The Most Watched Black Woman In The World

Alright - Anxious Desperate Real Housewives of Atlanta is over, at least until next week, but I've already seen too much of them in the last two days to watch a Reunion: The Real Housewives of Atlanta show next Tuesday.

I'm ready to get back to "The Most Watched Black Woman In The World" program, starring Michelle Obama, premiering next January on every news channel on the planet.

The good thing about the White House is that it produces as much spin on the First Family as the producers at the Bravo! channel do for their Real Housewives franchise. One of the things that used to be a real sore spot among black folks, especially in the seventies and eighties, was the way black people were portrayed on TV. One bad image was one too many for a lot of us, who felt that with so few roles in TV, anything that negatively portrayed black people was perpetuating the very inequalities we were trying to eradicate.

You don't here as much about this these days - whether or not a lot of that has to do with the demise of UPN I don't know. But I can still watch an entire night of TV and see no black actors in starring roles.

Reality TV is scripted, with exaggerated personality conflicts, artificially contrived settings, and the most provocative editing decisions you can find outside of the Fox News studio, all done in an effort to force their preconceived storylines to pay off with a big bang. Bravo! will play these shows to death for a few more weeks before bringing something else into their rotation.

The White House spin machine will just be getting started. Michelle Obama will not be on TV as much as her husband, but she will be on there a lot, talking about real issues and real problems facing American families. The most watched black woman in the world will be on camera in her own hair, wearing tasteful accessories and keeping her cleavage to herself. The producers of her clips will have a mandate from the Office of the President to leave all the bloopers, bad angles, and awkward sounding phrases on the cutting room floor. What the cumulative effect of seeing thousands of positive minded clips and soundbites of this image of a black woman will be, I can't say.

I'll just be glad to finally see THIS kind of spin begin.

My Eyes Are Tired

My eyes are tired, but that's just about what it takes to get beyond the loaded phrases, couched terms, arched references, veiled threats, tilted arguments and foregone conclusions to see what is really going on these days.

I email a small cadre of friends a missive every couple of days that seeks to piece together in one place a complete look at the primary races.

Even though I live in Georgia, the South Carolina race was closer to my heart - after all, its my home state. I eyeballed the returns county by county, cutting and pasting them into a Word file. Then I took a look at the most recent census figures I could find that broke down each county's residents by race, age, and gender, cutting and pasting them in underneath the corresponding county's primary returns.

What you saw there two weeks ago is what you are seeing now - but only if you looked at the raw data for yourself, because the media spin doctors, who attempt to pass themselves of as journalists, create more spin than the professionals the campaigns are paying.

After seeing several of my emails, my best buddy called me one day and blurted out "the media is bullshit" before I could say hello.

I don't even watch the talking heads much anymore. I am spending way, waaay too much time trolling the polling sites and the county by county results in each state to sort of "take their temperature" with my own thermometer.

Obama running neck and neck with Clinton is a lot like the Giants hanging with the Patriots all the way to the two minute drill. "This guy/these guys aren't supposed to be here."

I give kudos to the Obama campaign strategists - they have broken this down to man-to-man defense, running a full court press in practically every state against Goliath, and it is working.

Couple that with Howard Dean's 50 State Strategy he put in place the last couple of years and the brand new voters the party has been helping to cultivate are coming out of the woodwork, people whose habits have not been tracked before, people whose influence is being measured after the fact for the first time.

Its going to be a dogfight to the end.

The only way to know this, though, is to scroll past the pie charts and moving average graphs to the raw numbers themselves - they tell you what's really going on.