Barack Obama – Page 31

More on race and the race

Just to add an exclamation point to my earlier posts and column on race and the race, check out this Reuters piece posted on The Raw Story:

Elements of Obama’s biography including the fact that his father was from Kenya and he grew up in Hawaii make him seem strange to some voters, said David Leege, emeritus professor of politics at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana.

Other factors making it harder for Obama were reservations about his race and concern he would use presidential powers to favor African Americans over whites when distributing government resources, Leege said.

In recent elections, nearly 20 percent of voters were susceptible to subtle appeals to race, though a smaller percentage were repelled by those kinds of appeals, Leege said.

“The reason the polls are close is partly because of the sense of antagonism that Obama might serve interests other than white interests and the doubt about: ‘Should you really take a risk on someone who is very different from us,'” Leege said.

Race and the race — again and again

My column on race and the race has elicited a surprising number of responses. As I detailed in a post last week, the anti-Obama crowd has offered an interesting array of reasons for opposing the Illinois Senator — many of them legitimate — but the arguments tend to be marred by what I will call the “they do it, too” excuse.

I received a letter — yes, an actual letter — from a poet and teacher that I know, a political conservative who was disappointed and offended by my Dispatches column.

He identifies some reasons for his dislike and distrust of the Senator, including his ideology, “his cocksure demeanor” and his connections to his supporters. He calls him “an arrogant, narcissistic, professionally undistinguished (i.e, for POTUS), crypto-Marxist demagogue.”

This is harsh stuff that reads right out of the conservative playbook on how to attack Democrats over the years. But what makes it remarkable is his focus on what the black community thinks of McCain (only one in 20 blacks have a favorable opinion, he says), despite his resume — a fact worth discussing, but one used here to race the specter of black racism.

“That is racist; outrageous and racist, both,” he writes. “If only 5 percent of whites said they had a favorable opinion of Obama, not only would I buy your argument: I’d be shocked, embarrassed and angry, too.”

The 5 percent number is accurate, though misleading, implying as it does that 95 percent view McCain unfavorably. The poll, however, actually finds that 57 percent of blacks view him negatively — a decent majority but not damning.

Is it racism? Some of it may be. But it also is likely connected to anger over general Republican policies on race, affirmative action and poverty, the missteps of the McCain campaign and his willingness to pander during the last several years to the worst of the Republican coalition.

Black racism, however, does not address the issues I raise in the column. There remains a segment of the population — a significant segment — that will view Obama through the prism of race, which shades the way his personal attributes are seen.

Charles Blow deconstructed this argument on the op-ed page of Saturday’s issue of The New York Times, saying it is a vestige of the “murky world of modern racism, where most of the open animus has been replaced by a shadowy bias that is difficult to measure.”

If the percentage of white voters who cannot bring themselves to vote for a black candidate were only 15 percent, that would be more than all black voters combined. (Coincidentally, it also would be more than all voters under 24 years old.) That amounts to a racial advantage for John McCain.

And this sentiment stretched across ideological lines. Just as many white independents as Republicans said that most of the people they knew would not vote for a black candidate, and white Democrats were not far behind. Also, remember that during the Democratic primaries, up to 20 percent of white voters in some states said that the race of the candidate was important to them. Few of those people voted for the black guy.

Some might say that turnabout is fair play, citing the fact that 89 percent of blacks say they plan to vote for Obama. That level of support represents a racial advantage for him, too, right? Not necessarily. Blacks overwhelmingly vote Democratic in the general election anyway. According to CNN exit polls John Kerry got 88 percent of the black vote in 2004.

Race is a central element in this year’s campaign, even if we are talking about race in code. Arrogance can be translated as “uppity,” while experience — of which Obama has more than the current occupant of the White House, more than Ronald Reagan and at least as much as Jack Kennedy — allows the discussion to avoid saying what the right wing longs to say but can’t in polite company: Obama should know his place.

So, yes, race will be one of several determining factors this year — a sad fact of life in the United States 54 years after the Supreme Court ordered the desegregation of schools and 40 years after Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated.

Progressives and Obama

John R. McArthur of Harper’s Magazine reminds us that, aside from the war, the growing class divide in American society is the most important issue facing the country. And while Barack Obama has made some noise about it, his track record should not delude us into thinking he will lead the lower classes in class war.

Obama’s campaign autobiography, The Audacity of Hope, is stunningly frank about his affinity with wealthy donors during his Senate campaign in 2004: “Increasingly I found myself spending time with people of means—law firm partners and investment bankers, hedge fund managers, and venture capitalists. As a rule, they were smart, interesting people, knowledgeable about public policy, liberal in their politics, expecting nothing more than a hearing of their opinions in exchange for their checks.”

