Obama on the Rise. His Campaign Reveals As Much About America As It Does About Him
With the news that Barack Obama has pulled slightly ahead of Hillary Clinton in Iowa and almost even with her in South Carolina, more people are seriously considering his candidacy. He's on the cover of Time, with the article headline, "Obama Finds His Voice," and described in The New Yorker as refreshing, offering "a sort of anti-politics that prizes truth-telling above calculation."
Hillary Clinton, Obama suggests, "is so polarizing that she is forced to be a milquetoast candidate in order to become an electable one."
"Who's Afraid of Barack Obama?" asks Frank Rich in The New York Times, suggesting that Republicans SHOULD BE. In trying to communicate with the new multi-cultural America, GOP leaders, he notes, are "defensive and out of touch."
"Most of the party’s candidates have barricaded themselves from African-Americans for so long that they don’t know how to speak to or about them. As sure-footed as these Republicans are in attacking the Clintons and Streisand — or in exchanging fire with Al Sharpton and hip-hop moguls — they are strangers to the mainstream multiracial and multicultural America exemplified by an Obama or an Oprah."
Earlier, Paul Krugman chronicled the shameful history of "Republicans and Race." Rich tells us that Shelby Steele, the "arch-conservative scholar who shares Obama's mixed-race heritage, has just written a book, A Bound Man, to argue (unpersuasively, in my view) that Mr. Obama can’t win. (Yet) he can’t stop himself from admiring the guy throughout." On the book's web page, Steele acknowledges that Obama "has the temperament, intelligence, and background -- an interracial family, a sterling education -- to guide America beyond the exhausted racial politics that now prevail." Yet as one of the reviewers observes, Steele himself seems caught in old-school thinking when he concludes that Obama can't win. He seems to be saying that Obama can't win because America hasn't yet cast off its racial burdens and hangups.
"Americans are constrained by a racial correctness so totalitarian," says Steele,"that we are afraid even to privately ask ourselves what we think about racial matters. Like Obama, most of us find it easier to program ourselves for correctness rather than risk knowing and expressing what we truly feel. Obama emerges as a kind of Everyman in whom we can see our own struggle to accept and honor what we honestly feel about race."
The book seems to be more about America's racial attitudes than it is about Obama. In "The Identity Card," a Time article, Steele says Obama as President could show “that race is but a negligible human difference.” His candidacy "asks the American democracy to complete itself, to achieve that almost perfect transparency in which color is indeed no veil over character--where a black, like a white, can put himself forward as the individual he truly is."
"Read Shelby Steele and you'll find all the argument you need for why Obama can win and now is the time for him to do so," one reviewer of Steele's book concludes.
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