teflobama, a vacuous opportunist sez adloph reed
By shag carpet bomb • May 5th, 2008 • Category: Election 2008, Obama, PoliticsObama No
By Adolph Reed Jr., May 2008 Issue
Progressive May 2008
I’ve never been an Obama supporter. I’ve known him since the very beginning of his political career, which was his campaign for the seat in my state senate district in Chicago. He struck me then as a vacuous opportunist, a good performer with an ear for how to make white liberals like him. I argued at the time that his fundamental political center of gravity, beneath an empty rhetoric of hope and change and new directions, is neoliberal.
His political repertoire has always included the repugnant stratagem of using connection with black audiences in exactly the same way Bill Clinton did—i.e., getting props both for emoting with the black crowd and talking through them to affirm a victim-blaming “tough love” message that focuses on alleged behavioral pathologies in poor black communities. Because he’s able to claim racial insider standing, he actually goes beyond Clinton and rehearses the scurrilous and ridiculous sort of narrative Bill Cosby has made infamous.
It may be instructive to look at the outfit where he did his “community organizing,” the invocation of which makes so many lefties go weak in the knees. My understanding of the group, Developing Communities Project, at the time was that it was simply a church- based social service agency. What he pushed as his main political credential then, to an audience generally familiar with that organization, was his role in a youth-oriented voter registration drive.
The Obama campaign has even put out a misleading bio of Michelle Obama, representing her as having grown up in poverty on the South Side, when, in fact, her parents were city workers, and her father was a Daley machine precinct captain. This fabrication, along with those embroideries of the candidate’s own biography, may be standard fare, the typical log cabin narrative. However, in Obama’s case, the license taken not only underscores Obama’s more complex relationship to insider politics in Daley’s Chicago; it also underscores how much this campaign depends on selling an image rather than substance.
There is also something disturbingly ritualistic and superficial in the Obama camp’s young minions’ enthusiasm. Paul Krugman noted months ago that the Obamistas display a cultish quality in the sense that they treat others’ criticism or failure to support their icon as a character flaw or sin. The campaign even has a stock conversion narrative, which has been recycled in print by such normally clear- headed columnists as Barbara Ehrenreich and Katha Pollitt: the middle- aged white woman’s report of not having paid much attention to Obama early on, but having been won over by the enthusiasm and energy of their adolescent or twenty-something daughters. (A colleague recently reported having heard this narrative from a friend, citing the latter’s conversion at the hands of her eighteen year old. I observed that three short years ago the daughter was likely acting the same way about Britney Spears.)
Princeton Professor Sean Wilentz, a Clinton supporter, noted that the Obama campaign advisers have tried to have it both ways on the race question. On the one hand, they present their candidate as a figure who transcends racial divisions and “brings us together”; on the other hand, they exhort us that we should support his candidacy because of the opportunity to “make history” (presumably by nominating and maybe electing a black candidate). Increasingly, Obama supporters have been disposed to cry foul and charge racism at nearly any criticism of him, in steadily more extravagant rhetoric.
The campaign’s accusation that the Clinton team made Obama look darker in a photo or video clip than he actually is — and what exactly are we to make of that as an accusation? — and the hysterically indignant reaction to Geraldine Ferraro’s statement that much of Obama’s success stems from the fact that “the country is caught up in the concept” of a black candidacy are no different from the campaign’s touting its “historic” character. Obama supporters fulsomely attacked even Clinton’s attempts to portray him as inexperienced, which is standard fare in political campaigns. They also charged that she was playing to racism. See most recently Harvard sociologist Lawrence Bobo’s characterization that she was “disrespecting” black people, a leftover canard from Jesse Jackson’s campaigns (which, lest amnesia overtake us, were also extolled as historic firsts).
The Jackson comparison points to one of Obama’s key contradictions: Like Jackson, he wants to appeal to blacks with the “it’s our time now” line, and to white liberals with that, as well as with the “I’m black in a different way from Jesse” qualifier and the religious conversion rhetoric. A friend said that Obama’s campaign, in stressing his appeal to rapturous children and liberal, glamorous yuppies, offers vicarious identification with these groups, as well as the chance to become sort of black in that ultra-safe and familiar theme park way.
I often tell my students that, even though Paul Wellstone was my good friend from college to his death and an individual for whom I always had great respect, no politician in this system is likely to be a person you’d want for your sister-in-law or brother-in-law. And, as many Progressive readers may know, I’m hardly a Clinton fan. I’m on record in last November’s issue as saying that I’d rather sit out the election entirely than vote for either her or Obama. At this point, though, I’ve decided that she’s the lesser evil in the Democratic race, for the following reasons: 1) Obama’s empty claims to being a candidate of progressive change and to embodying a “movement” that exists only as a brand will dissolve into disillusionment in either a failed campaign against McCain or an Obama Presidency that continues the politics he’s practiced his entire career; 2) his horribly opportunistic approach to the issues bearing on inequality—in which he tosses behaviorist rhetoric to the right and little more than calls to celebrate his success to blacks—stands to pollute debate about racial injustice whether he wins or loses the Presidency; 3) he can’t beat McCain in November.
