Barack Obama: Lost in the Foothills of Hope
By KEVIN ALEXANDER GRAY
My wife, Sandra, warned me, "Don't be hating." Now San (as we call
her), who has worked in retail sales, selling ladies shoes, throughout
her working life, is not an overtly political person. She is one of
those old-timey, "salt of the earth" types. But when she doesn't like a
person, there is usually something wrong with that person. For
instance, before it became evident that Al Sharpton's effort in South
Carolina was going nowhere fast, she coined the now-popular phrase
"scampaign" to refer to the reverend's run. I know it is ill-advised
not to take heed of her warning.
With San's admonition in mind, I tried to table her (and my) Oprah-
tainted, media-hyped preconception of Baraka Obama so that I could read
The Audacity of Hope with an open mind and with the same hopeful spirit
as the title seeks to portray.
But the book is like those two solid yellow lines on a two-lane
mountain road. They're just there in the middle and never-ending, with
a stop sign as the only relief.
He offers no boldness. Dr. King set out to change the social,
economic, and political structures of this country. He described the
change as a 'third way' beyond capitalism and socialism. King's "third
way" is far different than Bill Clinton's "third way," promoted by
Obama and all those around Hillary, who tout the Clintons as the second
and third coming of Camelot.
The Clinton "third way" is Republican Party politics in slow motion.
Under Bill Clinton, U.S. troops weren't trapped in Iraq, but just as
many, if not more, Iraqis died as a result of his policies. His
destruction of the welfare system, his embrace of capital punishment
and other punitive and discriminatory crime policies, his bowing to
Wall Street all made him palatable to Republicans.
The hope in Obama's title is for a mixture of Kennedyism, Reaganism,
and Clintonism packaged as the new face of multicultural America. At
its core, this is what The Audacity of Hope promotes, instead of any
fundamental progressive change.
Nonetheless, it comes as no surprise that The Audacity of Hope is a
New York Times bestseller. The book arrives amidst the hype of an
upcoming and wide-open Presidential race, the collective angst over the
country moving in the wrong direction, an economy that working people
know isn't as good as they are being told it is, and a war that has
washed away - at home and abroad - the country's preexisting false
sense of moral superiority. As the line in Ethan and Joel Cohen's 2000
movie, Oh Brother Where Art Thou, goes, "Everybody's looking for
answers."
Yet, does Obama's book provide any real answers? It there anything in
it that will help stimulate measurable change? Or, is it all just talk,
posturing, and positioning for personal political goals? Is it an
orchestrated, consciously plotted pretext to inoculate a politician
from the perceived liabilities of race, lineage and inexperience?
The answers are no, no, yes, yes.
I can agree with Obama on the need for a new kind of politics. But he
suggests that what's broken can be fixed versus being replaced
altogether. He opines that if we would all just recognize our "shared
understanding," "shared values," and "the notion of a common good" that
life (or politics) in the United States would be better.
Take, for instance, his praise of Reagan, hedged as it is by criticism
of Reagan's "John Wayne, Father Knows Best pose, his policy by
anecdote, and his gratuitous assault on the poor." Writes Obama:
"I understood his appeal. It was the same appeal that the military
bases back in Hawaii always held for me as a young boy, with their tidy
streets and well-oiled machinery, the crisp uniforms and crisper
salutes. . . . Reagan spoke to America's longing for order, our need to
believe that we are not subject to blind, impersonal forces, but that
we can shape our individual and collective destinies. So long as we
rediscover the traditional values of hard work, patriotism, personal
responsibility, optimism, and faith."
Obama gets a lot wrong from start to finish. While people may indeed
have a shared reality - which means we witness the same things - we
don't always feel, understand, process, or react to what we witness in
the same way. The simplest example of not having a "shared
understanding" is the difference in how blacks and whites view the
police.
What is lacking here is devotion to principles, which Obama constantly
sacrifices on the altar of "shared values." And of course the issue is
not of shared values. It's how we rank our values. Many people value
religion, but which religion has more value? In this country we all
know the answer to that question. As proof that the United States
government values Christians over Muslims, consider that the United
States is at war with an Islamic country. Consider that Muslims in this
country are subject to increased government scrutiny and racial,
ethnic, and religious profiling. No one in their right mind could
believe that the United States place a Muslim on an equal footing with
a Christian or Jew. The daily body count dispels that notion.
