I have known Barack Obama since the early '90s. My conversations with him had convinced me he was an unwavering progressive. I celebrated his first election to the Illinois state senate, and he compiled a strikingly progressive legislative record during his seven-year stint.
Conditions conspired to grease Obama's path into the U.S. Senate and then into the presidential race. Those of us following the "Obama phenomenon" were amazed by the magical, dreamlike quality of his ascent. A local astrologer noted a propitious celestial alignment in Obama's chart; perhaps astrology could best explain his meteoric rise. Who would have predicted that a black candidate with a name like Barack Hussein Obama would become a U.S. senator and legitimate presidential candidate during a war with Islamic terrorism?
The dream continues with Obama as one of the frontrunners in the Democratic primary race. Somehow, though, the magic has gone missing. The political calibrations employed by Obama's campaign staff have devalued political vision and put a premium on marketing, transforming Obama into an electoral commodity (with demographically designed components). They have excised the very quality that distinguished Obama from the usual suspects.
No one in this brood of presidential candidates has yet said much about the incarceration crisis in black America, or the large black unemployment rate, or the chronically low quality of education in city schools, or anything else relating to the specific needs of the African-American electorate. This avoidance is deliberate. Party strategists apparently believe American voters are less likely to choose Democratic candidates if they perceive them to be under the sway of the party's most loyal constituents. For example, candidate Bill Clinton's criticism of Sister Souljah's inflammatory comments in 1992 about the Los Angeles riots (now referred to as Clinton's "Souljah Moment") are often credited with helping him win the votes of many "Reagan Democrats." Sophisticated African-American voters are expected to tolerate this tendency and squash their gripes for the good of the progressive whole.
Many of us hoped Obama would help put an end to the Democrats' racial schizophrenia. Given his deep understanding of African-Americans' liberation struggle, we thought he was perfectly cast as the candidate who could bring needed perspective to our racial dilemma. Perhaps he came to believe that political success was incompatible with efforts to promote a serious racial reckoning. It may be that he wanted to ride the Obama magic all the way to a progressive revolution, but was reined in by more seasoned political hands.
Political calculations must be the reason Obama is playing the "Bill Cosby card" (that is, focusing on individual behavior as the primary cause of racial disparity) in his latest speeches. He knows better than that. After all, Obama wrote the foreword to the National Urban League's distressing 2007 report "The State of Black America: Portrait of the Black Male," which indicts institutional racism as the major culprit.
Many wonder why Obama is focusing on issues that reinforce white Americans' denial of the legacy of slavery. Paul Street, for example, writes in the June 20 edition of the webzine, blackagendareport.com, "Obama allows whites to assuage their racial guilt and feel non-racist by liking and perhaps even voting for him while signaling that he won't do anything to tackle and redress the steep racial disparities and systematic racial oppression."
Street has been a consistent critic of Obama, but many of us who know the candidate begged to differ. We argued that he would use his extraordinary time in the limelight to speak unpopular truths about U.S. foreign and domestic policy while unflinchingly reminding the nation of its racial obligations. That prospect was the magic ingredient in Obama mania. His strategists are busy squandering it.
Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor of In These Times.
