Obama Sets out on His Mission to Excite and Unite a Divided Nation

Culled fromThe Independent

A gaffe, they say in politics, is when someone inadvertently blurts out the truth. Thus it was when Joe Biden, the incorrigibly loquacious senator from Delaware, held forth the other day about Barack Obama, his fellow aspirant for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination.

(c) The Independent

"Look," he declared, "you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man."

The remark was of course profoundly politically incorrect, and profuse apologies were instantly on their way to Jesse Jackson, Alan Keyes, and Al Sharpton, all blacks who have run for the White House in recent years, and all of presumably impeccable personal hygiene and boasting impressive rhetorical skills.

But deep down, Mr Biden was spot on. Mr Obama, the 45-year-old junior senator from Illinois, is different. He is the first African-American candidate with a realistic chance of winning. And the reason, as Mr Biden so clumsily made clear, is that to the white majority of the country he hardly seems black at all.

This morning, at an open air rally in wintry Springfield, the capital of Illinois where he spent eight years as a state senator, Mr Obama formally launches his campaign. The site of the announcement is laden with symbolism. This first major black candidate of the 21st century will throw his hat into the presidential ring at the old State Capitol building, in which an earlier Illinois legislator named Abraham Lincoln cut his political teeth before himself moving on to the White House, where he issued in January 1863 the Proclamation of Emancipation freeing black slaves. This will be a patented "Only in America" moment, a testament to the country's astonishing mobility, its endless flux, and its capacity to reinvent itself.

Whether Mr Obama can follow the path of America's 16th and arguably greatest president is not clear. If he becomes the 44th, he will face challenges more subtle but in some respects as daunting as the Civil War: a country whose international reputation has never been lower, struggling to extricate itself from a disastrous foreign war, and whose global dominance is threatened by the ascent of China and India.

Click here for full text of Senator Barack Obama's announcement for President.

But the very fact that Mr Obama is setting out on the road is indeed, as Joe Biden puts it, "a storybook" - the climax of a meteoric career that has seen an untried newcomer, with just two years service in the US Senate, emerge as the most exciting politician of the day.

Three years ago, he was all but unknown. Then came the electrifying speech at the July 2004 Democratic convention, in which Mr Obama told his countrymen that, for all their divisions of party, race, class and social attitudes, they were united by the far more important fact that they were all Americans. That November, he won a landslide victory for the vacant Illinois Senate seat, and was immediately being touted as a presidential contender.

In retrospect, the only surprise is that the moment has come so soon. But in American presidential politics, opportunity is fleeting. In this election campaign of 2008 which has already started, anything can happen. Mr Obama is the flavour of the hour. In most polls, he already runs second only to Hillary Clinton. In some key primary states, he is narrowly ahead. After Springfield he travels to Iowa, whose caucuses kick off the primary season, before addressing a rally in his home town Chicago. On Monday, he is off to New Hampshire, the key primary state which greeted him like a rock star on a first visit last December.

But how long can the phenomenon last? Mr Obama's appeal is multi-layered, yet also shallow. His background is, by any standards, remarkable. The son of a Kenyan father and a white mother from Kansas, he was born in Hawaii - about as far away from Washington as it is possible to be born and still be eligible to run for president.

His parents (both now dead) separated a few years later, and his mother married an Indonesian. The family moved to Jakarta, where he was educated at Catholic and Muslim schools. He returned to Hawaii, before attending the Ivy League Columbia University, and Harvard Law School, where he was the first black, and youngest, president of the Harvard Law Review.

This family history, coupled with a gentle manner and a political message of reconciliation and healing, make Mr Obama one of a select group of blacks - Tiger Woods and Colin Powell are two others that come to mind - who transcend race. Whites do not feel threatened by them. Rather they make Americans feel good about themselves and a society in which this sort of ascent is possible. All of which, of course, only makes many blacks suspicious.