If you think that this passage is merely foolish, you’re missing the point. The Audacity of Hope is carefully calculated to present Obama as a non-threat to the big-money interests that pay for campaigns. Even so, Obama tries to have it both ways: “On core issues,” he writes, “I was candid; I had no problem telling well-heeled supporters that the tax cuts they’d received from George Bush should be reversed.”

But it’s easy to be candid when you’re talking about proportionately so little money: a 4.6 percentage-point increase in an investment banker’s income tax to a hardly confiscatory 39.6 percent (the top marginal rate remained over 90 percent until 1964) won’t make much of a dent. As Obama notes, “My own worldview and theirs corresponded in many ways—I had gone to the same schools, after all, had read the same books, and worried about my kids in many of the same ways.” Thus, “I know as a consequence of my fund-raising I became more like the wealthy donors I met, in the very particular sense that I spent more and more of my time above the fray, outside the world of immediate hunger, disappointment, fear, irrationality, and frequent hardship of the other 99 percent of the population.”

That’s Obama in his own words — leaving the junior senator from Illinois open to the charge that he has nothing in common with the workers he’s courting (not that McCain has anything in common with them, either, but for some reason GOP elitism doesn’t seem to resonate).

Meanwhile, Obama has stopped talking about making hedge-fund managers pay income tax on their partnership income at the same time as he proposes to increase the capital-gains rate to 25 percent. This is tactically clever, since it sends a friendly signal to the hedge-funders, while suggesting to progressives that he’s no pushover for Wall Street. At 25 percent, those “smart” and “interesting” financial touts would still be paying far less tax on their hedge-fund income than if they had to pay the top income-tax rate. So far, Obama has outraised John McCain among employees of hedge funds $822,000 to $348,000—this although John McCain wants to leave the capital-gains rate at 15 percent and opposes treating hedge-fund partner income as personal income. But there’s a money logic to this seeming incongruity: Hedge-funders specialize in predicting winning investments, and the accommodating Obama looks like a better bet than the more honestly pro-plutocrat McCain.

Progressives need to be wary. While Obama is the better candidate by a wide margin, but his instincts are not automatically progressive. The left needs to keep Obama’s feet to the fire. Hence, this open letter from The Nation:

We urge you, then, to listen to the voices of the people who can lift you to the presidency and beyond.

Since your historic victory in the primary, there have been troubling signs that you are moving away from the core commitments shared by many who have supported your campaign, toward a more cautious and centrist stance–including, most notably, your vote for the FISA legislation granting telecom companies immunity from prosecution for illegal wiretapping, which angered and dismayed so many of your supporters.

We recognize that compromise is necessary in any democracy. We understand that the pressures brought to bear on those seeking the highest office are intense. But retreating from the stands that have been the signature of your campaign will weaken the movement whose vigorous backing you need in order to win and then deliver the change you have promised.

And we need.

Cover misses the mark

Remember what I said about campaign noise obscuring the issues last week? Well, The New Yorker turned up the volume with a poorly executed satire of the fear factor in this year’s election, running a cover illustration that cobbles together all of the nasty rumors being floated about Barack and Michelle Obama by the wingnuts on the right.

The Huffington Post offered a pretty cogent take on the cover:

The illustration, by Barry Blitt, is called “The Politics of Fear” and, according to the NYer press release, “satirizes the use of scare tactics and misinformation in the Presidential election to derail Barack Obama’s campaign.” Uh-huh. What’s that they say about repeating a rumor?

Presumably the New Yorker readership is sophisticated enough to get the joke, but still: this is going to upset a lot of people, probably for the same reason it’s going to delight a lot of other people, namely those on the right: Because it’s got all the scare tactics and misinformation that has so far been used to derail Barack Obama’s campaign — all in one handy illustration. Anyone who’s tried to paint Obama as a Muslim, anyone who’s tried to portray Michelle as angry or a secret revolutionary out to get Whitey, anyone who has questioned their patriotism— well, here’s your image.

The New Yorker and the artist — Barry Blitt — defend the cover, but somehow miss the point. Yes, satirizing the conspiracy culture is perfectly fine and should be encouraged — but the satire has to work. It has to be funny. And it has to be clear who the target is.

And that’s the problem. There is nothing about this image that separates it from the garbage bouncing around on e-mail. The most significant visual clue as to intent, from what I can glean, is the magazine’s logo, which I guess would signal who the audience is supposed to be.

It is a joke that misfires badly and, in the process, ends up endorsing the very people it was meant to target.

Obama’s misstep

There are days when you have to wonder whether there is much of a difference between the major party’s presidential candidates. Yesterday was one of them.

The U.S. Senate — with Democrat Barack Obama voting yes — approved “a major expansion of the government’s surveillance powers, handing President Bush one more victory in a series of hard-fought clashes with Democrats over national security issues.”

The measure, approved by a vote of 69 to 28, is the biggest revamping of federal surveillance law in 30 years. It includes a divisive element that Mr. Bush had deemed essential: legal immunity for the phone companies that cooperated in the National Security Agency wiretapping program he approved after the Sept. 11 attacks.

