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

Washington Monthly, Nov, 2004 by Benjamin Wallace-Wells

A decade and a half ago, African-American politicians began to break out of this civil rights era box. On the Republican side were a handful of black conservatives, including former Rep. J.C. Watts (R-Okla.) and perennial candidate Alan Keyes, who emerged as the antithesis of the Rangels and the Waterses. They have argued that traditional big government liberalism has hurt blacks more than it has helped them--a strategy that hasn't earned them many black votes, but won these African-American politicians a following among white conservatives partial to the notion that a low-tax, small government philosophy could solve problems of poverty and race, too. This faith energized conservatives, but was as limiting as the civil-rights agenda, keeping politicians like Watts from drawing votes from any but committed Republicans.

Around the same time, a new political character emerged, one that could, and did, win statewide office. Its most recognizable incarnations were one term Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.), former New York State comptroller H. Carl McCall, and the current lieutenant governor of Maryland, Michael Steele. They came through integrated institutions: Braun, a favorite of the multi-ethnic Chicago machine, had been Cook County Recorder of Deeds; Steele, a Republican who in recent weeks has become the GOP's cable show surrogate of choice, was a lawyer and entrepreneur; and McCall had been a banker and corporate boardroom fixture whose voice always had a tinge of Dartmouth in it. They were educated, successful, and were not seen by whites as culturally alien. But they also were wholly conventional partisans, captains of ideologically unrocked boats; they won office by picking up loyal party voters they crossed racial lines but not political ones, and so have generated no great national excitement. Even when, in 1992, she was elected to become the first black senator since Reconstruction, few thought Braun might someday be president.

But there was also Doug Wilder, who became governor of Virginia in 1989 by voicing a very different politics. The symbolic import of Wilder's win seemed profound: A black man was now running the home state of the Confederacy and Robert E. Lee, from a city whose prettiest avenue is dotted by monuments to the Confederate dead. But more important was Wilder's political idiosyncraticity: He favored both balanced budgets and tougher measures on crime. As the national Democratic Party struggled to move itself to the center, Wilder came to seem a perfect symbol of what the party could become. National press outlets from U.S. News & World Report to CBS News ran profiles wondering whether Wilder might be the first black president, and his supporters, buoyed by donations from Democratic fundraisers around the country, began making plans for a run at the White House. But Wilder's formal presidential candidacy would turn out to be a failure. It lasted nine months, and Wilder won his biggest headlines for his weird struggle with Jesse Jackson, whom Wilder alternately embraced and accused of undermining black support for his candidacy. Wilder's policies were a muddle, too; it was hard to could figure out whether he stood with the liberals or the centrists.