According to
Maureen Dowd,
Barack Obama's latest problem may be
because he isn't black enough:
The Obama White House is too
white.
It has Barack Obama, raised in
the Hawaiian hood and Indonesia,
and Valerie Jarrett, who spent
her early years in Iran.
But unlike Bill Clinton, who
never needed help fathoming
Southern black culture, Obama
lacks advisers who are descended
from the central
African-American experience,
ones who understand "the slave
thing," as a top black Democrat
dryly puts it.
Dowd continues:
The West Wing white guys who
pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod
before Glenn Beck could pounce
not only didn't bother to
Google, they weren't familiar
enough with civil rights history
to recognize the name Sherrod.
And they didn't return the calls
and e-mail of prominent blacks
who tried to alert them that
something was wrong.
Dowd then collects quotes from
several aging veterans of the
1960s civil rights era -- John
Lewis, James Clyburn, Eleanor
Holmes Norton -- as well as
unnamed sources. Here is one of
the anonymous quotes: "Who knew
that the first black president
would make it even harder on
black people?"
Outside of wondering when the
Irish-American Dowd became the
arbiter of the authentically
black in American politics, my
first reaction to the above was,
Who ever suspected
that Andrew Breitbart was such
an evil genius? In plucking
Shirley Sherrod out of obscurity
to make a point about the NAACP
and the Tea Parties, could
Breitbart have started a
small-scale war among black
American politicians?
All I can
say is, thank God that instead
of telling them all to shut up,
baby boomer Maureen Dowd
encouraged these political old
timers to publicly nurse egos
bruised when the Generation X
occupants of the White
House
didn't
fall down in awe of all things
from the 1960s. The fault
lines Dowd writes about have
actually existed for some time
now, but it is hard to imagine a
less appropriate
time for veterans of the civil
rights era to be dissing
Obama for lacking a personal
claim to authentic black victim
status. While Obama may not have
shared their experiences in a
pre-Civil Rights era South,
neither do millions of other
blacks born in the north at too
late a date to
recall seeing stories about
Freedom Riders on the
Huntley-Brinkley Report, or who
heard parents talk about
newspaper headlines about
members of the Student
Nonviolence Coordinating
Committee over breakfast.
Those doing the complaining
about Obama on race seem to miss
what the focus of most people in
the Tea Party is.
Obama not only shares the
redistributionist agenda
many so-called civil rights
activists have promoted their
entire political careers, but he
is also coming close to putting
that agenda into operation in
major segments of the economy. There
is nothing racial about being
opposed to Marxist-style class
warfare solutions that, for
all their claims of social
justice and fairness, have
been repeatedly proven to worsen
economic conditions for the vast
majority of a nation's citizens.
This fall, Democrats need an
enthusiastic turnout by black
voters in several statewide
election contests. Missouri,
Illinois, Pennsylvania,
Wisconsin, and Ohio immediately
come to mind. While expressed
support for Obama among blacks
remains very high in the polls,
converting that support to
actual votes for other Democrats
on the November ballot is not
a given -- not with the stated
black unemployment rate
currently
exceeding 15%,
black-on-black
crime high, and large cities all
across the nation cutting back
on services.
Even a small drop in the turnout
percentage among black voters
could cost the Democrats several
Senate seats and governor's
mansions. Intensity of political
support can be very much a
function of
what-have-you-done-for-me-lately.
This is not usually measured in
the the abstract terms favored
by academic types, who love
mankind in general while showing
disdain for most humans as
individuals. "Where are the
jobs?" is an almost universal
political question this summer.
As someone who was a local
political junkie when I lived in
Chicago, Dowd's unawareness
that Obama has heard the
complaints she reported at least
once before in his
political career is amusing. In
the tribalism of Chicago
politics, the reaction to the
Hawaiian-born,
Indonesia-raised Barack
Obama's status until quite
recently was the wait-and-see
attitude reserved for an
untried son in-law, not the full
embrace given a genuinely
beloved member of the civil
rights community. For
years, some blacks looked
at Obama's exceptionally large
number of "present" votes in the
State Senate and wondered what
exactly his game was. Where
could he be fit along
the traditional local
scale between the greedy
pragmatists, who wanted only to
run the Cook
County Democrat machine for
themselves, and the starry-eyed
reformers, who desired to tear
it all down in favor of
their own pet theories of
government?
Then, in their 2000 primary
contest, Civil Rights-era
veteran Congressman Bobby Rush
effectively painted primary
challenger Obama, the favorite
of the University of Chicago
community in Hyde Park, as an
"educated fool"
and an
elite outsider. In
promoting his own long career as
a black nationalist to voters in
Illinois' First Congressional
District, Rush noted exactly
what Dowd's sources say today:
"Barack Obama is a person who
read about the civil-rights
protests and thinks he knows all
about it."
Chicago political insiders also
noticed that in a redistricting
map drawn after the 2000
census that was notorious for
allowing incumbents of both
parties to pick their
constituents instead of the
other way around, Obama ended up
with a district that
contained more affluent white
liberals and fewer poor blacks.
Black political colleagues would
poke fun at Obama's trying to
fit in as one of them by talking
jive even as he also
reminded everyone of his Harvard
law degree. Several expressed
open dislike of him to one of
the
few white reporters in the
2004 election cycle who bothered
to ask.
My own suspicion is that we will
know if the black
dissatisfaction Dowd writes
about is real by how
actively partisan the First Lady
is on the campaign trail this
fall. If her schedule includes a
great many stops in cities in
key states and appearances in
front of local chapters of the
NAACP, ACORN offshoots, and
other black activist venues, we
will know there is a
general enthusiasm gap, and not
just some grousing by old-timers
about the Generation X
crowd. That's because,
in her
criticism of Barack Obama's "too
white" set of advisors, Dowd
overlooked Michelle Obama.
Her family's background in
Chicago's identity politics
makes her the member of the
administration best-suited
for outreach to those who refuse
to let go of "the slave thing."
Coming on the heels of the
Journolist revelations, Dowd's
musings about Obama's White
House being too white call to
mind one of Obama's peers in the
Illinois State Senate. Before
the national media
climbed onto Obama's
bandwagon and he started
bringing home the political
bacon from Washington, D.C.,
critical comments about him were
far from heresy in Chicago
political circles.
In
2000, Illinois State Senator
Donne Trotter also
challenged Congressman Bobby
Rush in the primary. When asked
about the campaign, Trotter said
this
to a reporter from the
alternative weekly, the Chicago
Reader:
Barack is viewed in part to be
the white man in blackface in
our community. You have only to
look at his supporters. Who
pushed him to get where he is so
fast? It's these individuals in
Hyde Park, who don't always have
the best interest of the
community in mind.
Today, Senator Trotter's
criticism can be seen
as both insensitive to Obama's
mixed-race background and
remarkably prescient about his
political base being strongest
among the white radical
left. Over twenty months after
they elected Obama president,
many American voters feel they
still don't know the full
measure of the man they voted
for, while the motives of
those supporters on Journolist who
labored to keep the
voters intentionally blind --
even while urging them to make a
leap of faith -- have
become increasingly suspect.
R SMITH
