Shelby Steele on Obama

[otterinbham 0]

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1205795358...emEditorialPage

The Obama Bargain

By SHELBY STEELE

March 18, 2008

Geraldine Ferraro may have had sinister motives when she said that Barack Obama would not be "in his position" as a frontrunner but for his race. Possibly she was acting as Hillary Clinton's surrogate. Or maybe she was simply befuddled by this new reality -- in which blackness could constitute a political advantage.

AP

Jesse Jackson and Barack Obama, June 4, 2007.

But whatever her motives, she was right: "If Obama was a white man, he would not be in this position." Barack Obama is, of course, a very talented politician with a first-rate political organization at his back. But it does not detract from his merit to say that his race is also a large part of his prominence. And it is undeniable that something extremely powerful in the body politic, a force quite apart from the man himself, has pulled Obama forward. This force is about race and nothing else.

The novelty of Barack Obama is more his cross-racial appeal than his talent. Jesse Jackson displayed considerable political talent in his presidential runs back in the 1980s. But there was a distinct limit to his white support. Mr. Obama's broad appeal to whites makes him the first plausible black presidential candidate in American history. And it was Mr. Obama's genius to understand this. Though he likes to claim that his race was a liability to be overcome, he also surely knew that his race could give him just the edge he needed -- an edge that would never be available to a white, not even a white woman.

How to turn one's blackness to advantage?

The answer is that one "bargains." Bargaining is a mask that blacks can wear in the American mainstream, one that enables them to put whites at their ease. This mask diffuses the anxiety that goes along with being white in a multiracial society. Bargainers make the subliminal promise to whites not to shame them with America's history of racism, on the condition that they will not hold the bargainer's race against him. And whites love this bargain -- and feel affection for the bargainer -- because it gives them racial innocence in a society where whites live under constant threat of being stigmatized as racist. So the bargainer presents himself as an opportunity for whites to experience racial innocence.

This is how Mr. Obama has turned his blackness into his great political advantage, and also into a kind of personal charisma. Bargainers are conduits of white innocence, and they are as popular as the need for white innocence is strong. Mr. Obama's extraordinary dash to the forefront of American politics is less a measure of the man than of the hunger in white America for racial innocence.

His actual policy positions are little more than Democratic Party boilerplate and hardly a tick different from Hillary's positions. He espouses no galvanizing political idea. He is unable to say what he means by "change" or "hope" or "the future." And he has failed to say how he would actually be a "unifier." By the evidence of his slight political record (130 "present" votes in the Illinois state legislature, little achievement in the U.S. Senate) Barack Obama stacks up as something of a mediocrity. None of this matters much.

Race helps Mr. Obama in another way -- it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America's tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. Will his victory mean America's redemption from its racist past? Will his defeat show an America morally unevolved? Is his campaign a story of black overcoming, an echo of the civil rights movement? Or is it a passing-of-the-torch story, of one generation displacing another?

Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans -- black and white -- Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America's very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.

And yet, in the end, Barack Obama's candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton's or Jesse Jackson's. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were "challengers," not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.

But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don't know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey, bargainers all.) Mr. Obama has said of himself, "I serve as a blank screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views . . ." And so, human visibility is Mr. Obama's Achilles heel. If we see the real man, his contradictions and bents of character, he will be ruined as an icon, as a "blank screen."

Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama's political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday -- for 20 years -- in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage ("damn America").

How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?

But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one's blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America's television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.

No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity. His is the story of a man who flew so high, yet neglected to become himself.

[Wishbone 0]

I agree with this article 100%. It touches on the phenomena in which liberal whites attempt to bridge the cognitive dissonance associated with throwing away their birthright while maintaining the comfort of their liberal beliefs . I love the term "bargaining'.

[jw 4 au 526]

I thought this was a good read. Thanks Otter. What sums it up for me, and I am steeling this idea from Hannity and Colmbs tonight, is the fact that Obama went to church there for 20 years and wants us to believe he did not know what was going on. That either makes him too ignorant to be our President or too slimey.

The article states:

"How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?"

I think what is lost in this whole argument is that Obama is still 1/2 white. If elected, he would be just as much the 44th white president as he is the first black president. I have always thought he is the one bringing race into this discussion more than anyone else.

[otterinbham 0]

I thought this was a good read. Thanks Otter. What sums it up for me, and I am steeling this idea from Hannity and Colmbs tonight, is the fact that Obama went to church there for 20 years and wants us to believe he did not know what was going on. That either makes him too ignorant to be our President or too slimey.

