The great black hope: what's riding on Barack Obama?

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2004 by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

Looking at Obama, Americans saw a political character that they'd never quite encountered before. He was black, but not quite. He spoke white, with the hand-gestures of a management consultant, but also with the oratorical flourishes of a black preacher. Joining him on stage were his wife, a black lawyer from Chicago's South Side, and what must have been the two most attractive political kids this side of John Edwards. They looked like a Gap ad.

Throughout his speech, Obama made himself as hard to peg politically as he had been racially, casting himself as a politician who didn't proffer typically lib eral solutions to cultural problems: "Parents have to teach, that children can't achieve unless we raise their expectations and turn off the television sets and eradicate the slander that says a black youth with a book is acting white." Obama argued that his party could see beyond big government. "The people I meet in small towns and big cities and diners and office parks, they don't expect government to solve all of their problems. They know they have to work hard to get ahead," he said. "Go to the collar counties around Chicago, and people will tell you they don't want their tax money wasted by a welfare agency or the Pentagon." The import was hard to miss: Obama was casting himself as an unorthodox intellectual independent.

He closed his address with one of the successful pieces of political oratory in years; its target was the idea of labels altogether. "There's not a liberal America and a conservative America ... a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there's the United States of America," Obama said, booming now. "The pundits like to slice and dice our country into red states and blue states ... But I've got news for them, too. We worship an awesome God in the blue states, and we don't like federal agents poking around our libraries in the red states." This was thrilling for viewers, an attack that didn't seem mean or cynical, because it was leveled not against any individual but against a glib, divisive intellectual construct that many people were growing sick of On Larry King's post-game wrap, even crotchety Bob Dole smiled his lopsided smile. "I gave him an A," Dole said, looking positively giddy. Obama had managed to exceed even the supremely high expectations for his speech with the most deft use of his race that any politician has managed in a long time. Masterfully, Obama had used race to unite.

Populists and virgins

Obama's rhetoric that night couldn't have been more different than that of the veteran black politicians who have come before him. Unlike the Ivy League-educated Obama, most of that older generation of black politicians came to elected office in the wake of the civil rights movement in the only way that was open to them, as mayors or congressmen representing constituencies that are mostly black. Their policies reflected that--and still do. These politicians tend to favor government spending for jobs and social programs in the cities, and have a generally liberal disposition. In style they run the gamut from the strident Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Calif) to the affable Rep. Charles Rangel (D-N.Y.). But the leaders of this generation are, like former Reps. Tip O'Neill (D-Mass.) or Dan Rostenkowski (D-Ill.), all essentially ethnic politicians, devoted to the narrow needs of their constituencies, and so their ability to appeal broadly to white voters has been limited.