PHILIP J. CUNNINGHAM
I thought Global Affairs readers might find the following of interest.
I wrote this for the Bangkok Post which just ran an editorial today expressing fears about possible US action in Iran, a serious topic expertly addressed in a guest editorial on Juan Cole's Informed Comment blog.
My piece is not strictly about global affairs but I hope it does raise some questions about a presidential race that seems to be about everything and anything but global affairs.
...
Why be President when you can be King?
By Philip J. Cunningham
With the rapid and unexpected ascent of Barack Obama one gets the sense in America that a national turning point is at hand, an opportunity for reconciliation and transformation, though the success of this bold project is far from assured. The transformative moment, such as it is, coexists with the deeply treacherous politics of fear, --a strike on Iran cannot yet be counted out in the lame duck days of the Bush/Cheney imperial presidency, thrusting the US onto a war footing that might very well make the otherwise charmless John McCain electable.
Given broad public discontent with Bush Jr. and the war in Iraq, the Democratic Party should own the election, but it now risks self-destruction as Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama camps vie to push one another off the high road with unfriendly nudges and low innuendoes.
The American electorate may verily be ready and hungry for change, but a truly transformative shift of the kind superficially symbolized by putting the first woman or the first black in the White House is not a sure thing even if one of them should win the general election.
Hillary Clinton is the better known of the two candidates, having been in the fishbowl of Washington politics considerably longer. Her strengths and weaknesses are well documented but it remains an open question whether the symbolic positives of having a woman occupy the highest office begins to compensate for her known negatives as an opportunistic politician.
What you see is may be what you get with Hillary, but not so with Barack Obama who remains something of a cipher. Not only has he had only limited exposure on the national stage but also he has successfully cultivated a fuzzy public persona conveniently loaded with ambiguity.
This works for him and against him, he can be seen as healer and fence-sitter, a bridge and a brick in the wall. His identity is cast as being rooted in the African-American community, but he is a Johnny-come-lately to that community, and could have, had he chosen to do so, emphasized the strong Asian and Caucasian influences of his childhood. When Geraldine Ferraro suggested that Obama’s success was in part due to his blackness, she was making a fair observation.
Obama is indeed popular with whites, not because of his political record or his “whiteness” but because of what he’s come to symbolize. He’s that rare black American reaching out to whites, offering absolution in a way that no white man can.
Of course this is only one of many factors, he is popular with whites for many of the same the reasons he is popular with blacks; he is good-looking, articulate, knowledgeable, politically mature and gentlemanly in demeanor.
But when it comes to identity politics, Obama appeals to blacks and whites for strikingly different and difficult to reconcile reasons. To the former he is a “brother,” to the latter he is an emissary from the ‘hood offering the olive branch of racial reconciliation, which despite, or perhaps precisely because of the largely one-sided history of racial oppression, comes as a welcome relief to many guilt-challenged whites.
Thus Obama’s regular attendance at a neighborhood church espousing black liberation theology is not necessarily a negative with whites, his identification with people and places the average white American cannot connect with is unwittingly part of what makes him popular to whites, despite the off-putting rhetoric espoused of Reverend Wright, because it locates him close to the beating heart of the “real” black community. He is not a race-blind Clarence Thomas or Condoleezza Rice. He wants to and needs to speak for the street, and if he does so with his healing words, then a true thaw in racial tensions might be around the corner.
For a boy raised by a white mother, two white grandparents and an Indonesian stepfather, his ability to in some sense represent black America is actually quite remarkable. Obama has integrated himself into both black America and white America, poised to emerge as a rare all-American leader.
Exploiting a personal journey in search of identity and a complex family mix for political gain is not without a downside. At times Obama treads a line so fine that it gets outright awkward if not coldly calculating; witness the way he talks of “typical whites” and ignores the most dysfunctional side of the black community or the way he equates the white mother of his white mother with a controversial white-bashing preacher.
