| « | Sleepless in Manhattan |
»
|
|
Tuesday, March 18, 2008
A Lesson Before Dying
As most erudite Eternity Road readers doubtlessly know by now, Barack Obama gave a major address on “race, politics, and unifying our country” today. The speech has already received extensive attention from both liberal and conservative commentators, and I do not wish to rehash their opinions here, especially as I have only read excerpts of the speech. My focus will be broader - I want to ask, “Why did Obama feel it necessary to give this speech?” and “What effect will this have on his candidacy?” In other words, I want to get beyond the content of the speech and its interpretation as such, and get to the significance of its having been delivered.
I have read more than a few sources today blame the fact that Obama felt it necessary to give this speech on the Clintons. As Erick Erickson put it at RedState today:
We got here because the Clintons are willing to use race to get into the White House. But more importantly, we got here because while Barack Obama has tried to be above race, he has been mentored by a man who is deeply, deeply affected by the issue of race. While Barack Obama has tried to make white people comfortable, the man who married him, baptized his children, and mentored him for twenty years has been preaching sermons, in Barack Obama’s words, that “stereotype and amplify the negative to the point that it distorts reality.”
(emphasis added)
I think this is unfair, not because I am particularly kindly disposed towards Clintonian politics, but because I believe throwing this solely at their feet ignores the bigger picture. This bigger picture was illuminated in Shelby Steele’s A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win, a work I was initially skeptical toward but has proved, with the beginning of the Wright affair, remarkably prescient. Steele’s thesis is simple: African Americans have two basic approaches toward white America: bargaining and challenging. The bargainer approaches America and offers a deal: do not hold my race against me, and I will not rub America’s racial past in its face. The challenger is much more combative, and is embodied in the well-known personas of Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton.
Obama’s problem is that he has attempted to straddle both positions, something that Steele foresaw with uncanny accuracy; in other words, he has tried to appeal to the broader America by taking the bargainer’s attitude, but he has also built connections with the black community by taking the challenger’s stance, the only one that it seems to appreciate. At first, it seems to me that Obama attempted to root his presidential candidacy squarely in the bargaining position, but the connections with challengers like his pastor Jeremiah Wright that he used in his past campaigns have now caught up with him. Many have decried his speech today as rather incoherent; this is why.
Obama’s ham-fisted permutation of these two positions has had precisely the opposite effect he had hoped it would; rather than creating a synthesis of white and black attitudes, it has driven an even wider rift between them. We can observe this starkly in recent poll numbers, which have whites trending strongly away from Obama and blacks strongly toward him. Dirty pool by the Clintons did not create this; Obama’s candidacy in and of itself did. The Clintons are not responsible for Obama’s connections to Pastor Wright; Obama is. That the Clintons would exploit this fact is natural.
My sense is that the Democrat Party is about to be torn apart by these racial issues, something readers here will, along with myself, no doubt find deeply ironic. If I were a betting man, I would say that the clearly narrowing nature of Obama’s appeal might predispose the superdelegates who will now decide the nomination more towards Hillary, not because she is any less divisive, but because they will be terrified that Obama might in the end prove to be nothing more than another Jesse Jackson. Their rejection of Obama may just be the final straw the African American community, and its repercussions will be far-ranging if it does indeed occur.
These are quite interesting political times.
Comments
Barack Obama would be better if he didn’t want to both have his cake and eat it. It’s good he would like to see America rise above race and religion. But he sabotages himself by trying to hide the non-race aspects of his personal THEOLOGY. See:
http://miraclesdaily.blogspot.com/Posted by on 03/18/2008 at 08:52 PMIt is proving very interesting that Obama’s membership in Trinity UCC, which was his defense against the charge that he was a muzlim, is now biting him in this way. It looks as though this is going to have a bigger impact, not only on Obama but on race relations for the whole country, than the muzlim charge ever had.
This is focusing a lot of people not only on Jeremiah Wright, the retired Trinity pastor, but on his theological lights, Cone and Hopkins. There is a fascinating report at:
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Front_Page/JC18Aa01.html
This will wake up many people, because what these folks are teaching is pure Marxism and totally unrecognizable as Christianity. This is what Obama has been soaking in for 20 years. We should be very wary.
Posted by on 03/18/2008 at 09:15 PMThe clear reference Obama made to a distinct “African” American community reveals the depth of the chasm existing between his campaign and mainstream American ideals. The white liberal guilt sector of the electorate has been sent a message that in spite of their appeasement directed at assuaging that guilt they will always be considered beyond the pale.
Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 03/18/2008 at 10:28 PMAn excellent piece of work, Aaron, concise and precise.
I think most people who were paying attention knew about Wright a year ago. This stuff is not new, in fact they’ve been selling the tapes to anyone with the $ for years, not trying to hide them. Any thoughts on why the TV newsies decided to run with it at precisely this moment?
Posted by Robert Pearson on 03/19/2008 at 02:00 AMRobert: “Any thoughts on why the TV newsies decided to run with it at precisely this moment?
In a word Clinton.
Posted by ΛΕΟΝΙΔΑΣ on 03/19/2008 at 07:04 AMI’ve been saying for years that the Democratic coalition is too unstable to last, and eventually the party will split. Looks to me like this year could be it: if Obama goes into the convention with more pledged delegates than Clinton, and the convention ends up nominating anyone white (possibly excluding Al Gore), blacks could well sit out the general election in protest.
The thing is, the Democrats cannot afford to lose any of the interest groups that make up their party, and still win elections. The Republicans could lose any one of a few groups and still win elections. This makes the Republican party more resilient, and unless the Democrats change their mindset from an accumulation of (potentially competing) victim status groups into a coherent political philosophy, they are doomed.
Posted by Jeff Medcalf on 03/19/2008 at 09:36 AMRobert,
Leonidas is right, one reason is the Clintons decided to bring it up. Another is that the media have finally decided to start hitting Obama after giving him more or less of a free pass. One reason for that is that the media generally likes to be tough on frontrunners. Once Obama hit frontrunner status, the media lost of a little bit of its adoration and decided to go after him.
I noted another reason on the Chicago Republicans blog:
“It [the Rezko affair] has affected Obama’s attitude toward the media and vice versa - as the Rezko affair has intensified, I have noticed an increasing number of stories in the press discussing how little Obama has allowed them access. Clearly, the media have been enamored with Obama for his liberal politics and racial background, but more than that the media desire access. It is the lifeblood of their profession. The more Obama denies it to them, the more restless they will become, and the more receptive they will be to the attacks of his opponents. If uneasiness about the Rezko affair has caused Obama to start holding the media at arm’s length, then it has done great damage to him even without being a national story, because it gave Clinton the opening she had long sought to go negative.”
Posted by on 03/19/2008 at 12:11 PMAaron, I think you’re right that Rezko has something to do with it because if it was just the Clintons, Feb 1 would have been a better day for the video to “emerge.”
Posted by Robert Pearson on 03/19/2008 at 05:46 PMHow does the media force access?
By running negative stories and forcing the candidate to respond.
==
Identity politics always breaks up due to arguments over the division of spoils.
The Rs are better off due to the fact that their core (often honored in the breech) is smaller, less intrusive, lower tax government.
Posted by M. Simon on 03/22/2008 at 07:07 AM
Comment Form
Commenting is not available in this weblog entry.
