NATO AIR
Senior Member
guys like colin powell and obama use race to unite americans, not divide them.
great article aside from the "clinton was a good president" comment at the end.
great article aside from the "clinton was a good president" comment at the end.
.The Great Black Hope
What's riding on Barack Obama?
By Benjamin Wallace-Wells
Cory Booker was feeling good. The one time Newark, N.J., mayoral candidate had just given a widely lauded speech at a youth vote event at the Democratic convention in Boston. The party's kingmakers and talent scouts, who had taken an interest in the career of this young, handsome African-American Rhodes scholar during his campaign two years ago were thrilled to see him, and eager to game out with him how Booker might win his next run. Operatives, glad-handers, and hacks, Booker recalled happily. When he talked to men and particularly women, they had a glimmer of awe in their eyes, as if a conversation with Booker might be a remembered event, something they'd someday recount for their kids. He could feel his head swelling, but it was okay to let your head swell sometimes, for a moment or two. And now here were two more excited white women, mouths open, and ready to gush. Booker leaned back and smiled his big, easy smile, and one of the women stuck out her hand I just wanted to congratulate you on your speech, she said. It was so stirringMr. Obama.
My head, Booker told me recently, compressing his hands to mimic a vice, returned to its present size. Beyond sharing light skin, Barack Obama and Cory Booker look nothing alike. Obama, the Democratic candidate for Senate in Illinois, is rail-thin, with short, Brillo-like hair; his precise features and scrawny neck make him look like a bobblehead doll. Booker, who was an all-Pac Ten tight-end, is thick and broad-shouldered, with a clean-shaven head. Obama is reserved, rhetorically smooth and on message; Booker comes across as more eager, less experienced, and a little rougher around the edges. But the women's confusion wasn't just another embarrassing example of whites being unable to tell one black guy from another, or the more forgivable mistake arising from the fact that on that night, everyone at the convention was dying to meet Obama, the keynote speaker. For despite their physical differences, Booker and Obama share something fundamental: They are black people whom white Americans can actually picture being president.
Booker has been told he might someday be the first black president since he was in grade school. He was raised in Harrington Park, N.J., the kind of well-off suburb where high-achieving, Ivy-bound students were the norm, and where it wasn't uncommon for teachers to wonder if a particular student at the top of his class might someday be president. Most years they wondered if they might have the first Jewish president or the first woman president on their hands; Cory's year, it was the first black president. Booker went to Stanford, then to Oxford; while there, he ran the L'Chaim Society, the Jewish students' organization, just because he was interested. (This fact still features prominently in his campaign literature.) After Oxford, Booker went to Yale Law, but rather than live in New Haven, chose to commute each day from a run-down housing project in Newark, a mostly-black, heap-of-junk port city in which Booker had never lived. It's hard to not feel some responsibility towards the community, Booker told me, like my generation should move things forward.
After winning a seat on the Newark City Council, and then a second term, Booker decided to run for mayor. Like many New Jersey politicians, Booker began to work the standard New York fundraising circuit. New York was wowed. Cory was the easiest person I've ever had to raise money for, remembers R. Boykin Curry IV, a veteran Manhattan money manager and a Democrat, but the kind of centrist Democrat who thinks Bill Clinton sold out to the left. A friend had invited him to a Booker event at a local bar; he met the politician, and his knees began to buckle. He is talking about school choice, about taking this city that's in absolutely abysmal shape and restoring it to its glory, and he's talking about models of urban renewal from Indianapolis to what Giuliani didhe absolutely got it, he got the way cities have to move into the modern world, Curry told me. There's a black politician speaking to you, and you can't get out of your mind that he's as charismatic and clever as Clinton, and at once you're jealous you're not him and you think, my God, I've got to do everything I can to get this guy elected. A fever was building. Time profiled Booker; CBS Evening News did, too. Though Booker was still only a councilman in America's 63rd largest city, Democratic fundraisers and operatives were also talking about a future White House bid; The New York Times said he was regularly referred to as someone who will end up the first black President of the United States.
Then Booker lost. His opponent, incumbent Newark mayor Sharpe James told newspapers and television during the campaign that he didn't believe Booker was black enough to be mayor of Newark, and the incumbent's campaign was accused of spreading rumors that Booker was Jewish. (Flyers appeared in Newark's wards depicting the Rhodes scholar with a stretched, Semitic nose). A veteran machine pol, James also worked his base to the bone, cornering the union endorsements and playing up his generous patronage in a city where government is the biggest employer. He effectively portrayed Booker as too brainy, too earnest, and too babe-in-the-woods to play political hardball in a place like Newarka figment of some white guy's dream, not a guy you could count on when the bus drivers threatened to strike. Booker lost by 3,000 votes, out of 53,000 cast. The candidate has since quit the city council, though he still lives in the housing project. Booker has set up a law firm on the top floor of the tallest building in Newark, looking out over a city of run-down rowhouses. The office also holds his campaign headquarters: Booker is running against James again, with the election two years away.
The feeling of rapture that Booker inspired has come to define a whole line of African-American politicians who have been touted as the next first black president. There was the excitement surrounding then-Virginia governor L. Douglas Wilder, a Korean War hero and budget-balancing moderate, when he launched his brief presidential run in 1991. There was the widespread clamor during the mid- and late-1990s for retired Gen. Colin Powell to run for president. And there was the boomlet of enthusiasm during the last few yearsalbeit mostly limited to Washington insidersfor Rep. Harold Ford, Jr. (D-Tenn.), the handsome, green-eyed Blue Dog Democrat, which culminated in his ill-fated bid to become House Minority Leader.