Right now African-Americans are not exactly flocking to the Barack Obama banner. And in a sense why should they? He does not share their slave ancestry, and grew up mainly among whites. In Chicago, he did work as a community organiser on the city's poor and largely minority South Side. But he has few links to the city's powerful black establishment.

The cases of Colin Powell, the first black figure to be seriously mentioned as a future president, offers fascinating similarities and differences. After much soul-searching, the former role model for blacks and whites decided not to seek the Republican presidential nomination for 1996, even though he was the one Republican with a realistic chance of defeating the incumbent Bill Clinton.

Mr Powell demurred largely because of the opposition of his wife Alma, reflecting not least her fear that he might be assassinated. Reluctantly, bowing to the inevitable, Mr Obama's wife Michelle has given her assent this time around. But she too fears the strains on family life and the loss of privacy for their two young daughters that the campaign will surely bring. As for assassination, suffice to say American politics are no stranger to violent death: look no further than the young president with whom Mr Obama is often compared, shot down in Dallas in 1963.

But there is an even more instructive footnote. In the end, of course, the Republicans chose the party grandee Bob Dole to oppose Bill Clinton. Mr Dole was soundly beaten but an election day exit poll in November 1996 suggested that had Mr Powell's name, not Mr Dole's, been on the ballot, the former would have won - not because of his appeal to blacks, who still overwhelmingly backed Clinton, but thanks to his popularity among whites. The same holds true now, for the time being at least.

A majority of blacks, say the polls, support Hillary Clinton, if only out of the warm glow inspired by the Clinton name. Nor should John Edwards, the third top-tier contender for the Democratic nomination be overlooked.

He is pushing a populist agenda, focused on America's glaring social injustices, that is bound to appeal to minority voters. Mr Obama himself counts on sidestepping the issue by making race irrelevant. As he said this week, "If we do a good in letting people know who I am and what I stand for, they'll make their judgement not on my race but based on how well they think I can lead the country."

There is a pristine, unsullied quality about the man that seems to lift him beyond the confines of the daily political fray - indeed the online magazine Slate has instituted an "Obama Messiah Watch." On Capitol Hill he stands out from his colleagues, and not merely because he is the only African-American member of the Senate. When the voice reading names for a roll-call floor vote intones "Mr Obama," a slight, almost delicate figure lopes forward. "At first glance, you take him for a page boy," one veteran of the press gallery said.

In Washington, no significant legislative achievement bears his name - though he is on the right side of the Iraq issue as the country turns ever more strongly against the war. Unlike Mrs Clinton, he opposed the Iraq invasion even before it was launched, and is on the record in Illinois to prove it.

But having not entered the Senate until January 2005, he was spared the key congressional vote of October 2002 when many Democrats, fearful of being labelled unpatriotic by the hugely popular (at the time) President Bush before the upcoming midterm elections, granted the White House authority to go to war. Some of those who did so, including Mr Edwards but not yet Mrs Clinton, have been forced to repudiate their vote. Obama does not have to.

For clues to his politics, the best place to look is Springfield, and his record in the state senate. There, he emerged as a committed liberal - but with an ability to see both sides of the argument. He is not an ideologue but a pragmatist who worked with Republicans across the aisle to fashion new campaign finance rules and a measure of healthcare reform. In extreme cases, he favours the death penalty - in a state that has now imposed a moratorium on capital punishment. In short, in the classic division of politicians into warriors and healers, Mr Obama is as emphatically the latter as President Bush is the former.

Indeed, part of his appeal is the lack of a paper trail of significant votes, as the candidate himself admits. "I am new enough on the political scene that I serve as a black screen on which people of vastly different political stripes project their own views," he writes in his best-selling - and eminently readable - political memoir The Audacity of Hope. A short Senate career is also his strength.

John Kerry's 20 years in the Senate bequeathed a paper trail of votes and a convoluted legislative style that probably cost him victory against George Bush in 2004.

Mr Obama has no such "form." There is no risk of him making statements like "I actually voted for the $87bn before I voted against it," that fatally nailed the Massachusetts senator and had him branded as as a "flip-flopper."

