the Tutsis, who were the victims, and the Hutus, who were the perpetrators of the genocide,” she says. “Hutu prisoners who’ve been in jail for the last 10 years for their role in the genocide are about to be released. There’s a national campaign for forgiveness. I listened to Tutsis, some of whom had lost family members, some who had been tortured themselves, talk to me about how important it is to for give the Hutus because if they didn’t, there was no way for the country to move forward.” Smith says the Rwandan experience illustrates how forgiveness is part of the human will to survive.
 
“Forgiveness comes under the category of being human,” she says. “It’s a nonphysical way we negotiate our way through life. It’s part of our resiliency. Can you image what we’d be like if we didn’t forgive? We forgive because we know there’s something else about life–grace. Forgiveness is about grace.”
–Yvette Moore