January 16, 2008

The Great White Hype

We were wondering when we’d see the phrase “Great White Hope” headline an op/ed about Barack Obama (The Great White Hope was a play-turned-1970-film fictionalizing the life of black boxer Jack Johnson), and this past Sunday, we found it in the Washington Post: “Why Obamamania? Because He Runs as The Great White Hope.”

David Greenberg recaps the “giddiness bordering on exhilaration among voters” following Obama’s win in Iowa, and utter intoxication among “voters and pundits … heady with the hope that he can deliver not just ‘change’ … but a categorically different kind of change from Clinton or the Republican candidates.”

For a moment, our hearts skipped at the possibility that Mr. Greenberg was about to explain the words “hope” and “change” — words rendered completely indefinable by Obama and his supporters. “Hope for what?” we keep asking. “Change what, exactly?”

Mr. Greenberg is to be forgiven for being as unable to define these words in the context of Obamamania; neither Obama nor his starry-eyed supporters have been able to define them either. Confront an Obama supporter, and you’ll likely hear (as we have, repeatedly) some inane, automated response as “You just don’t get it,” or “It’s a shame you don’t have hope,” or “Don’t you want change?” or (the most chilling we’ve heard lately) “There’s still time for you to catch up with the masses.” (Masses of what? And who wants to “catch up with ‘the masses’”? Whatever happened to thinking for yourself?)

This, however, is our current favorite: “Obama is the only way we’re going to throw those Bush thugs out of the White House!” Never mind that come January 20, 2009, Bush and Co. will be vacating the premises, no matter who wins the presidency in ‘08. But that’s the sort of answer you get when you press Obamaites too hard for a definition of “change.”

Still, Greenberg doesn’t need to define the words “hope” and “change”; he explains Obamamania by defining what they aren’t, beginning with the question, “So what explains the magic?”

The most obvious explanation is Obama’s stirring oratory, with its notes of generational change and unity.

Well, we already knew that: Obama’s charisma is undeniable, and he’s comparatively young (just six weeks older than yours truly, in fact); he represents the first post-Baby Boomer generation, the Baby Busters (perpetually confused with GenXers) — who, believe you me, have precious little in common with the “Howdy Doody” generation with which we’re so often lumped. Seriously: While a “generation” lasts 20 years, a “baby boom” just doesn’t — and yet every American born between 1945 and 1964 is thrown into the Baby Boomer pot. A “baby boom” is supposed to be the result of an event immediately preceding a spike in births; does anyone really believe that folks were still making babies in 1964 as a result of World War II?

But I digress, as usual. Still, Obama’s age, and, more striking, his tenuous ties to the rest of us Busters, are important considerations I’ll address in a moment. Right now, let’s get back to Greenberg’s herculean attempt to explain the Obama phenomenon (and note how Greenberg uses the word “seduction,” perhaps the most common word associated with the mystery of Obamamania):

The key to his seduction, though, resides not just in what he says but in what remains unsaid. It lies in the tacit offer — a promise about overcoming America’s shameful racial history — that his particular candidacy offers to his enthusiasts, and to us all.

Obama’s allure differs from the infatuations of past election cycles because it can’t be traced to what he has done or will do. In his legislative career, Obama has produced few concrete policy changes, and you’d be hard-pressed to find a rank-and-file fan who can cite one.

And there you have both the reason for Obama’s popularity, and the very thing that frustrates those of us not infected by the Obama bug to the point of distraction: His appeal lies in nothing he’s ever actually done, but in vague, feel-good… er, vibes. (Well, there’s one thing Obama may share with the rest of the Busters: I, too, once grooved on indefinable “good vibes.” Of course, it was the early 1970s, and I was about ten at the time.)

Not since 1896 — when another rousing speechmaker, William Jennings Bryan, sought the White House — has the zeal for a candidate corresponded so little to a record of hard accomplishment. But merely asking if Obama has done enough for us to expect he’d be a good president misses the point, because that measures the past rather than imagining the future.

Greenberg certainly has his finger on the pulse of the Obamanation: Asking about hard accomplishment misses the point — the point being: You’re killing my buzz, man — stop asking logical questions, and just get with the groove, baby.

Since when was it such a radical idea to demand that a potential President of the United States have a little more to fall back on than good vibes?

But that is another no-no question to the Obamaites: You’re not allowed to cite Obama’s distinct lack of experience in matters beyond the borders of the state of Illinois.

“Oh, sure,” the Obamaites cry, “Hillary has ‘experience’ — but do you want the same old corporatism that’s dominated the White House since the 1980s?”