The immunity provision — which Glenn Greenwald points out covers not just past actions but potential futures ones, as well — makes it impossible to hold the Bush administration accountable for the wiretapping program and what was a likely violation of federal law. Without the legislation, telecom companies could have been called to testify on the program.

Greenwald sums things up pretty succinctly:

With their vote today, the Democratic-led Congress has covered-up years of deliberate surveillance crimes by the Bush administration and the telecom industry, and has dramatically advanced a full-scale attack on the rule of law in this country.

Which brings me back to Obama and John McCain. One voted for the FISA bill — Obama — the other wasn’t present but supported the legislation — McCain, in what can only be described as a dereliction of duty. McCain’s position was to be expected, but Obama’s? Despite his claims to the contrary that his vote did not signal a shift, he directly contradicted a vow he made last year to fight any bill that included immunity.

Greenwald calls it a “complete betrayal,” adding that

A more complete abandonment of an unambiguous campaign promise is difficult to imagine.

Lawrence Lessig, a professor at Stanford who has been fighting to change the culture of American politics, offered this criticism earlier this week (Greenwald had linked to it, which is where I first found it, but I thought it worth linking to it, as well), saying Obama was engaged in “self-swiftboating”:

The Obama self-Swiftboating comes from a month of decisions that, while perhaps better tuning the policy positions of the campaign to what is good, or true, or right, or even expedient, completely undermine Obama’s signal virtue — that he’s different. We’ve handed the other side a string of examples that they will now use to argue (as Senator Graham did most effectively on Meet the Press) that Obama is nothing different, he’s just another politician, and that even if you believe that McCain too is just another politician, between these two ordinary politicians, pick the one with the most experience.

The Obama campaign seems just blind to the fact that these flips eat away at the most important asset Obama has. It seems oblivious to the consequence of another election in which (many) Democrats aren’t deeply motivated to vote (consequence: the GOP wins).

He says the FISA vote is just the latest example of this:

The best evidence that they don’t get this is Telco Immunity. Obama said he would filibuster a FISA bill with Telco Immunity in it. He has now signaled he won’t. When you talk to people close to the campaign about this, they say stuff like: “Come on, who really cares about that issue? Does anyone think the left is going to vote for McCain rather than Obama? This was a hard question. We tried to get it right. And anyway, the FISA compromise in the bill was a good one.”

But the point is that the point is not the substance of the issue. I’d argue until the cows come home that in a world where soldiers go to prison for breaking the law, the government shouldn’t be giving immunity to (generous campaign contributing) companies who break the law. But a mistake about substance is not why this flip is a mistake. I agree that a tiny proportion of the world thinks defeating Telco Immunity is important. The vast majority don’t even understand the issue. But what this perspective misses is just how easy it will be to use this (clear) flip in policy positions to support the argument “Obama is no different.” Here, and in other places, the campaign hands the other side kryptonite.

The issue cannot just be the substance alone. It has got to also be how a change on that substance will be perceived: And here (as with the other flips), it will be perceived in a manner that can’t help but erode the most important core of the Obama machine. It is behavior that attacks Obama’s strongest feature — that he is different. It is, therefore, Swiftboating.

I’m not sure he goes far enough. The flip is only part of the problem. He didn’t just flip, he flipped on an issue that has constitutional implications, leaving me to wonder how committed this former constitutional law professor is to civil liberties.

And he, like too many Democratic candidates before him, shows that he is willing to jettison the party’s liberal and left wings in a craven attempt to occupy some mythical center. This, of course, isn’t change or reform; it’s conventional wisdom of the most distasteful sort.

UPDATE: Lessig’s post today criticizes the left for misreading Obama and not recognizing that his vote was about him believing the FISA bill offered important improvements on the old law and that the improvements were more important that telcom immunity in the larger scheme of things. It was about balancing things — which is what legislators do in a democracy.

I agree — to a point. I think it is foolish to assume that liberal politicians might not occasionally vote in favor of legislation that includes bad provisions. Ted Kennedy, after all, helped shepherd No Child Left Behind through the Senate.

But the so-called improvements in this bill are illusory. While the bill includes a “reaffirmation that the FISA law is the ‘exclusive’ means of conducting intelligence wiretaps,” it does not tighten FISA. In fact, as the Times points out, the bill

expands the government’s power to invoke emergency wiretapping procedures. While the N.S.A. would be allowed to seek court orders for broad groups of foreign targets, the law creates a new seven-day period for directing wiretaps at foreigners without a court order in “exigent” circumstances if government officials assert that important national security information would be lost. The law also expands to seven days, from three, the period for emergency wiretaps on Americans without a court order if the attorney general certifies there is probable cause to believe the target is linked to terrorism.

That, plus the immunity, means that Obama struck the wrong balance on the FISA question.