Obama is the rare politician who can write well, witness the poignant musings on the mulatto’s search for identity, especially the absent African father so central to his books.
The journey is a fascinating one, beautifully told, but it also makes it plain that he has thought longer and harder about race, than foreign policy issues or economics, so his electability really comes down to what Americans look for in a President.
In recent years, the Presidency has become a winner-takes-all overly exalted position that calls for someone part monarch, part martinet, part guy-next-door, part Hollywood star. Expecting one extraordinary individual to be savior and solver of all problems is corrosive to the spirit of democracy; the danger of unrealistic and misplaced hopes can be seen in the unitary presidency of George W. Bush. Armed with the right to make war, the current occupant of 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue has assumed unprecedented power, armed with world-shaking prerogatives that would be the envy of many an authoritarian strongman.
Is that the direction Obama wants to go? His appeal to date is his moral clarity, thanks to his youth, inexperience and ambiguous take on tough issues; he hasn’t had to make the cold Machiavellian compromises and brutal power plays that we come to expect from the commander-in-chief.
Hillary Clinton likes to say she is more electable and in a way she is right, we expect less of her and are less surprised when she acts like a politician. She will do what it takes.
In contrast her charismatic rival projects an untainted moral authority, allowing him to cast an all-encompassing net of hope that embraces opposites. Not just white America and black America, but rich and poor, winner and loser alike.
On a good day Obama sounds a lot like Martin Luther King.
But it does not necessarily follow that Obama would be a good president or that being president would be good for the reconciliation agenda that so profoundly excites the public. King was a great man, but would he have been a good president?
pc
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
WHY BE PRESIDENT WHEN YOU CAN BE KING?
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i think you overstate the role of white guilt or a vision of obama as racial healer.
prior to the wright controversy, it seemed as if obama had made a deliberate decision not to run as black candidate but the best candidate.
there is not that much difference between the two in terms of policy.
they both favor withdrawing us troops.
they both favor universal healthcare in some form.
they both seem to care about issues economic equality and social justice.
i grant you that hillary is more of a known commodity, but you overstate the "fuzziness" of obama's positions.
but your assumption that his self-reflection has some precluded or precludes him from obtaining the necessary information to make decisions as president is fairly derisable.
Harvard Law review, successful political campaigns, a career as a lawyer, a career as a politician.
The advisors he has surrounded himself with are, for the most part, the most impressive of any of the candidates, especially McCains.
I agree with you that it will be the economy and the war, not race, that are the defining issues in this race.
It's almost a shame that the issues are so easily clouded due to the race and gender of our candidates when those attributes should be the least of our concerns.
thanks for your thoughtful comments.
I do not think that reflection precludes good decision-making, but I detect a certain amount of self-obsessing on the part of Obama about identity issues in which he posits his candidacy as the answer to years of racial injustice which would seem to mask a certain amount of narcissism.
Race and identity issues are important and compelling but somewhat peripheral to job of president which calls for a focus on foreign policy and the economy, especially in these troubled times.
You make very good, interesting points about how Obama has appealed in different ways to whites and blacks, and how his acceptance by the African American community is remarkable in some ways. But here you are mis-stating Obama's argument and mangling his language:
witness the way he talks of “typical whites” and ignores the most dysfunctional side of the black community or the way he equates the white mother of his white mother with a controversial white-bashing preacher.
Your argument seems to be that Obama has falsely equated his grandmother's remarks (most of which he probably didn't repeat in the speech) with pastor Wright's remarks, in order to make a great generalization. In fact, we don't really know much of what his grandmother said. He didn't give us a laundry list of offensive comments--nor should he have. We don't really have much choice but to take him at his word that she said things that were offensive, and somehow comparable to Wright's remarks. In that regard, we should also consider the context and subjective meaning of her comments, vs Wright's. His grandmother was not acting in the capacity of a polemicist, she was a parental figure, somebody who ought to be offering him unconditional love and acceptance, and for someone in that position to betray prejudice, perhaps even implying rejection, that is very serious and quite different from words spoken from a pulpit. There are many ways in which his grandmother's and his pastor's statements were not comparable, and he was not comparing them beyond making the point that sometimes you just have to look past people's words.