Frankly, I suspect that Clinton can’t beat him either, but there’s no way that Obama will carry most of the states in November that he’s won in the primaries and caucuses. And, while it makes some liberals feel good to think that a majority of the American electorate could vote for a black Presidential candidate, we should keep in mind that the Republicans haven’t let one dog out of the kennel against him yet. The Jeremiah Wright contretemps is only the first bark.
Obama’s style of being all things to all people threatens to melt under the inescapable spotlight of a national campaign against a Republican. It’s like what brings on the downfall of really successful con artists: They get themselves onto a stage that’s so big that they can’t hide their contradictions anymore, and everyone finds out about the different stories they’ve told different people. And Obama’s belonging to Wright’s church in the first place was quite likely part of establishing a South Side bourgeois nationalist street cred because his political base was with Hyde Park/University of Chicago liberals and the foundation world.
For now, the Jeremiah Wright connection probably won’t hurt him too much, partly because the Republicans at this point mainly may want to keep him and Clinton bleeding each other as long as possible. And his Philadelphia compromise speech — a string of well-crafted and coordinated platitudes and hollow images worthy of an SUV commercial, grounded with the reassuring “acknowledgment” of blacks’ behavioral inadequacies — has gained him breathing room by holding out a vague promise of racial “reconciliation” that has appealed to centrist liberals ever since Booker T. Washington’s comparably eloquent 1895 accommodation to Southern white supremacy. Obama gets credit for “opening a conversation” on race, for “taking the matter on squarely.” But he doesn’t really speak to what we ought to be doing to address the injustices, past and present, that he mentions. Despite all the babble about Obama’s transcendence, Obama persists in portraying black Americans as a stereotypical monolith: blacks feel x; whites feel y. And the trope of black “anger” is a tired chestnut that neither explains nor characterizes political grievances or aspirations. (By the way, Obama’s casting Wright’s alleged “anger” as generational is entirely consistent with his earlier praise of Ronald Reagan for sensing Americans’ desire to undo the “excesses” of the 1960s and 1970s.)
Because he’s tried carefully to say enough of whatever the audiences he’s been speaking to at the time want to hear while leaving himself enough space later on to deny his intentions to leave that impression, his record represents precisely the “character” weakness the Republicans have exploited in every Democratic candidate since Dukakis: Another Dem trying to put things over on the American people.
Obama’s campaign has been very clever in carving out a strategy to amass Democratic delegate votes, but its momentum is in some ways a Potemkin construction — built largely on victories in states that no Democrat will win in November — that will fall apart under Republican pressure.
And then where will we be?
Correction: Adolph Reed Jr. apologizes to Katha Pollitt for stating that her daughter influenced her to support Obama. Her daughter did no such thing.
Adolph Reed Jr. is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.
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OK, so let me get Adolph Reed straight: Obama is a phony conservative Democrat who’s only winning primary states that will never go Democratic in the general election, and he’s really a poser who plays progressive to mask his fundamentally center-right political instincts.
And Hillary is….better?!?!?!
And Obama will be crushed under the Republican blitzkrieg….like Hillary won’t???
Not that I’m voting for Obama in any way, but for a so-called Black progressive columnist to call him out on his Reagan pandering and give Hilllary and Bubba a free pass over their much more overt racist cue-playing (not to mention their deliberate right-wing “populist” pandering and war boosting) is nothing short of unbelievable.
Of course, whomever ends up the Dem nominee might still get by just on the sorry economy, the war, and the collapse of Bush anyway.
But in my view, they’re both equal oppurtunists….but still better than a racist fool like McCain.
Though..still not even close to McKinney, who, for the time being, remains my candidate.
Anthony
Oh man, i love that ending “And then where will we be?” I hate that. Who is the WE Reed is implicitly addressing? What a hypocrite. This is what politicians do when they play politics: they use the WE.
So, what’s the point of illustrating Obama’s weaknesses, then claiming you don’t like Clinton either, then claiming it doesn’t matter who is the next president anyway because everything is so fucked up, and then claiming McCain is a racist old cooter? Reminds me of my crusty philosophy professor who never liked anybody who didn’t think like him.
(I do notice Reed’s apology to Katha Pollitt. Who is a friend of my crusty philosophy professor. It’s all connected.)
