Obama’s Wrong Wright Message

Senator Barack Obama has impressive skills as an orator with a charismatic personality. He also displays a ready and willing intelligence. Such talents have propelled him from a relative unknown to international political celebrity in little more than three years. But this rapid rise has only raised greater curiosity about his personal history and values. Now, seeping facts about his biography have begun to define him in ways that undermine his winning message. First there was the flap about his pastor, Rev. Wright, and his casual refusal to adopt common patriotic symbols such as flag pins. Now there is more evidence that he adheres to the conventional liberal conceit that rural folks cling to cultural habits out of bitterness. We haven’t even gotten yet to his 1960’s style of policy prescriptions.

All of this was foreshadowed for anyone who read his memoir, Dreams From My Father. In his book Obama reveals a young man obsessed with a search for racial identity during his coming of age. Early on he seems to have decided to adopt the identity of his African father over that of his white mother or Indonesian stepfather. He seems to have viewed the white half of his heritage as the “other,” which is difficult for those of us of a single racial background to comprehend.

When he chose his political career path he seemed more determined to assert his black identity in his adopted hometown of Chicago. There, his ambitions as a community organizer and ward politician led him to Trinity Church and Rev. Wright. In this black church Obama could assert his credentials for black authenticity. It is this psychological need for identity and his conscious choice to be “black” that explains why he attended Trinity Church for twenty years and never saw the need to contradict Rev. Wright’s views on America. Unfortunately, this experience also contradicts his newfound desire to be a national political figure and the entire logic of his campaign. Obama promises to turn the page on divisive politics of the baby-boom era, to unite Americans for a common cause, but the only test of this commitment suffered twenty years of benign neglect in his relationship with his spiritual mentor. If Obama cannot bring a revered "uncle" back into the fold over a period of twenty years, or not even try, how will he create a big tent that encompasses red and blue voters? And how many of Trinity’s congregation have been sidetracked by Wright’s separatist racial values over the years? Now Obama has belatedly discovered that what works in the wards of Chicago’s South Side doesn’t play so well in rural Pennsylvania or suburban Florida. In fact, this week he also discovered that what plays well in the salons of San Francisco also doesn’t resonate well in the rustbelt. It is beginning to sound more like Obama's vision of unity is based more on persuading conservatives of the supremacy of liberal values - good luck with that.

The true divide in American politics is between liberal progressives and rural traditionalists, with the suburbs at the tipping point between inner suburbs leaning Democrat and outer suburbs leaning Republican. The mistake Obama fell into was the urban progressive attitude that rural traditionalists are out of touch with their inner selves due to economic transformations or Republican brainwashing. But Thomas Frank has it all wrong – these are deliberate lifestyle choices. Over the past twenty-eight years Republicans had the great fortune to have these constituencies delivered to them by Democratic blunders on religion, guns, crime, family values and abortion. Now Obama seems to have botched it again. Not because he misspoke or used the wrong words, but because he just doesn’t get it. Urban progressives really need to reprogram their conceits about American politics.

The sad reality is that Obama defined himself as the urban, “black” candidate long before the Clintons tried to pin the label on him by comparing him to Jesse Jackson. The rest of us in awe of Obama’s rhetorical magic are just discovering this. And the unfortunate reality of which few will speak is that defining American society through a racial division of black and white is rapidly losing its relevance in 21st century America. Hispanics, East Asians, South Asians, Russians and Middle Eastern immigrants have little desire for a national conversation on race that focuses solely on blacks and whites and so blacks’ opportunities to focus the debate on problems unique to their communities are slowly fading. We see this is in broad support for Clinton among these other groups. This is why it is imperative for a candidate like Obama to transcend his black African heritage and become the first mixed race candidate, rather than the first black candidate. As Shelby Steele has argued in his book on Obama, this may not be possible. If so, it is a missed opportunity, but the viability of his candidacy is still a notable achievement. The worst lesson to take from this would be for blacks and whites to conclude he lost because of racism rather than because his appeal was limited and his policy positions out of touch with the majority of Americans.