(This is usually followed by “You’re just a Hillary supporter anyway!” Which is far from the truth — although the hostile fervor of the Obamaites has served to push many of us previously-anti-Hillaryites squarely into the Hillary camp — but that’s another thorn we’ve snipped before, and will no doubt snip again.)

Frankly, “the same old corporatism” under Bill Clinton worked just fine for me, thanks very much; despite Big Dog’s spectacular (and unforeseen) failures and downright betrayals in the area of gay equality, those eight years between 1992 and 2000 were the best eight years of my life, in terms of quality of life. Is it selfish to long for the days when I was making a very healthy paycheck in a field (I.T.) that has since dried up like Kakadu in July? Perhaps. But never lose sight of the fact that principles must come second to the little luxuries of life — like eating, and living indoors. The most principled civil-rights activist in the world isn’t much use to anybody if s/he’s on the street and starving to death.

Or, as one of my favorite guilty-pleasure-movie lines goes: “Honey, we gotta eat.”

Greenberg continues:

Yet if Obama charms us by pointing to tomorrow, he doesn’t come bearing a new ideological vision.

True. And that throngs of voters are willing to cast their lot for a candidate whose ideology changes with every shift in the wind should make us all very nervous. One thing I’ve said repeatedly throughout this long, long campaign, in regard to Obama’s calculated machination of pitting Southern religionists against gay and lesbian Americans: You have to give the Republican candidates some credit for honesty; at least I know Romney and Huckabee and all the rest loathe my very existence as a gay American, and will fight me head-on. In contrast, Obama’s talk doesn’t match his walk.

Don’t sing me that old song, “Obama is the best candidate for gay rights — just look at his voting record!” (This means you, Chris Crain, who, not-so-incidentally, keep harping on that stale old right-wing rumor that Hillary is a lesbian.) There’s little difference between Obama’s voting record on LGBT-equality issues and that of any other mainstream Democrat with at least two ounces of brain matter left in his or her skull.

Where Obama steps out of line — way out of line — is in his deceitful and downright mean campaign tactics, his shameless pandering to shameless bigots (particularly those who should know better), and his unwavering insistence that lesbians and gay men are simply not worthy of the same rights (or, more accurately, privileges) that he enjoys. See: McClurkin, McClurkin, McClurkin, and Barack’s latest hit with a bullet: “We Are All Sinners (a.k.a. The Wink-Wink-Nudge, Bush-Style Code Words for Religionists Song).”

Yet, believe it or not, I still don’t think Obama at his core is a raging homophobe. I believe he is completely indifferent to gay and lesbian Americans, and we pop up on his radar only as a commodity — or liability.

Obama is simply an opportunist — which again, is more worrisome: I know where all the Republican candidates stand on the issue of my rights; they make no bones about it. As Duane Wells wrote so very plainly and perfectly: “I never thought I’d say this, but Mr. Obama’s duplicitous stance on gay and lesbian rights circa the Donnie McClurkin controversy has given me something of an appreciation for George W. Bush’s no-nonsense approach to politics. I may not agree with a thing that comes out of curious George’s mouth, but at least he doesn’t piss in my cornflakes and tell me that he filled the bowl with whole milk. No sir. If there is a good thing to be said about President Bush it’s that he will tell you he’s going to piss in your cornflakes, then he will actually piss in your cornflakes and then he will hold a press conference defending his right to piss in your cornflakes. There’s no deception. It’s honest and clear… whether you like it or not. With Obama that is unfortunately not the case.”

And consider this: If Obama so readily and freely throws gay Americans under the bus for sake of cozying up to a contingent (whose votes he was almost certainly assured of anyway), who’s he going to throw under the bus next? He’s already told the Baby Boomers that they’re for all practical purposes irrelevant — will your particular demographic be the next rendered “irrelevant,” a mere monkey wrench in the Obama machine?

It appears that Obama’s only “ideology” is one of winning, at any cost. He doesn’t actually stand for anything, other than some fuzzy concept of “hope and change.”

And, to paraphrase Alexander Hamilton: If you stand for nothing, you’ll fall for anything. And Obama has proved, time and time again, that he’s susceptible to following, blindly, a lot of bad advice. That’s assuming, generously, that Obama is not the instigator behind the cruelest of his own campaign calculations; on the other hand, it’s Obama’s campaign, and Obama should be the one calling the shots.

Quite a dilemma, this: Should we be more worried by a candidate who surrounds himself with the most un-principled advisers and does whatever they tell him to do (a grim portent of the way President Obama will pick and choose his cabinet), or by a candidate who is himself so ruthlessly ambitious that he will discard the most faithful voting blocs in his own party in order to “reach out” to groups whose “principles” run counter to very idea of democracy itself?

