As expected, I got some pushback on yesterday’s election analysis — especially the “Pookie Effect”.
For those who missed the original post, here’s what I said:
The Pookie Factor: At the risk of political incorrectness … I know Pres Obama was just trying to be cute with his “get lazy cousin Pookie off the couch and get him to vote”. I think there was some backlash to the comment. I know a lot of folks who are repulsed by the thought of lazy cousin Pookie deciding the direction of the country. Perhaps lazy cousin Pookie should get off the couch and get an education or get a job.
https://kenhoma.wordpress.com/2009/11/04/the-elections-checkbooks-adult-supervision-pookie-and-buyers-remorse/
No, I didn’t make Pookie up (even I CAN’T make that kind of stuff up) and, no, I didn’t just hear it on FoxNews.
My point: Corzine made a big mistake attacking Christy’s heft (pardon the pun). Similarly, Obama may have inadvertently created a flashpoint issue by invoking Cousin Pookie.
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Video Proof
FIrst, here’s the video proof: Obama stumping for failed candidate Deeds in Virginia … at 2 different venues.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Al6r8ESjAY
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j_293EQfM9Y
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Print Proof
Here’s an AP report on CBSNews.com … hardly right wing sources of misinformation.
Excerpted from AP / CBSNews.com: Obama Invokes “Cousin Pookie” to Help Va. Dem, October 27, 2009
(AP )(NORFOLK, Va.) In a last-ditch, against-the-odds effort to help Creigh Deeds win election as governor of Virginia next week, President Obama invoked the assistance of “Cousin Pookie.”
Addressing a campaign rally for Deeds at an arena at Old Dominion University, Mr. Obama used a device that served him well during his presidential campaign – especially before African-American audiences.
“Go out and get your cousin who you had to drag to the polls last November, Cousin Pookie, you go out and get him and you tell him ‘you got to vote again this time.'”
http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/10/27/politics/politicalhotsheet/entry5427510.shtml
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So, who’s Pookie ?
Excerpted from HNIC Reports: “Who is Obama’s ‘Cousin Pookie’?”, March 13, 2007 <== Note the date
In remarks at Brown Chapel in Selma, Ala., Illinois Democratic Sen. Barack Obama made reference to the mysterious Cousin Pookie.
In his sermon Sunday at Brown Chapel in Selma, Ala., Barack Obama declared: “If Cousin Pookie would vote, if Uncle Jethro would get off the couch and stop watching SportsCenter and go register some folks and go to the polls, we might have a different kind of politics.”
It wasn’t the first time the Illinois senator and presidential aspirant has invoked “Pookie” … but for those not in the know, the question remains: Who is this Pookie?
The Obama campaign didn’t respond to requests for details. But Newhouse News Service asked some of America’s best minds on black culture, language and politics.
In their interviews and e-mails, Pookie emerges as a stock character of the black popular imagination, a name that has come to personify the kind of layabout kin who, if endearing, is also a source of some embarrassment and consternation to his more successful relations.
“Pookie means a whole lot of different things; none of them are good.”
Pookie is the kind of ghetto character played by Cedric the Entertainer or Chris Tucker in one of those “Barbershop” or “Friday” movies. In the 1960s and ’70s, he would have gone by Leroy, Tyrone or Otis.
Pookie goes way back, but he has come into his own only in the last decade, as a “metaphor for kin … who everybody knows is just a little trifling and a little lazy.”
“If you get it you get it, and if you don’t, you don’t care.” Kitwana said.
Pookie “may be a kinder, gentler take on Cosby’s reference to, and critique of, Shaniqua and Taliqua (as average black youth).
By referencing Cousin Pookie, he’s showing that he’s comfortable with Pookie without being condescending.
“By invoking the name of someone that might be familiar to a lot of black people, he’s attempting to personalize his appeal.”
How the Rev. Joseph Lowery hears it: The contemporary of Martin Luther King Jr. smiled at the mention of Pookie — not because he was familiar with the reference but because he knew, in context, who was being talked about: any of the hundreds of thousands of African-Americans.
Jethro is Pookie’s white counterpart, and by including him, Obama was making a cross-racial appeal to get off the couch.
http://thehnic.wordpress.com/2007/03/13/who-is-obamas-cousin-pookie/
The Homa Files 