Obamaâs Hidden-Hand Politics
Team Obama implies that to defeat Obama is to suspend progress on race.
Artur Davis
There has always been a measured slickness in how Barack Obamaâs political operation has handled race, the third rail in politics. They have taken the guards off the rail and made an old obstacle an instrument of fashion. And they have done so with an instinct for the genuine and legitimate guilt surrounding race in American life. As political maneuver, it is a thing of grace in some ways.
At least until the thing turns shameless and expedient. Bill Clinton got the first dose of the treatment, when he protested that Obamaâs credentials as an anti-war stalwart were âthe biggest fairy tale Iâve ever seen.â That comment was then shape-shifted from a hard political jab at Obamaâs rhetorical dodges on the Iraq War to an insinuation that the notion that Obama could win the presidency was wishful fantasy. No dispassionate observer who saw the video and heard Clinton in full cry would have arrived at the seamier interpretation, but with the nudging of Axelrod and Co., and with a little help from South Carolinaâs congressman Jim Clyburn, the idea that Clinton meant much worse took hold.
The punch that Clinton absorbed was uncocked repeatedly. Sometimes on defense â when the Jeremiah Wright tapes surfaced, for example, the reasonable question of what drew Obama to a church with a history of incendiary rhetoric was cleverly converted to a teaching moment about an older generationâs fixation with race. When questions about the link between Obama and his old neighbor and fundraiser William Ayers started to burn, the line of inquiry was brushed off as an indirect method of raising fears about black radicalism, and it soon faded.
More often, the blow was an offensive one. The âYes We Canâ mantra always carried the insinuation that Obamaâs primary wins were a triumph over the color line. Hillary Clintonâs campaign never found a way to channel that kind of power, even with another glass ceiling at stake. To the contrary, the Clintonites only added fuel to the fire through their observations about Obamaâs struggle to connect with working-class whites â and through their lament that he was lucky to âbe who he is,â in the words of the late Geraldine Ferraro. To desert Obama in the final throes of the 2008 primaries, Democrats would have had to break faith with their most loyal base and with their partyâs identification with the civil-rights era. That was the cloud hovering over Hillaryâs furious rally in the final quarter.
The transcendent moment of Obamaâs triumph canât be diminished. But one would have to be blinkered to deny that Obamaâs race in 2008 likely empowered him much more than it weakened him â or to assume that Obamaâs strategists and their acolytes in the press donât recognize the power of recapturing race as both an offensive and a defensive weapon.
Enter Joe Biden in Danville, Va., on Tuesday, before a crowd with a large African-American presence. In forced colloquialisms, the vice president warned the audience that Republicans would âput yâall back in chains.â In the hours since, Team Obama has scratched hard to find a different subtext to his statement, but their mincing of words has only added insult to injury: Every African American in the room knew full well whom âyâallâ referred to, and what chains meant â itâs one of the clearest codes in racial politics in the black community and has been for a while. At worst, the word âchainsâ signifies a retreat to a society where a personâs skin color amounted to a prison. At the least, the word bluntly and outrageously equates ordinary conservatism with racial viciousness.
Biden brought this rawness to a place the Obama campaign and its allies have spent much time cultivating this year. It is visible in David Axelrodâs breathless assertions about a decidedly innocent, non-political moment: a small black child touching Obamaâs head in an Oval Office photo-op. It is visible in Eric Holderâs deployment of the Justice Department to a series of battles over state voter-ID laws, and in the New York Timesâ editorial-page crusade against all manner of alleged race-baiting by Republicans. (Including one writerâs remarkable, if side-splitting, assertion that Mitt Romneyâs blandness is a calculated ploy to invoke memories of a Fifties-era, pre-multicultural America. Who knew?) It is an unmistakable, unapologetic argument that to defeat Obama is to suspend progress on race.
Of course, there are different kinds of progress. There is the inconvenient fact that Obama has governed while black unemployment and the level of child hunger in the black community have risen to the highest rates in the modern era, and while educational achievement among African Americans continues to bottom out at appalling levels. This record is one that the chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus said last summer would lead blacks to march outside the White House if it had a different occupant.
The Obama message, implicitly, is that the conditions on the ground, including in the black community, are small, grudging details when weighed against the epic fact that a black man occupies the Oval Office. Itâs a point of view. But that argument is too charged, too at odds with Obamaâs official de-emphasis on race, to be made out loud and in the light of day. Better to work through the hidden-hand approach, through surrogates who create plausible deniability and through commentators who can be disavowed. Interesting that the Sixties-era figure whom the Obama reelect campaign conjures up is neither a Kennedy nor a King but that great hidden-hand stone thrower, Richard Nixon.
http://www.nationalreview.com/articles/314130/obama-s-hidden-hand-politics-artur-davis