1115.org

Although it’s true that his words and actions while in the U.S. Senate predisposed me against voting for him, I was always curious about how Barak Obama would handle the issue of race in a national campaign. Though Shirley Chisholm (1972), Jesse Jackson (1984/1988) and Al Sharpton (2004) were all major candidates for President before him, Obama must be considered the first African American candidate who isn’t running as “The Black Candidate.” This has been plain for some time, but recently it has come into starker relief with Obama’s comments about hip hop and last week’s interview on ABC’s This Week that features an interesting take on affirmative action:

Stephanopoulos: And you’re a constitutional law professor so let’s go back in the classroom…..I’m your student. I say Professor, you and your wife went to Harvard Law School. Got plenty of money, you’re running for president. Why should your daughters when they go to college get affirmative action?

Obama: Well, first of all, I think that my daughters should probably be treated by any admissions officer as folks who are pretty advantaged, and I think that there’s nothing wrong with us taking that into account as we consider admissions policies at universities. I think that we should take into account white kids who have been disadvantaged and have grown up in poverty and shown themselves to have what it takes to succeed. So I don’t think those concepts are mutually exclusive. I think what we can say is that in our society race and class still intersect, that there are a lot of African American kids who are still struggling, that even those who are in the middle class may be first generation as opposed to fifth or sixth generation college attendees, and that we all have an interest in bringing as many people together to help build this country.

I mention these two cases not to slam Obama. As far as hip hop lyrics go, I question his timing, coming as his comments did in the middle of the Don Imus dust-up where muddying the waters only served to provide cover for white people who lust for the days when they could get away with dropping the n-word with impunity. And on affirmative action, I’m not even sure that I disagree with him. But the point is, he’s certainly not running as “The Black Candidate,” and I’d bet he’d be the first one to say as much.

In light of this, I was fairly surprised to read this account of a recent Obama campaign stop:

A gray-haired man in the back row of the crowd of 1,200 nodded in assent as Obama discussed the 1968 Memphis garbage workers strike, the event that drew the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to that city, where he was assassinated.

The Memphis garbage collectors “eventually won the right to unionize, and they eventually won a contract,” Obama said.

As someone who has prospered in the space that King created for all Americans, especially black Americans, it’s not surprising that Obama speaks reverentially of the man. Indeed it would be shocking if he didn’t. But given Obama’s style, as described in last week’s New Yorker profile (”Obama’s drive to compromise goes beyond the call of political expediency—it’s instinctive, almost a tic”) I find it puzzling that he would mention the Memphis garbage workers strike in his stump speech. That strike was bloody, violent, and brimming with racial hatred. The crowd was hit with tear gas and riot clubs, many were arrested, the National Guard was called in and a curfew instated, and a 16-yr-old boy was shot to death. Obama is lucky that he isn’t now faced with the same decision that Dr. King was in 1968.

But there are more similarities between now and 1968 than are obvious. Dr. King’s description, just days before his murder, of the state of the nation in his “I’ve Been to the Mountaintop” speech echoes loudly:

And you know, if I were standing at the beginning of time, with the possibility of taking a kind of general and panoramic view of the whole of human history up to now, and the Almighty said to me, “Martin Luther King, which age would you like to live in?”
[…]
Strangely enough, I would turn to the Almighty, and say, “If you allow me to live just a few years in the second half of the 20th century, I will be happy.”

Now that’s a strange statement to make, because the world is all messed up. The nation is sick. Trouble is in the land; confusion all around. That’s a strange statement. But I know, somehow, that only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. And I see God working in this period of the twentieth century in a way that men, in some strange way, are responding.

Something is happening in our world. The masses of people are rising up. And wherever they are assembled today, whether they are in Johannesburg, South Africa; Nairobi, Kenya; Accra, Ghana; New York City; Atlanta, Georgia; Jackson, Mississippi; or Memphis, Tennessee — the cry is always the same: “We want to be free.”

And another reason that I’m happy to live in this period is that we have been forced to a point where we are going to have to grapple with the problems that men have been trying to grapple with through history, but the demands didn’t force them to do it. Survival demands that we grapple with them. Men, for years now, have been talking about war and peace. But now, no longer can they just talk about it. It is no longer a choice between violence and nonviolence in this world; it’s nonviolence or nonexistence. That is where we are today.

And also in the human rights revolution, if something isn’t done, and done in a hurry, to bring the colored peoples of the world out of their long years of poverty, their long years of hurt and neglect, the whole world is doomed. Now, I’m just happy that God has allowed me to live in this period to see what is unfolding. And I’m happy that He’s allowed me to be in Memphis.

It’s certainly an imperfect analogy, but the problems that blacks faced during the civil rights era are comparable to the problems we all face now. The loss of freedoms under the current administration, the divide between haves and have-nots, Vietnam vs. Iraq, etc. all call for a strong leader to help us out of the dark.

