If I Vote for Obama, It’ll Be Because,…
January 8, 2008
(Written the morning after the New Hampshire primary, in which Obama finished second to Hillary Clinton)
By Jim Sleeper
The preacherly cadences in Barack Obama’s “Yes We Can” speech last night in Nashua deepened his two greatest symbolic promises: Domestically, he makes being an American beautiful again because, in him, it makes achievable what is still incredible to many — a 400-year-old hope that we can untangle the race knot we’ve tied ourselves in since 1607. “It’s not something he’s doing,” Dartmouth Professor Joseph Bafumi told the New York Times; “it’s something he’s being.”
Internationally, therefore, Obama reminds multitudes of what has fascinated them about America – not just its wealth and power, which are trashy and brutal even when irresistible, but a folksy universalism that disposes Americans to say “Hi” to anyone rather than “Heil” to a leader, to give the other person a fair shot, and, out of that kind of strength, to take a shot at the moon.
Our wealth and power often subvert what’s best in us. But because Obama knows that human failings make this more complicated than either conservative moralism or leftist anti-capitalism alone can explain, his promise runs deeper than the poetry of campaigning. But can that promise really become the prose of governing? Can we take his symbolism for substance?
Obama says “Yes we can!” arguing that the movement his campaign is building will sustain him as president against countervailing powers. But a campaign isn’t a movement, and experiences of the 1960s taught some of us that even a swelling movement is no substitute for sustainable, organized power in a political party or coalition of parties, and in unions and churches that can mobilize disciplined multitudes in support of a program.
Many have been elected who could not govern. At David Dinkins’ inauguration as New York City’s first black mayor in 1990, the audience teared up as the Rev. Gardner Taylor of Brooklyn’s Concord Baptist Church intoned, “God of our weary years, God of our silent tears.“ But those high sentiments foretold little about what they would accomplish, not mainly because racists crawled out of sewers to help elect Rudy Giuliani. That wasn’t the main reason why Giuliani defeated Dinkins in 1993.
Hillary Clinton, Obama’s chief opponent now for the Democratic nomination, has endured and overcome a great deal, but she knows what governing from a executive position actually entails, and it’s unfair to say, as some do, that she knows too much about it because of all the baggage she carries from her husband’s presidency.
Obama doesn’t yet know enough about governing to discredit Bill Clinton’s argument that electing Obama would be a roll of the dice. Voting for JFK was a roll of the dice, too, but in consequence we got the Bay of Pigs and the Vietnam disaster, and Kennedy and his brother Bobby had to learn civil rights on the job, as neither Barack nor Hillary will have to do. Still, Barack’s learning curve is at least as steep as he is smart.
His really impressive personal struggle and the profound intuitions it has given him about public rights and wrongs are refreshing in a politician, much more so than anything was in candidate Jack Kennedy. And Obama’s American self-becoming has made him the catalyst of a campaign that, while it is not yet a movement and may never be a governing coalition, has nevertheless earned him a strong claim to Americans’ critical support.
His campaign confirms many Americans’ yearning to believe again that, unlike that of almost any other nation in history, the national identity of the United States was founded not on myths of primordial kinship, of “blood and soil,” but on a more universal experiment that enjoins all Americans, “by their conduct and example, to decide the important question, whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government through reflection and choice, or whether they are forever destined to depend for their political constitutions on accident and force,” as Alexander Hamilton put it.
Claiming one’s identity as an American, therefore, means standing up personally as well as politically for this daunting civic-republican challenge, against exclusionary racial, religious, and other strains that have persisted alongside and within our republican framework.
That is what Rosa Parks did, and it is what Obama is doing — first by being what he has made of himself as a man, and second by running for president. And I must say, as one who has argued for years that Americans must let race go as an organizing principle of even progressive politics — because too much of even what passes for anti-racism only ends up recapitulating racism itself — I can’t help feeling that Barack is everything I’ve hoped an American could be.
But Hillary’s claim to be doing some of this American heavy lifting is deep and credible, too. If I vote for Obama, it won’t be because I discount Hillary Clinton’s symbolic and substantive leadership but because my yearning to get beyond race will be strong enough to impel me to try this roll of the dice.
(One of the many posted comments on this column and my response:)
On January 9, 2008 – 11:11am ______ said:
Just a guess (Jim Sleeper will correct me if I’m way off), but the challenge he’s talking about is less Obama’s being black than the reaction and response from “the rest of us” to the participation and leadership that black folk can bring to our civic culture.
On January 9, 2008 – 12:08pm Jim Sleeper said:
The challenge we need to face down is the temptation to essentialize race – so that people continue to think that having a skin color means having a “culture” because that’s what white supremacists and oppressed blacks made of racism, for obvious reasons, across 400 years. The challenge is not only racism itself, in other words, but a lot of what passes for anti-racism – the presentation racial identity as somehow redemptive of personal and public justice.
This is a difficult argument to make well, because blacks, trapped in the race-box whites have kept them in, generally have had no option but to embellish and deepen a protective black racial identity, in ways that are sometimes perverse.
But there is another side of the story. Precisely because most African-Americans were abducted and plunged wholesale into the American experience at no initiative of their own and with scant material or cultural resources to fall back on, they have had the greatest possible stakes in the American republic’s living up to its stated creed. Blacks have been among the most eloquent champions of the republic’s promises but also among the most nihilist of its assailants, for obvious reasons.
I argue in “The Closest of Strangers: Liberalism and the Politics of Race in New York (Norton, 1990)and in “Liberal Racism” (Rowman & Littlefield,2002)that the long struggle of countless blacks to join and champion the republic is “the most powerful epic of unrequited love in the history of the world.” Moreover, even if every broken heart could be mended and every theft of property and opportunity redressed, still there would be a black cultural community based on the memories and virtues of survival in adversity.
But that’s not the same thing as saying that having a color should automatically mean having a culture. That’s reductionist and, at a certain point, it depletes individual dignity more than it enhances it. We all — blacks, whites, including white racists and white liberals who dote on race — have to get over the hump of denying that race should and will recede in importance to the point that it carries no more power in determining your prospects than, say, a difference in eye color among whites.
But to get over that hump of denial about race, we will need transitional figures like Obama, who both embodies and has worked his way through what I am talking about. In Bakke, Justice Harry Blackmun wrote that before we can hope to get beyond race, we must first take more account of it, not less. The question is what we mean by “first” — how long and in what ways. Obama strikes that balance perfectly, at least as a campaigner. He is faithful to the collective cultural memory without making it determinative of his and others’ prospects.
I should probably add that I wrote the two books just mentioned after ten years’ immersion in inner-city black life and politics, in Brooklyn. I sketch this in the introduction to The Closest of Strangers. That book and Liberal Racism are available from Amazon, etc, and in libraries.