Obama as "White Hope"?
In one respect, Greenberg’s point is self-evident. Successful African-American candidates running in majority-white constituencies rarely have campaigned as radical tribunals of the underclass. Alan Wheat (Missouri) and the late Julia Carson (Indiana) captured majority-white House districts by appealing to both black and white voters. When running for the Senate in 2004, Obama appealed to suburban and downstate whites, with a turning point in the campaign coming when was endorsed by the (white) daughter of former senator Paul Simon. Harold Ford—whose campaign strategy very much resembled Obama’s—narrowly lost a 2006 Senate race in Tennessee, but in the process fared better than the white Democrats who sought election from the GOP-leaning state in 1994, 1996, 2000, and 2002.
It might be a legacy of racism that most constituencies have proven reluctant to vote for African-American candidates who—to borrow Greenberg’s phrase—“rub white America’s face in its corrupt history of slavery and segregation.” (Former California congressman Ron Dellums might be the exception that proves the rule in this regard.) That said, minority candidates of any type rarely “rub” their identities in the faces of the majority. We’ve seen that with Mitt Romney’s handling of his Mormonism in the GOP race; or in the political career of former Colorado congressman and senator Ben Nighthorse Campbell; or in the statewide campaigns of Senators Bob Menendez and Mel Martinez; or in the successful gubernatorial bid of Massachusetts governor Deval Patrick.
There is, however, scant evidence that black candidates who have appealed to whites have suffered with black voters. The inner-city votes in Kansas City, Indianapolis, and Memphis were key to the political careers of Wheat, Carson, and Ford. In the Illinois 2004 Democratic primary, Obama swept Chicago’s black wards.
Greenberg, however, suggested that Obama’s attempts to appeal to all constituencies has hurt him with black voters in this year’s presidential bid: “Some pundits scratched their heads when Obama was trailing Clinton among black voters. (He’s now pulled even or ahead.) But it made perfect sense. Clinton had a track record of working for African Americans’ interests. Obama was not just skirting controversies such as the ‘Jena Six’—the black Louisiana teenagers punished disproportionately last year for their role in a racial fracas—but was aiming his appeals squarely at the white Iowans who he knew could make him the front-runner.”
In fact, it appears as if the chief reason for Obama trailing among black voters came not from his unwillingness to focus on issues such as Jena--which, as more information about both the defendants and the unprovoked nature of the attack for which one of the defendants pled guilty has come to light, appears to have been a very wise decision on his part.
Instead, Obama's early training of Clinton among African-Americans seems to have come from the belief of black voters that an African-American couldn’t win--which, in light of the apparent Bradley effect from last week’s New Hampshire primary, isn’t hard to understand.
After Obama’s win in Iowa, which suggested he could be electable, his support among black voters surged—not only in South Carolina, but even in Clinton’s home state, where a Daily Newspoll out today showed Obama leading among New York black voters. In this respect, the timing of Greenberg’s column turned out to be unfortunate.
Greenberg also expressed doubts about Obama’s credentials: “Not,” he writes, “since 1896—when another rousing speechmaker, William Jennings Bryan, sought the White House—has the zeal for a candidate corresponded so little to a record of hard accomplishment.”
Yet the same words could also apply to Hillary Clinton, whose “landmark” New Hampshire victory Greenberg celebrated to open his op-ed. It’s true that she has served seven years in the Senate to Obama’s three (although Obama also served eight years in the Illinois Senate). But Clinton’s “record of hard accomplishment” pales in comparison to that of—for instance—vanquished rivals Chris Dodd, Joe Biden, or Bill Richardson; or her husband when he ran for President in 1992.
In Iowa—successfully—and in New Hampshire less so, Obama brought together the reform wing of the Democratic Party (the kind of voters who backed Gary Hart in 1984 or Bill Bradley in 2000) with strong support from young voters and from African-Americans. How does Greenberg explain such support?
“Obamamania—the phenomenon, not the man—leads us to believe that if only we vote for an African American, an avatar of ‘change’ and healing, we can slough off the burdens of our past—the burdens of finding answers to problems such as the rising number of out-of-wedlock births, the obscene size of the black male population behind bars, the rotten state of city schools, the simmering white resentment about affirmative action, the black-white gap in life expectancy and the cascade of government failures that turned Hurricane Katrina from a breakdown of emergency relief into a disgraceful racial scandal.”
Perhaps reform and under-30 Democrats are backing Obama not because they’ve tired of the excessive partisanship of the last 16 years, including the Clintons’ approach to politics, but because they want to “slough off the burdens of our past.” But this seems a remarkable charge to level against a significant component of the Democratic Party.