“At crucial moments through his career,” writes Ed Pilkington, “he had what he calls the ‘audacity of hope’: where others might have stepped back, he reached out, both in terms of his personal ambition and in terms of his appeal to supporters outside the natural Democratic tent.

“When he made the Boston speech he was not even yet in Congress: He was a Chicago lawyer running at the time for one of two Illinois seats in the US Senate. That race was in itself a long shot: a black man, as he says in his first book Dreams from My Father, ‘without organizational backing or personal wealth, and with a funny name,’ competing to become only the third African American since the post-civil war period of Reconstruction to serve in the Senate. He won, galvanizing support in white areas as well as black.

“Look further back still and the pattern is repeated. In 1990, while a second-year student at Harvard, he had the audacity to stand for election to head the Harvard Law Review, one of the country’s most prestigious legal publications. He beat off 18 other candidates to become its president (savor the moment: He was elected president Obama).

“David Goldberg, a civil rights lawyer who was a runner-up in that poll, recalls that Obama won by reaching out to right-wing law students, several of whom went on to become key legal advisers in the Bush administration: ‘We were a really polarized group of students, and he managed to span us all.’”

Notice a pattern yet?

In his WaPo op/ed, Greenberg draws a parallel between Ronald Reagan’s empty, feel-good rhetoric, and Bill Clinton’s 1992 win due to being “the first Democrat since the 1960s to formulate a viable and vital new liberalism — one rooted in years of policy wonkery, a frank reckoning with his party’s failures and an early recognition of the importance of globalization.” But…

…where Clinton converted voters to his philosophy with binder-thick proposals, from AmeriCorps to welfare reform to the earned-income tax credit, Obama fans rarely tout his specific ideas. No one claims his agenda entails radical innovation or differs much from Hillary Clinton’s. On the contrary, Obama’s ideology, insofar as he has articulated it, seems to be a familiar, mainstream liberalism, heavy on communitarianism. High-minded and process-oriented, in the Mugwump tradition that runs from Adlai Stevenson to Bill Bradley, it is pitched less to the Democratic Party’s working-class base than to upscale professionals.

The Obama phenomenon, then, stems not from what he has done but who he is. As the social critic John McWhorter has written, “What gives people a jolt in their gut about the idea of President Obama is the idea that it would be a ringing symbol that racism no longer rules our land.” He is the great white hope.

Greenberg delves more deeply into the race issue, then hits upon an idea that — commensurate with my encounters with the frenzied throngs — is a very uncomfortable idea to Obama supporters:

Obama’s rhetorical gifts clearly contribute to his allure. But that allure resides not simply in the mellow timbre of his larynx but, more deeply, in his near-perfect pitch in talking about race to white America. Obama doesn’t shun race altogether — if he did, he would provoke suspicions — and he certainly doesn’t “transcend” race, whatever that means. But neither, as the social theorist Shelby Steele has written, does he rub white America’s face in its corrupt history of slavery and segregation. Traditionally, whites have appreciated such gentleness.

History provides a precedent of sorts: In 1960, John F. Kennedy, a dashing, almost aristocratic figure who defied many nasty stereotypes of Irish Catholics, made Protestants feel not just safe in voting for him but downright virtuous. They could flatter themselves that they were not prejudiced while still choosing a candidate as cultivated as any Brahmin. Similarly, Obama — whose strongest appeal has thus far been to upscale white liberals — allows those whites to feel good about themselves and their country. He lets them imagine that a nation founded for freedom yet built on slavery can be redeemed by pulling a lever.

At the same time, Obama doesn’t threaten or discomfort whites. He doesn’t strike them as wronged or impatient, or as the spokesman of a long-subjugated minority group or even as someone particularly culturally different from themselves.

Ouch. In other words, white liberals may be leaping at the chance to finally alleviate all that deeply-ingrained white-liberal guilt without actually addressing the issue of race head-on.

This idea, whether correct or not, is one few Obamaites confront easily or willingly. Rather, many immediately discard it with the accusation that it somehow impugns Obama’s qualifications for the presidency (whatever those as-yet-unexplained “qualifications” may be). It doesn’t — nor it is a “racist” thought (the growing chorus of “Racism!” from the Obamaites every time The One’s suitability for the presidency is questioned, for any reason, is deafening). Rather, it is an idea worth consideration and discussion; if nothing else, the truth could provide some clues about the makeup of Obama’s base: What percentage of Obama supporters really are white liberals proud to say they support a man of color — and secretly relieved to support that man as an imaginary panacea for race conflict in this country?

Obama above all should be most interested in the answer to this question, if for no other reason than to attempt to dilute the potential “Bradley effect” (when white voters publicly espouse their support for a non-white candidate, but vote for the white candidate when alone in the voting booth), a phenomenon that appears to have some Obama supporters worried. Witness Obama’s projected win — and surprise loss to Hillary Clinton — in New Hampshire.