As for complaints that Mr Obama lacks the experience to lead America in a desperately complicated world, his response is simple and devastating. The Bush administration, with the likes of Powell, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld had perhaps the most experienced national security team in US history, he says - and look what a mess they made of things in Iraq, and what they've done for America's good name in the world. Enough said.

Instead, Mr Obama projects himself as fresh and new, a spokesman for a post-baby boom generation weary of the country's endless political wars, and of the hackneyed, over-hyped divisions between Red (Republican) and Blue (Democrat). In this vision of things, the cautious and calculating Mrs Clinton is yesterday's woman, the candidate of the status quo.

At this point, the mantle of JFK fits easily on his shoulders. In reality, a president Barack Obama would be 47 when he took office, four years older than Kennedy was on Inauguration Day 1961.

But he projects something of Camelot's glamour and excitement, and shares Kennedy's self-deprecating charm, not to mention his stirring ability as a speaker, and has an ability to attract powerful supporters.

His emerging campaign team is very strong. His fundraising ability, even with the formidable Clinton machine ranged against him, is massive. If New York is lining up behind Mrs Clinton, Chicago is going with Mr Obama and - even in Clinton-besotted Hollywood - the big donors are giving the man from Illinois a very serious look.

In the invisible but crucial "money primary," he is at least holding his own.

But now the visible contest, too, enters a new phase. As Senator Biden noted, Mr Obama is "clean". But he is not perfect. On the sin scale's trivial end, he is desperately trying to kick smoking. More seriously, queries have been raised about a 2005 land deal with Antoin Rezko, a sleazy Chicago fundraiser and fixer, which the candidate has acknowledged as a "bone-headed" mistake. If there are other, more serious skeletons in his closet, the relentless scrutiny of a presidential race will surely expose them.

The real questions, however, lie elsewhere. This talented newcomer may drip charisma from his pores but does he have substance? Back in 1984, former vice-president Walter Mondale, the Democratic establishment's candidate for the White House that year, famously asked his upstart challenger Gary Hart - also long on theory but short on specifics - "Where's the beef?" In Obama's case, too, it is legitimate to wonder what, if anything, lies between the two alluring parts of the hamburger bun.

Second, is there steel to go with the charm? This election is the most open in decades, the first since 1928 in which neither a sitting president or vice-president is running. It will be a ferocious battle. Some Republicans (or was it a rival Democratic camp?) have been falsely putting it about that the Islamic school he attended in Jakarta was a hothouse of Islamic extremism. In case you missed the point, the more childish conservative commentators roll their lips around his full name - Barack Hussein Obama, just one letter short of being an exact combination of America's two greatest recent enemies.

Finally, the third question, the most important of all: can he do it? The very title of his book sets the frame for his campaign.

There is audacity, to be sure. Little could be bolder and more presumptuous than for an untested 45-year- old - whatever the colour of his skin - to put himself forward as saviour of the world's most powerful country, trapped in an unwinnable war, its global reputation at a nadir, when even history seems to be turning against it. The next president will be inheriting a whirlwind.

But Mr Obama also epitomises hope. That commodity is fragile, and needs much nourishing. Who will be your greatest enemy, he has been asked. His answer is one word: "cynicism."

But for the moment Barack Obama, more than any other candidate ,offers hope. That will be his message in Springfield, Illinois, today, as the last piece in his campaign falls into place.

Let battle commence.

Click here for the full text of Senator Barack Obama's announcement for President.