The article states:

"How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?"

I think what is lost in this whole argument is that Obama is still 1/2 white. If elected, he would be just as much the 44th white president as he is the first black president. I have always thought he is the one bringing race into this discussion more than anyone else.

Let me put it this way. If McCain received a gratuitous endorsement from Rev. Phelps of Kansas or any number of other right-wing loons, then he would be eviscerated by the press. The fact that Obama sat docilely in the pews for two decades and listened to this without so much as a whimper of protest says a lot.

That being said, I don't think we've really addressed the question of race in this country. Despite all the bromides, it remains a persistent issue and probably will for generations to come. While huge strides have been made, I'm still amazed at how it crops up in everyday life today. Until we individually come to grips with its effect on our everyday attitudes in life, we'll have these controversies ad nauseum.

[TexasTiger 13,026]

I thought this was a good read. Thanks Otter. What sums it up for me, and I am steeling this idea from Hannity and Colmbs tonight, is the fact that Obama went to church there for 20 years and wants us to believe he did not know what was going on. That either makes him too ignorant to be our President or too slimey.

The article states:

"How does one "transcend" race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?

What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn't thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to "be black" despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn't this hatred more rhetorical than real?"

I think what is lost in this whole argument is that Obama is still 1/2 white. If elected, he would be just as much the 44th white president as he is the first black president. I have always thought he is the one bringing race into this discussion more than anyone else.

Let me put it this way. If McCain received a gratuitous endorsement from Rev. Phelps of Kansas or any number of other right-wing loons, then he would be eviscerated by the press. The fact that Obama sat docilely in the pews for two decades and listened to this without so much as a whimper of protest says a lot.

That being said, I don't think we've really addressed the question of race in this country. Despite all the bromides, it remains a persistent issue and probably will for generations to come. While huge strides have been made, I'm still amazed at how it crops up in everyday life today. Until we individually come to grips with its effect on our everyday attitudes in life, we'll have these controversies ad nauseum.

The article is utter BS. Your analogy is just as bad. Wright=Phelps? Please. Wright appears to be, at least, a sometimes angry, embittered man with some whacky ideas, but Phelps? Please make that case with specifics.

Steele had an interesting book 20 years ago. He's been living off of it ever since. A few thoughts on his thoughts on Obama:

http://www.commonwealmagazine.org/article....mp;recalcul=oui

If McCain received a gratuitous endorsement from Rev. Phelps of Kansas or any number of other right-wing loons, then he would be eviscerated by the press.

McCain was endorsed by this guy:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/jane-hamsher...se_b_89227.html

The press has given him a pass.

He called this Rod Parsley his spiritual guide:

http://www.motherjones.com/washington_disp...tual-guide.html

Crickets.

He warmly embraced Falwell ONLY AFTER Falwell blamed 9/11 on America:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/ac2/wp-dyn/A28620-2001Sep14

You'll note that all Bush had to say through a spokesman was that his statements were "inappropriate."

And today McCain showed that outside of tough talk, he's actually totally clueless about the complexities of Iraq:

If a Dem made this mistake even once, much less three times, it would be portrayed as evidence of their unfitness to be commander-in-chief. McCain gets pass after pass.

http://theboard.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/03/...cts-in-iraq/?hp

Your playing the Republican "victim" card is sorely misplaced. The broadcast media has obsessed on the Wright story for days. McCain? Most folks don't know anything about his radical "men of God."

[lukeduke 8]

The article is utter BS. Your analogy is just as bad. Wright=Phelps? Please. Wright appears to be, at least, a sometimes angry, embittered man with some whacky ideas, but Phelps? Please make that case with specifics.

I don't think Phelps was the best analogy either. How about David Duke instead?

[otterinbham 0]

The article is utter BS. Your analogy is just as bad. Wright=Phelps? Please. Wright appears to be, at least, a sometimes angry, embittered man with some whacky ideas, but Phelps? Please make that case with specifics.

I don't think Phelps was the best analogy either. How about David Duke instead?

Good idea. I wrote in haste.

Oh, and one other thing. Even if the guy wrote one book twenty years ago, does that make it any less valid?

After all, modern liberalism has been feeding off the carcass of John Stuart Mill for at least 170 years.

[Tigermike 3,054]

Oh, and one other thing. Even if the guy wrote one book twenty years ago, does that make it any less valid?

After all, modern liberalism has been feeding off the carcass of John Stuart Mill for at least 170 years.

[Auburn85 432]

and besides, Phelps is a registered democrat, but then again, Mccain gets alot of indy and dem crossover support