It is often said that America isn't ready for a black president. And it is true that most of today's most prominent African-American politicians would have a hard time winning large numbers of white votes, both because of lingering racial resentments and a sense among whites that black politicians don't necessarily share their values and interests. Yet there are a few black politicians for whom their race isn't a ball-and-chain, but a jet enginethe feature that launches them into stardom. For all of Colin Powell's gifts as a soldier and diplomat, he probably would not consistently rank as the most admired public official in America if he were white. For all of Obama's brilliance and eloquence, it is hard to imagine that he would be a national figure at this early stage of his career, if not for his African father.
For this small group of black politicians, race has been an advantage because whites see in them confirmation that America, finally, is working. Blacks, after all, aren't just any minority, the moral equivalent of Asian-Pacific Islanders but six times the size. They are the victims of much of our country's most vicious oppression, the cause of our deepest historical divisions, the stubborn counter-example that suggests our system isn't as fair or just as we would like it to be. The act of redressing these injustices has absorbed much of the political and emotional energy in America for 150 years. And while all Americans can take some pride in what racial progress African Americans have made in recent years, what whitesand indeed blacksreally want is for the whole awful nightmare behind them. The ultimate proof that we have finally done so would be for a black person to be elected president of the United States. In Barack Obama or Colin Powell, whites, giddily, begin to see not only figures who can command both white and black votes but also the promise of a real racial unity. Their candidacies are thrilling because they carry with them the notion that the symbolic gap between the races may be beginning to close.
The handful of black politicians who tap this vein of political yearning share certain qualities. They have all been highly successful within the post-war institutions that have done the most to integrate American society and help develop black leaders: the U.S. military (Wilder and Powell) and elite universities (Booker, Ford, and Obama). Consequently, all give off the sense that they have transcended traditional racial categories, by signaling in their speech and demeanor, their personal narratives and career achievements, that they fully share in the culture and values of mainstream America; they are able to transcend race through the simple fact of their class. Just as importantly, they also transcend ideology by declaring with their rhetoric and policy positions a self-conscious independence from the conventional politics of their parties.
To require that politicians transcend both race and ideology is, of course, an almost impossible standard, and one that white politicians needn't meet at all. That may explain why each of these African-American figures share another quality, one with echoes of the debate over affirmative actiona sense that the ferocious political appetite for their candidacies has pushed them into something that they're not quite ready for. That's certainly the private fear of many of Obama's most passionate admirers. As wonderful as Barack is, the one thing you wonder is if we haven't made him out to be something more than it's possible for him to be, a prominent Virginia Democratic fundraiser who had worked up close with Wilder told me. So much is expected of him. Four years ago, the same could have been said about Cory Booker. And so, the most compelling question about the politics of race right now may be this: Is Booker the next Barack Obama? Or is Obama the next Cory Booker?
Black man's burden
By the night he spoke at the Democratic Convention in late July, the expectations for Obama seemed almost unfulfillable. All spring and summer, reports had trickled back to Washington about this guy with an odd name out in the provinces, a reputedly brilliant speaker and political neophyte who was running a strong campaign in a Democratic primary crowded with veterans. He was respected in the state Senate, it was said, as a bipartisan dealmaker so talented that he could pass liberal bills taking measures to limit racial profiling and put cameras in police interrogation rooms, to prevent forced confessions. Obama's reputation grew after he beat his better-known opponents for his party's nomination; then was leading his Republican opponent, a handsome, charismatic investment banker named Jack Ryan, by 20 points before Ryan had to drop out of the race after a sex scandal. (State Republicans chose Alan Keyes, the black, conservative former presidential candidate, to replace Ryan). Finally, Obama was selected to give the keynote address at the convention. The thrill that accompanied the reports of Obama's presence made it sound as if people had discovered the Messiah in Illinois.
The television talking heads, though they shared the excited anticipation for Obama, spent most of their pre-speech minutes wondering if this nobody could possibly fulfill these expectations. When Bill Clinton had been picked to give his keynote in 1988, after all, he had been a three-term governor, and arguably the most articulate Democrat of the last half of the 20th century, and flunked it.
Yet the night Obama delivered a speech that, even in the company of the party's most masterful orators, was clearly the most memorable of the convention. It began, like the buzz about Obama had, with the thing that is most instantly interesting about the candidate: his background. Obama is the son of a white mother from Kansas and a black father from Kenya who left the family when Barack was three. Barack grew up careening around the Pacific Rim, from Indonesia to Hawaii, a set of locales that seem the backdrop less for a political epic than a surfer flick, before education in a series of tony private schools ending with Harvard Law, where he was the first black president of the law review. Armed with a J.D., Obama moved to Chicago and became a constitutional law professor and a community activist, pushing for voter registration and better public housing, before eventually running for a seat in the Illinois State Senate. What was perhaps most brilliant about Obama's speech at the convention, and indeed about much of his campaign, was the way in which he revamped his unusual, foreign-seeming biography so that it fit the central American political myth, the ascent from the Log Cabin, with a post-racial 21st-century spin. The half-Kenyan kid became Abe Lincoln. Isn't it unlikely, Obama tells all his audiences, that a skinny kid with a funny name from the South Side of Chicago could be where he is today. (In some ways perhaps not so unlikely: He was the son of a single mother, but he also went to prep school and has degrees from Columbia and Harvard).
read the rest @ http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2004/0411.wallace-wells.html
