Yesterday, a new email forward began making the rounds of conservative inboxes, blogs and message boards. It featured a picture of President Obama speaking with advisors in the Oval Office, kicked back, feet up on the Resolute desk. The accompanying text was fraught with class-based rhetoric, suggestions of imperial presidency and unfitness for office.
This arrogant, immature & self-centered man has no sense of honor, or of simple decency. While this posture is disrespectful in any culture, it is absolutely never done in any executive setting.... He thinks of himself as a king -- and not as a servant of the people.
Of course, the link I just posted above goes to the Wonkette article about the email. It features a picture of George W. Bush, with almost the exact same composition, in almost the exact same post. But still, there was an uproar, an outrage that Barack Obama would do something like this. Was it because it was Barack Obama?
When I first read this, I thought, "How did we get here?" Last year at this time, the Current Events section read Gwen Ifill's The Breakthrough: Politics and Race in the Age of Obama for Black History Month. Seeing this picture sent me back to that book, riffling through my notes and feeling sort of astonished that a lot of that sense of possibility she taps into has been agitated against so successfully and so angrily.
Ifill's book primarily profiles three up-and-coming black leaders (she began the book before Obama's election): then-Senator Barack Obama, Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick and Newark Mayor Cory Booker. Through these men, Ifill then introduces the primary metaphor of her book, "sandpaper moments," and from there introduces some running themes, like line jumping, gender vs. racial rights interests and coalition-building over special interests.
What she means by "sandpaper moment" is the sudden moment of political tension within a group where interests catch on each other and impede progress, intensifying stressors until one or other side breaks through and effectively decides which change will come.
In terms of line-jumping, this is a significant process. Because many of the Civil Rights generation are still alive, and because blacks still don't have anything like parity with whites in terms of offices held, there is a great deal of pressure within the black political community to "get in line," leaving guaranteed seats or good electoral opportunities for community leaders on a first-come, first-served basis. Obama, Patrick and Booker all basically flouted this, taking high-profile opportunities despite older candidates more steeped in the movement still waiting their turn.
But despite, say, Jesse Jackson weeping with joy on Obama's election night, victory doesn't heal all wounds. The generational divide points up debates on two issues. One, an ongoing argument about whether the Civil Rights community needs to move away from what some see as outmoded tactics of dissent and outrage and instead embrace more coalition building. Two, where and how those coalitions should be built, especially on gender lines.
I wish Ifill had devoted more space to it, but she does address the rift that the Obama vs. Hillary Clinton showdown caused in the Civil Rights community. While Obama represented a large portion of Americans racially, Hillary represented half of America on a gender basis. Because the Civil Rights community has traditionally also folded gender-equality rhetoric in with racial equality and often sought protections and rights for both at the same time (and because the Clintons were seen as a very positive force for the community), embracing one candidate meant turning aside another. Ifill notes how simply making the choice meant casting a vote for the future ideological direction of the movement. Were women's interests subordinate to racial ones?
The solution Ifill praises is coalition building amongst unexpected interests, and she highlights her support for it through the three men she focuses on the most. Cory Booker became Mayor of Newark by stepping outside the party machine and building coalitions amongst poor whites who couldn't have completed the city's white flight (assuming they'd want to), wealthy developers and the traditional black community. Not only did he talk tough on crime, but he advocated downtown redevelopment, in a way that appealed to conservative business leaders, to bring back diverse neighborhoods in the city.
Deval Patrick followed much of the same script. Instead of playing strictly to a racial community bloc (which in Massachusetts accounts for only 7% of the population), he appealed to the urban underclass of all colors while also campaigning on a populist platform that appealed to struggling rural and urban voters.
And as for Obama, for all the talk about red-blue divides, most of the maps we're familiar with are misleading. A quick look at a map of the U.S. adjusted to reflect votes by county and by popular vote (trust me: this site is very cool), his appeal resonated across the country much more completely than we've been led to believe.
Finally, Ifill ends the book with numerous profiles of up-and-coming black politicians, making it a good quick resource for names you're sure to hear in coming years.
She doesn't make a lot of choices in the book between the opposing ideas she presents. Instead, sheallows herself to speculate but leaves the reader to reach conclusions. Part of that might have been diplomacy: these are contentious issues. Nevertheless, the book is still thoughtful and, above all, hopeful.
Which leads back to wondering how we got here: with a president who some would rather believe isn't a natural-born American than acknowledge that he could just beat 'em fair and square; or, for that matter, with people who refuse to believe that he did beat 'em fair and square. How did we get to the point that so many are so ready to impute a sinister motive to his seating posture (or his flag-saluting posture)?
Or is this a cause for hope? Is this the vituperation we should expect? Maybe, bad apples and cheap or thoughtless ugly name-calling aside, most of his lumps are the same ones opponents would accord any president.
Did Obama fail to "breakthrough," instead creating anger in part of the country? Or is the anger evidence that he DID breakthrough to being disliked just like anybody else?
