History Forum / General / British History / July 2008

Obama No

By Adolph Reed Jr., May 2008 Issue
The Progressive

He's a vacuous opportunist.I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known
him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign
for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a
vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white
liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political
center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new
directions, is neoliberal.

His political repertoire has always included the repugnant stratagem of
using connection with black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton
did—i.e., getting props both for emoting with the black crowd and talking
through them to affirm a victim-blaming “tough love” message that focuses on
alleged behavioral pathologies in poor black communities. Because he’s able
to claim racial insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and
rehearses the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has
made infamous.

It may be instructive to look at the outfit where he did his “community
organizing,” the invocation of which makes so many lefties go weak in the
knees. My understanding of the group, Developing Communities Project, at the
time was that it was simply a church-based social service agency. What he
pushed as his main political credential then, to an audience generally
familiar with that organization, was his role in a youth-oriented voter
registration drive.

The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama,
representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in
fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine
precinct captain. This fabrication, along with those embroideries of the
candidate’s own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin
narrative. However, in Obama’s case, the license taken not only underscores
Obama’s more complex relationship to insider politics in Daley’s Chicago; it
also underscores how much this campaign depends on selling an image rather
than substance.

There is also something disturbingly ritualistic and superficial in the
Obama camp’s young minions’ enthusiasm. Paul Krugman noted months ago that
the Obamistas display a cultish quality in the sense that they treat others’
criticism or failure to support their icon as a character flaw or sin. The
campaign even has a stock conversion narrative, which has been recycled in
print by such normally clear-headed columnists as Barbara Ehrenreich and
Katha Pollitt: the middle-aged white woman’s report of not having paid much
attention to Obama early on, but having been won over by the enthusiasm and
energy of their adolescent or twenty-something daughters. (A colleague
recently reported having heard this narrative from a friend, citing the
latter’s conversion at the hands of her eighteen year old. I observed that
three short years ago the daughter was likely acting the same way about
Britney Spears.)

Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz, a Clinton supporter, noted that the Obama
campaign advisers have tried to have it both ways on the race question. On
the one hand, they present their candidate as a figure who transcends racial
divisions and “brings us together”; on the other hand, they exhort us that
we should support his candidacy because of the opportunity to “make history”
(presumably by nominating and maybe electing a black candidate).
Increasingly, Obama supporters have been disposed to cry foul and charge
racism at nearly any criticism of him, in steadily more extravagant
rhetoric.

The campaign’s accusation that the Clinton team made Obama look darker in a
photo or video clip than he actually is—and what exactly are we to make of
that as an accusation?—and the hysterically indignant reaction to Geraldine
Ferraro’s statement that much of Obama’s success stems from the fact that
“the country is caught up in the concept” of a black candidacy are no
different from the campaign’s touting its “historic” character. Obama
supporters fulsomely attacked even Clinton’s attempts to portray him as
inexperienced, which is standard fare in political campaigns. They also
charged that she was playing to racism. See most recently Harvard
sociologist Lawrence Bobo’s characterization that she was “disrespecting”
black people, a leftover canard from Jesse Jackson’s campaigns (which, lest
amnesia overtake us, were also extolled as historic firsts).

The Jackson comparison points to one of Obama’s key contradictions: Like
Jackson, he wants to appeal to blacks with the “it’s our time now” line, and
to white liberals with that, as well as with the “I’m black in a different
way from Jesse” qualifier and the religious conversion rhetoric. A friend
said that Obama’s campaign, in stressing his appeal to rapturous children
and liberal, glamorous yuppies, offers vicarious identification with these
groups, as well as the chance to become sort of black in that ultra-safe and
familiar theme park way.

I often tell my students that, even though Paul Wellstone was my good friend
from college to his death and an individual for whom I always had great
respect, no politician in this system is likely to be a person you’d want
for your sister-in-law or brother-in-law. And, as many Progressive readers
may know, I’m hardly a Clinton fan. I’m on record in last November’s issue
as saying that I’d rather sit out the election entirely than vote for either
her or Obama. At this point, though, I’ve decided that she’s the lesser evil
in the Democratic race, for the following reasons: 1) Obama’s empty claims
to being a candidate of progressive change and to embodying a “movement”
that exists only as a brand will dissolve into disillusionment in either a
failed campaign against McCain or an Obama Presidency that continues the
politics he’s practiced his entire career; 2) his horribly opportunistic
approach to the issues bearing on inequality—in which he tosses behaviorist
rhetoric to the right and little more than calls to celebrate his success to
blacks—stands to pollute debate about racial injustice whether he wins or
loses the Presidency; 3) he can’t beat McCain in November.

Frankly, I suspect that Clinton can’t beat him either, but there’s no way
that Obama will carry most of the states in November that he’s won in the
primaries and caucuses. And, while it makes some liberals feel good to think
that a majority of the American electorate could vote for a black
Presidential candidate, we should keep in mind that the Republicans haven’t
let one dog out of the kennel against him yet. The Jeremiah Wright
contretemps is only the first bark.

Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the
inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like
what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get
themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their
contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories
they’ve told different people. And Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in
the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois
nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde
Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.

For now, the Jeremiah Wright connection probably won’t hurt him too much,
partly because the Republicans at this point mainly may want to keep him and
Clinton bleeding each other as long as possible. And his Philadelphia
compromise speech—a string of well-crafted and coordinated platitudes and
hollow images worthy of an SUV commercial, grounded with the reassuring
“acknowledgment” of blacks’ behavioral inadequacies—has gained him breathing
room by holding out a vague promise of racial “reconciliation” that has
appealed to centrist liberals ever since Booker T. Washington’s comparably
eloquent 1895 accommodation to Southern white supremacy. Obama gets credit
for “opening a conversation” on race, for “taking the matter on squarely.”
But he doesn’t really speak to what we ought to be doing to address the
injustices, past and present, that he mentions. Despite all the babble about
Obama’s transcendence, Obama persists in portraying black Americans as a
stereotypical monolith: blacks feel x; whites feel y. And the trope of black
“anger” is a tired chestnut that neither explains nor characterizes
political grievances or aspirations. (By the way, Obama’s casting Wright’s
alleged “anger” as generational is entirely consistent with his earlier
praise of Ronald Reagan for sensing Americans’ desire to undo the “excesses”
of the 1960s and 1970s.)

Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s
been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space
later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record
represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited
in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put
things over on the American people.

Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass
Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin
construction—built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win
in November—that will fall apart under Republican pressure.

And then where will we be?

Correction: Adolph Reed Jr. apologizes to Katha Pollitt for stating that her
daughter influenced her to support Obama. Her daughter did no such thing.

Adolph Reed Jr. is Professor of Political Science at the University of
Pennsylvania.