Comments

[QueenBee]

It has been excruciating to watch the negative scrutiny of Obama by some African American hotshots. This is a sobering take from The Black Commentator:

The Blackness of Obama
By Kimberly Jade Norwood, JD
Guest Commentator

I recently read several articles, written by black authors, questioning Senator Obama’s blackness. The argument appears to be that since Senator Obama is not the descendant of West Africans forcibly brought to this country in chains, he doesn’t get to claim blackness. Ta-Nehisi Paul Coates wrote on February 1 that it doesn’t matter to these writers that Senator Obama actually has Black African blood running through his veins. It does not matter that he identifies with being Black. It doesn’t matter that he is married to a Black woman. It does not matter that he attends a Black church. It does not matter that he lives a culturally black experience. It does not matter that he can’t catch a cab in New York City to save his black ass. It does not matter that he is a proud and vocal champion for change in policies and practices that negatively impact Black America. None of that matters! Apparently the test for blackness now is being a descendant of West African slaves and only West African slaves.

I just want to point out two ironies:

Irony #1: Remember Tiger Woods? When he refused to label himself Black, many in Black America were visibly upset. "How dare he" was the cry heard in the Black community after community. His father is Black so that was enough to demand that he claim his blackness.

Now, we have Obama, who also has a Black father. Indeed, Obama’s father is really Black! You don’t get more authentic than Black African blood! He wants to claim his blackness but some of us are saying no!

We are upset with Tiger for not claiming his blackness, upset with Obama for claiming his. Huh?

Irony #2: Ok, now the test is whether one is a descendant of West African slaves. Excuse me? Are you sure you want that test? If that’s the test then others you have traditionally excluded, like Clarence Thomas, like Ward Connerly, like Condoleezza Rice get in.

Oh no, what we really mean is descendant of West African slaves and you think and live a certain way. Then, and only then, are you really Black.

This is so pathetic that is it laughable. And it is further proof that we don’t need anyone else tearing us down. We do a pretty good job ourselves.

I have a great idea. Black youth are drowning. Between the dangerous lifestyle practices, drop-out rates in high schools and painfully low grade proficiency levels Black youth are facing some very serious challenges that need massive and nationwide attention. Instead of pulling others down why don’t we pull these Black youth up?

Kimberly Jade Norwood, JD, is a Professor of Law & Associate Professor of African and African-American Studies at Washington University School of Law.

[QueenBee]

If one were to advice Obama, it would be to go pay his respects at the foot of some of the black pillars. Obama's ascendency gives voice to the latent frictions between the African American community and the relatively recent African immigrants. Some dialogue needs to occur. There is an underlying feeling that many native Africans' ancestors were complicit in the transatlantic slave trade.

It is not such an easy association, because the slave trade was controlled by powerful interests, a relatively small class of gangsters against whom ordinary folks had no defence, just like today. In addition, many modern day Africans are also descendants of victims, whose families were decimated. Later on, we were all subjected to colonialism, which was a system that enslaved the entire country rather than the individual.

African Americans should judge Obama by his agenda, and not by the colour of his skin. This is so backward, people should think. If memory serves me well, the majority of Black America embraced Clarence Thomas during his difficult hearings. I urge that they embrace his/our shared Africanness, but scrutinize his politics. That is the sane thing to do.

Obama Cannot Hear Us!
Represent Our Resistance
By Dr. L. Jean Daniels, PhD
BC Columnist

I can only imagine Senator Barack Obama’s handlers whispering in his ears, “Lincoln, Lincoln.” So the “rock star” of the contemporary political scene stood where the icon of presidential rock stars once stood—and Black America did not hear a damn thing.

I cannot imagine Obama arriving to this spot, in the heartland of America, by way of the African Diaspora and hearing the voice of Lincoln screaming, “Go back! Go Back to Africa!” His handlers would have blocked out all the historical resonance.

Obama choose to listen to these handlers and announced his candidacy for president at the Old State Capitol in Springfield, Illinois. One report described the TV crews, cables, and satellites lining the streets to the Old State Capitol. In the cold weather, people, too, came from across the country to catch a glimpse of the “young” guy who has no “baggage".

Interesting.

Do these people mean that Obama is young enough to be molded to be even more like them? Is the word “baggage” code meaning “guilt, culpability, and/or complicity” for American slavery and the exploitation of Black Americans? Does Obama really mean to them someone who is “clean” and “fresh” because he does not remind us of folks he almost looks like?