Greenberg addresses yet another issue Obama supporters are loath to confront:

As much Kansan as Kenyan, Obama does not descend from families who suffered American slavery or Jim Crow. His family tree has fewer slaves than slaveholders, fewer chains than Cheneys.

That’s what I meant by Obama’s “tenuous ties to the rest of us Busters.” As mentioned, Obama and I are the same age; neither of us can recall the Civil Rights era as clearly as our elders (Obama and I were both two-going-on-three in 1964), yet I, at least, remember dim news images of firehoses in the streets of Birmingham, and attack dogs unleashed — and, much more clearly, my first, timid step approaching a black child at a playground. While I didn’t understand what it was I understood, I understood there was a difference between us, and that there were some very bad people in this world who would be very angry about my playing with a black child (or, as we were taught was the proper word at the time, a Negro).

Despite his skin color versus mine, I am not at all convinced that Barack Obama’s ties to the Civil Rights era equate with mine; when my snow-white third-grade class was being introduced to our first black classmate, Obama was living in Indonesia. We both attended Catholic school — but somehow, I cannot imagine that young Barack was inundated by the issue of American race relations (on the news, in the movies, on the cover of newsweeklies, and in lengthy class discussions — yes, even before my age reached double digits) as I was.

The issue was all around me; no one my age was allowed to forget the vast divide between whites and blacks in the United States. Was Obama, insulated literally on the other side of the planet, as aware at the same tender age of the volatile schism between black and white “back home”?

I wasn’t quite four when the Watts riots exploded — and exploded with such repercussion that I remember them as well as I remember the endless news footage of the Vietnam War, and the nightly body count out of Southeast Asia.

Does Obama remember any of this? Did he even hear about it before he returned to the U.S. at the age of ten — when even the Summer of Love was a quickly-fading memory?

Greenberg continues:

This background may be what some people (mainly blacks) have meant when they asked the regrettable question of whether Obama is “black enough” to earn their votes. But Obama has always been black enough for his elite white enthusiasts, who would never presume to judge an African American’s racial authenticity — indeed, are all too happy to have such a question be kept, by prevailing norms, off limits to them.

Ouch, again.

Some pundits scratched their heads when Obama was trailing Clinton among black voters. (He’s now pulled even or ahead.) But it made perfect sense. Clinton had a track record of working for African Americans’ interests.

And yet it’s Clinton’s track record Obama supporters decry as the same old, same old — as opposed to, I guess, this hazy promise of “change” from Obama. No one put it better than Senator Clinton herself at the New Hampshire debate: “Making change is not about what you believe. It’s not about a speech you make. It is about working hard. …

“I want to make change, but I’ve already made change. I will continue to make change. I’m not just running on a promise of change. I’m running on 35 years of change. I’m running on having taken on the drug companies and the health insurance companies, taking on the oil companies.

“So, you know, I think it is clear that what we need is somebody who can deliver change. And we don’t need to be raising the false hopes of our country about what can be delivered. The best way to know what change I will produce is to look at the changes that I’ve already made.”

Clinton is a known quantity. We know what she’s accomplished, and she’s clear on what she intends to deliver. Obama is not.

Ultimately, concludes Greenberg, supporting Barack Obama…

…is a fantasy of easy redemption. America’s racial history — mixed into our culture at its foundation — will be with us always, even as personal prejudice recedes and inequality is chipped away. For all we know, a President Obama might make the so-called underclass his top priority. But Obamamania — the phenomenon, not the man — leads us to believe that if only we vote for an African American, an avatar of “change” and healing, we can slough off the burdens of our past — the burdens of finding answers to problems such as the rising number of out-of-wedlock births, the obscene size of the black male population behind bars, the rotten state of city schools, the simmering white resentment about affirmative action, the black-white gap in life expectancy and the cascade of government failures that turned Hurricane Katrina from a breakdown of emergency relief into a disgraceful racial scandal.

Obama’s boosters are not fired up about finally confronting those intricate and intractable problems, for which the answers lie not in identity but in politics and policy. Inspiring and exhilarating as it is, Obamamania allows us to sidestep the hardest challenges, at least for now.

That is what worries me the most: that Obama will be swept into the White House on a wave of “easy redemption” that “allows us to sidestep the hardest challenges, at least for now.”

I’m no fool: Any change would be welcome after seven years of allowing ourselves to be cowed into submission by a rogue administration with an out-of-control tinpot dictator in charge.

But do we want to “sidestep the hardest challenges,” now or in the future? Haven’t we buried our heads in the sand long enough?

Posted by: Sapphocrat