Can anyone imagine Dr. King trying to compromise with segregationists? “You can go on allowing whites-only drinking fountains as long as there are an equal number of coloreds-only fountains.” “Instead of lynching every black man you come across after dark, can we cut that back to three out of every four?” “We understand that you don’t want us to sit in the front of the bus, but how about anything after the first five rows?” Maybe not.

Martin Luther King, Jr. - Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution (3/31/68):

One day a newsman came to me and said, “Dr. King, don’t you think you’re going to have to stop, now, opposing the war and move more in line with the administration’s policy? As I understand it, it has hurt the budget of your organization, and people who once respected you have lost respect for you. Don’t you feel that you’ve really got to change your position?” I looked at him and I had to say, “Sir, I’m sorry you don’t know me. I’m not a consensus leader. I do not determine what is right and wrong by looking at the budget of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. I’ve not taken a sort of Gallup Poll of the majority opinion.” Ultimately a genuine leader is not a searcher for consensus, but a molder of consensus.

On some positions, cowardice asks the question, is it expedient? And then expedience comes along and asks the question, is it politic? Vanity asks the question, is it popular? Conscience asks the question, is it right?

The main theme of Obama’s campaign is of course, compromise. And that sounds great, and has obviously sent legions of impressionable young voters swooning, but none, not even Obama himself has been able to explain why, in practical terms this is desirable, or even provide a substantive example where compromise would yield a more desirable outcome than the ideas the Democratic party already espouses. I’ve been over this here many times, and my questions have always been “What is there to compromise on?” and “Who is there to compromise with?” These aren’t rhetorical questions, and despite an audience numbered in the mid-four digits, no one has made much of an effort to answer either one. While I’d be more than happy to hear thoughts on this from Obama supporters, who probably constitute more than 1,000 of the people reading this, I’m going to assume for a moment that I’ll be waiting in vain because deep down, even the most fervent Obamaniacs know that there’s no compromise with Mitch McConnell and Trent Lott in the Senate, John Boehner and Roy Blunt in the House, and large swaths of the constituents they and their ilk represent.

The ultimate irony is that Lott, the second ranking Republican in the Senate, not only spoke wistfully of an alternate reality where Segregationist-in-Chief Strom Thurmond was elected President, but also led the fight against integration at his University of Mississippi fraternity. Lott will still be in the Senate leadership in 2009, and if Obama continues running as something of a man without a party and manages to take the White House, Obama will find himself without majorities in either house, forced to compromise with Lott from a position of weakness. Is that part of the plan?

The largest percentage any Presidential candidate has won with in recent history is Ronald Reagan’s 58.77 in 1984. It’s hard to imagine an election today varying much from the 50/50 and 51/48 of the last two, but even 59% isn’t exactly kumbaya time. Sure, in a vacuum, having a few percent more voters behind a new President would be nice. However in the insane version of the real world in which we find ourselves, I have no idea what good it’s supposed to do, but I do know that the compromises it would take to get there would cause unimaginable problems. The coalition of groups that make up the left half of the American political spectrum is basically held together with duct tape, used chewing gum, and bits of string picked up off the floors of textile factories. How long would that hold together in the face of compromises on, say, abortion, taxes, social security, the Iraq War, health care, or 50 other issues? Are the results of these compromises a fair bargain to get eight more percentage points of support? And how much support is lost from the base in the process?

This is a way of saying that our side has already compromised. Every change to abortion laws in most of our lifetimes has been in favor of the other side, the same with taxes despite overwhelming evidence (and the admissions of respected conservative economists) that supply-side theory is bunk. Health care has gone from a right that came with citizenship to a free-market race to the bottom at the expense of the poorest and to the enrichment of the very top of the economic pyramid. What exactly is our side supposed to give up now?

This isn’t the time for consensus or compromise. It’s a time for capitalizing on the mess that the President and his party have made, and fixing what’s been broken by years of Republican ideas. It’s not time to give them a seat at the table when everything they’ve touched has turned into a disaster. I know why Obama isn’t saying this. He’s carved out a nice little centrist spot in the middle of the road like his choice of Senate mentor Joe Lieberman. It’s the fact that Obama’s supporters can’t see what’s going on, and when it’s explained to them, can’t offer up any defense but “I trust him,” that is horrifying. As Sarabeth pointed out to me yesterday, blind loyalty like this is exactly why we find ourselves in the current mess. We’ve gone from voting for a man because he’s the kind of guy people wanted to “have a beer with,” to supporting a candidate based on nothing more than the warm fuzzy feeling born out of a decision to market “compromise” and “consensus” to voters weary from the Bush years. But it’s a false cure. You don’t cool down boiling water with lukewarm water, you do it with cold water. The more the better.