There are a lot of legitimate criticisms one could make about Obama. Unfortunately, parts of your editorial seem to be repeating the tired media trope of Obama as a charismatic stuffed shirt who doesn't talk specifics. Alas, this was used so often, I think, because it silences by exploiting the target's potential for marginalization, as a minority--one need not even engage with the content of Obama's positions, instead one appeals to one's own intellectual authority, asking the reader to accept that there is no content worth engaging with. It might work just as well on Clinton if she conveyed more empathy and emotion in her speaking, and were not already type-cast as "cold", had she not made such an effort to come across as tough.
This speech by Obama on race may not have been inspiring and pyrotechnic, but it was actually very nuanced and subtle, and I think it is a great disservice to characterize it as vague or insubstantial. If you want to criticize him for half-measures, you could talk about his support for corn-based ethanol, or his stand against negotiating with Hamas, or his general lack of outspokenness on global warming.
You also seem to be accepting, or embracing, the equally tired narrative that sets up Obama as inevitably disappointing by comparing realistic expectations for him with exaggerated expectations attributed to some of his supporters. This is a highly spurious argument. Any candidate will have some true believers whose expectations are unrealistic and excessive. One could argue that (for example) a Clinton presidency wouldn't have sweeping effects on women's prospects against corporate glass ceilings. But this would be to misstate the motives and arguments of many of their most engaged, organized and active supporters--often people for whom Clinton or Obama were a second choice. No candidate will live up to all the expectations voiced by their most ardent supporters.
Most of the conversation about Obama and Clinton has actually been fairly grounded, reasonable, and realistic. The "media hype" is, ironically, more a fiction created by the media itself than anything that occurred, spontaneously, in the media. The one thing the discussion has lacked, sorely, and especially in the last month, is attention to substantive issues. The two candidates' overall positions are nearly identical, but there are certainly areas where they stand apart, such as net neutrality, foreign policy (in some respects), transparency, and even political strategy (which has implications for the general election), and these could have been addressed more.
Finally, this phrase just does not contribute to intelligent, articulate political discourse, and I have no idea why you would want to use it (emphasis mine):
"a fair observation that got misconstrued by the politically correct thought police of the national media"
I guess that, without saying it, you're suggesting that a President Obama might change the presidency to make it less authoritarian and more in tune with the US Constitution. But he has given us NO real indication that he would do that. While he does promote his collegial style as a foreign policy option he has also threatened to bomb Pakistan, and has not addressed the issues of executive privilege and the rubber-stamp congress.
So you don't think King would have been a good president? I suppose Ghandi had no business being a leader in India either.
So you can rely on Hillary, as a politician, to do what it takes.
Let me finish that sentence for you:
You can rely in Hillary, as a politician, to do what it takes... to maintain her personal power.
Is that what you wish?
-pete
I want to thank those of you who took time to read my piece carefully and respond with constructive comments. I found the comments of "anonymous" (3rd comment) well-thought out and helpful, so much so I would encourage the writer to post under his or her name. I am new to blogging but like the idea of being able to improve a piece, and the comment about the inutility of the phrase "politically correct thought police" is well-taken, so much so that I have deleted it.
To respond to another comment, I do not think Gandhi (Mohatma) would have been a good PM nor does it seem necessary to assume that a great man like MLK would have been a good president. Being president isn't the be all and end all for people with rare gifts and great talent, and one might even make the argument that one can achieve more good by not being president. As Don Bacon has suggested, Obama could turn out to be interventionist in ways that are at odds with his message of reconciliation.
Having said that, I remain undecided between Hillary and Obama, and continue to watch the campaign with great interest.
pc
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