The Obama Bargain

In a follow-up to my recent post on Barack Obama's speech on race, I'd like to share an article my parents sent me. It is widely known, I think, that I am a liberal daughter of extremely conservative parents. This has, for the most part, deterred me from discussing politics with them, and I'm very careful in what I do say and share; the last thing I want is to create animosity and anger between us, which comes with the territory when people with decided and opposing political views try to discuss them.

However, I sent them the video of Obama's speech anyway, in the hope that they would be affected by it and his candidacy in a greater way. I suppose I had hoped that it would begin a conversation about the election, and reveal their opinion of him more decidedly. (I am already aware of the distaste they both share for Hillary Clinton, and to some lesser extent John McCain). In response, they sent me this article, posted below. Written by Shelby Steele, a research fellow at the Hoover Institute at Stanford (i.e. a conservative policy think tank), and published in the Wall Street Journal, it takes a very pessimistic and negative view of Obama's campaign.

I was disgusted by it, to the point where I could barely finish it (so beware to the reader). The arguments made about racial iniquities in America have been around for decades, dare I say over a hundred years. These are not false, or misinformed. They have existed, and it is a stain on the country's history that African Americans and other minorities have been treated so shamefully by our system of government, and by its people. However, to use this argument against a black presidential candidate is, in my opinion, despicable. I am certain that his views, if the situation was reversed and Obama did not have the support and momentum he does, would be the same. Steele states that the only reason he is "in his position" in the race is due to his own race. That his heritage is the only reason he has gained so much popular support. He references Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton's campaigns in the 1980s and '90s to establish connection, that like them, "Mr. Obama's run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance". And yet, the arguments made for why they never made it were racial as well: they didn't make it because they are black, their "position" was solely due to their race. Essentially, he is arguing that black candidates for political positions like president are damned if they have support, and damned if they don't. Regardless, it is only because they are black that it is so.

Steele does not believe that Obama will win the presidency. Obama, he says, as used his race well in "bargaining" for the competitive position he has right now, with his promise of appeasing the "hunger for white innocence" and ending black inferiority. He "hopes to ascend [to power] on the back of [white] gratitude", but ultimately will not prevail. To thus simplify what has so far been an excellent and competitive political campaign in those "black and white" terms belittles Obama in the most offensive way possible. To Steele, he is not talented, appealing, intelligent, or wise, but simply a sly black man vying for the favor of a racist white America.

The historic nature of his candidacy is what is most attractive about him, Steele states. However, he overlooks a crucial point, one that I also find offensive and disparaging. Hillary Clinton is also an historic candidate, and yet the fact that she is a woman running in a country where gender discrimination is very real is never given a thought. She is dumped unceremoniously with the rest of the 2008 candidates because she is white. Apparently to Steele, the nuances of race are the only ones that matter.

In one aspect I do concede to Steele: Obama is on occasion lacking in what he calls a "galvanizing political idea". He can be rather vague about his tangible plans for acting upon the changes he seeks to make, and is sometimes even ambiguous about what those changes should be. However, I would like to believe that the reason he is supported despite these failings is because of his incredible ability to inspire us as Americans, not as white Americans or as black Americans or as Asian or Hispanic or Native Americans. There is a choice we make, to remain rooted to the past as Steele seems to be, with his negativity and pessimism towards the motivations of our nation's citizens (not just in this article, but in his many published works), or to embrace the potential of a future where our differences unite us, not divide us. We cannot hope to solve the problems of racial injustice in this country when we still allow ourselves to blame each other for it. We need to reconcile those problems, not chain ourselves to them.

Barack Obama has never been appealing to me because he is black, in just the same way as Hillary Clinton is not because she is a woman. I base my support as purely as I can on the merit of each candidacy. That is how I feel Obama has run his campaign thus far, addressing race only when it was completely necessary. Maybe I'm too much of an idealist, but I feel Steele is sorely mistaken in his assessment of Obama's campaign, and hope to see him proven wrong.

The Obama Bargain

By SHELBY STEELE
March 18, 2008; Page A23

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.

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 ("God 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.

Mr. Steele, a research fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution and the author of "A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can't Win" (Free Press, 2007).