Anyway,
I am much more interested in the notion that Obama has attempted to address race in any manner other than through speech. He is talking to Whiteness when he addresses race. We can call him on it as much as we want, but he has decided (long ago, I think,) to pay homage to that power structure quietly humming in the background of American Life. Obama knows damn well that he can avoid actual black communities; nevermind native communities. I have often wondered if his public addresses regarding race haven’t been his way to AVOID the issue all together. We might call his rhetoric Racial Pragmatism. When you address Whiteness you are sweeping the possibility for positive communication under the fridge. It’s like sticking your radical message through a compressor and then turning the volume down. It’s quiet enough so they tolerate you in Mississippi and West Virginia; nevermind Ohio and Indiana.
In addition, the intellectual-set and its increasingly vocal hatred of Obama. I am a lefty scholar writer cynic myself and at times I do sincerely believe that my crowd would only be happy if its candidate would talk and look like a transgendered Hairy Ape (from ONeill’s play) who speaks in Sutras of Fascinating Ideologies That Work Like Spells on The Masses. Americans who think for work are such an under-appreciated group that I think we act as Utopians. What is the genuine article? Who can play the proper role? It’s just not possible.
Nobody will listen to a candidate who speaks like an intellectual and reasons with the public and addresses the real conditions of existence rather than exploiting ideological strategies; and so on. Well, intellectuals would. But we’re not electable.
gotta go for my run. laters.
oh sheesh i combined reed’s article and Anthony’s response in my response to both. silly. you get my point.
I apologize to Katha Pollitt.
i think it’s worthless to criticize him for not calling out the clintons. he’s already written on it. this essay is about something else.
also? i’m sick to fucking death of the folks who think anyone has to criticize clinton in order to criticize obama. i’ve spent 10 years criticizing the two of them, including risking some funding over it when i criticized thirdwayism in a paper i wrote for a research collaborative.
as a side note, re: lbo list, i am especially pissed right now b/c julio huato thought that he’d somehow persuaded me to agitate for obama at work. the fuckhead couldn’t fathom that, as a leftist, i can talk about my crits of obama in the lbo space, but hardly bother with workmates, where i’m going to listen and ask questions and often play dumb, if only to get them to think a little more critically.
i DO NOT shove my left socialist politics down their throat. i do NOT shove my refusal to vote politics down their throat.
it’s baby steps baby steps. these guys, died in the whole democrat ass suckers, seriously can
‘t imagine that * i. just. don’t. give. a. shit.* but i will use voting talk and election talk to make baby steps inroads with workmates who, say, claim clinton or obama are substantially different.
oh? huh. not paying attention. how?
gary — why on earth do you say “radical message”? obama has no radical message and never has. he doesn’t pretend to be center, covering up his radicalness. he *is* just as rightwing as clinton and mccain.
well sheesh. first of all…ihearyou. second. i meant that it’s like sweeping your radical message under the fridge comment as a sarcasm. my point was supposed to be that lefty folks sometimes want too much from authenticity. what politician is authentic? who are we kidding, right? obama is not the black moses. (oh wait, that’s isaac hayes. (before scientology, of course.))
i really do think that obama is powerfully unaware of just how much he is avoiding a true radical agenda. if his message was radical, he’d have been pointing out the white power structure all along and he’d actually be communicating with the people who have been helping him gain the nomination. instead, he’s addressing white middle class america. par for course, i’d say. quite conservative, after all.
we have clinton grandstanding on the back of pickup trucks about bullshit tax breaks–old school populist politics, yawn–and obama playing to naive sentimental liberals who just wanna see a black man make good. double yawn.
i am tired of it all, too. so what is a lefty to do?
who says anything about authenticity? no one, least of all reed, thinks that to be authentically black, you have to be a leftist.
i think you make the same mistake as anthony.
who is reed’s autdience? it’s leftists. he’s not chastizing obama, who doesn’t expect to be authentic.
most leftists don’t expect authenticity from most politicians, either.
but in the circles reed travels these days — at least from reading doug — there are leftists who think obama has potential for a more radical politics. they think he’s keeping it on the down low to get elected and is just saying stuff about race, when of course no real black man in america can think racism is 90% taken care of (obama’s percentage, not mine).
that is the projection of white and black liberals and democrats and pwogs and leftists. especially whites, i think.
he fulfills that black savior stereotype — and in that sense, its racist. you can see that black savior stereotype throughout our culture: the wise black man or woman who is more in touch with nature or spirituality or something and must teach whitey how to be real. the down to earth black sidekick in every action adventure flick.
about the only film i can think of the walked away from that was cruise’s flick that bombed not too long ago — the one where he plays a killer for hire, hires a limo and exposes the black guy driver for being a fraud.
anyway, i’ve got to go back to work. i’m home doing training.