“Baggage” could also trigger an image of that other political icon who was once dubbed the first “Black” president—William Jefferson Clinton. There are the Lincoln-Obama comparisons. Where are the Clinton-Obama comparisons?

For some, Clinton’s audacity to blatantly expose the sexual drive of white men is unforgivable. How many presidents committed adultery at the White House? News really sells when there is a sex scandal. But Clinton violated the protocol of secrecy among the boys. Worse, it was the Bill Clinton who, as Sakura Kone, Media Coordinator for Common Ground reminds us, “added fifty-nine more charges for the death penalty.” It was on Clinton’s watch when the mandatory minimum drug sentencing provision was passed, and, as a result, the prisons are swelling with Black, low-level users or street dealers. It was Clinton, the first “Black” president, who, “when he took away welfare", said Kone, told Black Americans that he knew the welfare bill he signed had nothing to do with reforming welfare for the benefit of recipients. He knew it would actually impoverish 1 million children, “but if you re-elect me, I will fix it.” He did not, of course.

That Clinton did not really listen to us. He used us to get our votes. That Clinton, loved by Black Americans, defended by Black Americans while white America proceeded with impeachment hearings against Clinton, that Clinton smiled and winked at Black audiences while he ordered his handlers to uphold the status quo of white rule and dominance.

So now we have Barack Obama, a Black man, but not one who has experienced what it means to be a descendant of the enslaved and to have survived the dehumanizing efforts of white Americans, not one who seems to know this—our history and America’s history.

Obama did not announce his candidacy among Black Americans. He did not announce at the Hampton Convocation Center where 10,000 Blacks did meet to hold the annual State of the Black Union symposium. So he could not hear those voices like that of Rev. Al Sharpton, calling for his “agenda and policy” to be accountable to the “best interests” of Black Americans. We were waiting to hear him acknowledge that he notices how we are suffering from criminal foreign and domestic policies. But it seems Obama hears only the call of his handlers, “Lincoln.”

We have been through this before. People who seem to look like us and talk like us, but who do not have our best interest as part of their agenda because the agenda is a simple one, similar to Lincoln and Bill Clinton: maintain dominance of the business and corporate interests. And that translates: white interests!

There are 9 million uninsured children in America, said Marian Wright Edelman, President and Founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. Do you hear her, Obama? Katrina children are floundering in New Orleans, she said. Do you hear them?

There is no room for us in the American agenda of fortifying an empire. Black interests and social justice cannot be heard in that agenda.

In fact, if Obama made an about face and lent his ears to the voices of Black Americans, if he sincerely expressed disgust at the conditions Blacks face in New Orleans, at the targeting of poor Black youths for the war for oil in Iraq, at the abhorrent incarceration rates of Black men and women, and at the equally dismal education gap between white students and Black students—if Obama said enough is enough, we will effect fundamental change, really, wink, wink, he might find himself at least physically close to Lincoln, in the hear after. There is a history of that violence and hopefully his handlers will tell him that, too. But he will not have anyone to tell him that we have been there and done that—and we go on—anyway and stand on the shoulders of those who stayed strong and in the struggle.

But Obama will not take the risk. He is young and ambitious. I imagine the handlers are saying it is best to play it safe. And Obama will go on listening carefully to the handlers who know best, after all. They know all about power and climbing the political ladder to the top.

I just hope Black Americans know a thing or two now and carefully listen to each other. Unless we hear from Obama and hear that he will stand with us for our human rights, let’s not march behind him, for there is skin among us who ain’t kin.

Dr. Jean Daniels writes a column for The City Capital Hues in Madison Wisconsin and is a Lecturer at Madison Area Technical College, MATC.. Click here to contact Dr. Daniels.

[QueenBee]

Now, well articulated, important questions that Barak must answer, and why black America looks askance at his Lincoln reenactment.

Barak Obama: Trojan Horse of A Great White Hope

[QueenBee]

More good Obama stuff from Black America