Beneath the hope: Obama and the politics of grievance

National Review, June 2, 2008 by Victor Davis Hanson

THE more Barack Obama racks up majorities in states with large university and black populations--what Clinton strategist Paul Begala called the "eggheads and African-Americans"--the more he seems to fare poorly in the electoral-vote-rich states that will be in play in November, most of which have large white working-class constituencies. Indeed, he may be the first Democratic nominee in memory to lose the primary elections in California, Indiana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

Barack Obama talks passionately about hope, change--and racial transcendence. But what advanced him this far was not merely his eloquence, but also his ability simultaneously to play on, and disguise, the politics of racial grievance. And yet he seems confused and angry when reminded that such a doctrine won't quite deliver him the presidency. When the anti-American remarks of Rev. Jeremiah Wright were widely aired, Obama seemed at first taken aback. Why would anyone be outraged? After all, there was nothing secret about Wright. Obama had even quoted, in his memoir, Wright's accusations that white America was responsible for everything from world hunger to genocide against the Japanese, and had bragged in speeches about his intimacy with Wright.

So Obama was naturally confused by the outcry. At first he thought he could shrug his way out of it with the quip that the Trinity congregation was not "particularly controversial"; Wright himself, in Obama's words, was "brilliant" and a "respected Biblical scholar." Yet within days Obama resorted to a different defense: Wright was not much more out of the mainstream than the proverbial outspoken and often embarrassing "old uncle." After that, Obama ended up offering several additional explanations, among them an inspirational speech on race--which unexpectedly turned out to be a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card for Wright, who later at the National Press Club confirmed that his earlier inane rants about whites, the AIDS virus, and American culpability for 9/11 in fact were not taken out of context but deeply embedded in his worldview.

For all Obama's eloquence, his clean-up campaign contextualized the serial Wright venom within the familiar saga of grievance and racial victimization: Whites do not understand the theatrical protocols of Wright's black church. The prior good works of Wright in community outreach and anti-apartheid activism outweigh his occasional unfortunate speech. Wright's slurs were taken out of context. Wright had been turned into convenient tool for right-wing politicos. In short, Obama was reduced to pleading on March 18, "I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can my white grandmother--a woman who helped raise me."

But, of course, that blanket amnesty for Wright became inoperative after the enterprising Wright's National Press Club rant of April 28, whose insulting tone elicited outrage among the liberal Washington press corps, and thus required yet another Obama protestation: "It is antithetical to our campaign. It is antithetical to what I'm about. It is not what I think America stands for. Reverend Wright does not speak for me. He does not speak for our campaign. I cannot prevent him from making these outrageous remarks. ... When I say that I find these statements appalling, mean it ... makes me angry but also saddens me."

Wright, of course, said nothing on April 28 that he had not said previously. To his credit, Wright has been consistent in his views, odious though they may be. It is Obama who on five or six occasions has changed his story about Wright--always under pressure, and always in reaction to the public's, rather than his own, outrage at Wright.

IT'S NOT JUST WRIGHT

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama, the candidate's wife, was reported airing her own grievances about a "just downright mean" America. Her serial complaints culminated in the now infamous "For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country." That revelation, voiced on two separate occasions, raised a storm of protest, since it seemed to confirm that Wright's anti-American message had been absorbed into the Obama worldview after the couple's 20 years of attendance at his church.

The most controversial of the growing list of Obama grievances and clumsy retractions was Barack's dismissal of Pennsylvania's small-town, middle-America culture: "And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Like Reverend Wright's mendacious views on 9/11 and AIDS, almost everything in that sentence was either untrue or disingenuous. Pennsylvanians valued gun ownership and religion for centuries before the supposed current economic downturn--and while times are perceived as rough, the unemployment rate in Pennsylvania is still about 5 percent. Obama himself has whipped up "anti-trade sentiment" by trashing NAFTAand similar proposed trade accords. That he gave this speech in liberal, upscale San Francisco only added to the aura of condescension--especially the standard liberal trope of false consciousness: The ignorant working classes turn toward extraneous palliatives rather than follow the advice of Harvard intellectuals to agitate for economic redistribution that would better solve their mostly material problems. Had Hillary Clinton used the same sort of "they" language--say in front of a conservative, midwestern white audience--to explain why innercity, gun-toting, church-attending blacks were turning out en masse for Obama, her campaign would have been rightly finished then and there.