At the top of Obama's shared values matrix is his Christian faith, his
heterosexual family, the American flag, and the Democratic Party.
"Shared values" and "the notion of a common good" pretty much amounts
to the same thing in Obamaspeak. It all sounds pleasant, but it's
surely not new. It's somewhat reminiscent of Jesse Jackson's "common
ground" theme that he built his '88 campaign around. Clinton picked up
the phrase, and it is now a standard part of the political lexicon.
But the use and meaning of Jackson's phrase has changed over the years
since Clinton co-opted it. Jackson's "common ground" meant bringing
together a coalition of workers, women, men, blacks, progressive
whites, gays and lesbians, environmentalists, anti-apartheid activists,
those opposed to Ronald Reagan's illegal war in Central America,
farmers, Latinos, Arab-Americans and other traditionally
underrepresented or unrepresented groups. With Jackson's phrase, all
could demand a seat at the Democratic Party table.
By contrast, Clinton wanted the Democratic Party to renew its "common
ground" with those who left the party with Strom Thurmond and the
Dixiecrats and those who jumped ship when Ronald Reagan rose to power:
white men. Clinton's "common ground" was with the Democratic Leadership
Council. Clinton "common ground" pushed aside those whom Jackson
brought to the party. And The Audacity of Hope places Obama squarely in
the DLC camp, even if he never applies for a membership card.
As a political tome, The Audacity of Hope is kind of a new and
improved, better-written version of Clinton's long-winded speech at the
'88 Democratic Convention in book form. Obama touches all the hot
button words like the "nuclear option," "strict constructionists," and
the like but never really says anything deep or brave or new other than
to remind us that the hot buttons are really hot.
Give Obama credit for copping to the fact that his "treatment of the
issues is often partial and incomplete." Overall, the treatise reads
like a very, very long speech of sound bites and clich廥 arranged by
topic and issue and connected by conjunctions, pleasantries, and
apologies. Pleasantries like wishing for a return to the days when
Republicans and Democrats "met at night for dinner, hashing out a
compromise over steaks and cigars." Or, leading with apologias to
describe painful parts of United States history or softening a
rightfully deserved blow as when he describes racist southern Senator
Richard B. Russell as "erudite." Or accusing his mom of having a
"incorrigible, sweet-natured romanticism" about the '60s and the civil
rights era as he waxes romantically about Hubert Humphrey's Democratic
Party. It's like he did not have a clue about the 1964 struggles of
Fannie Lou Hamer and the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party.
The shame of Obama's lack of depth is that Hamer's conflict over
representation pretty much set the table for how the Democratic Party
deals with blacks today. But of course he was only three years old and
living in Hawaii when Lyndon Johnson went on national television to
give a speech so that Hamer's image and the MFDP challenge would be off
the airwaves. Hamer's fight was a precursor to the candidacy of Shirley
Chisholm, the first black to seriously run for President in 1972 (if
you exclude Dick Gregory's 1968 bid). Chisholm continued Hamer's fight
for a greater black and female voice in politics and government.
Throughout, Obama proffers an unnaturally romantic view of the
Democratic Party for a person of his age. His appreciation of party
seems as times deeper than his understanding of the civil rights
movement, which comes across as antiseptic. And he goes out of his way
to comfort whites with a critique of black Americans that could tumble
out of the mouth of William Bennett. "Many of the social or cultural
factors that negatively affect black people, for example, simply mirror
in exaggerated form problems that afflict America as whole: too much
television (the average black household has the television on more than
eleven hours per day), too much consumption of poisons (blacks smoke
more and eat more fast food), and a lack of emphasis on educational
attainment," he writes. "Then there's the collapse of the two-parent
black household, a phenomenon that . . . reflects a casualness towards
sex and child rearing among black men."
The book has no soul. That perhaps explains why some (with motives
good and bad) in the black community complain that he "is not black
enough," or "he has no respect or appreciation for the past," or "he is
the amalgamation of everything white folk want a black man to be," or
"he's a white boy being scripted by smart-ass white boys."
The book is surprisingly short on substance. Given all the policy
disasters of the Bush Administration, what troubles Obama about the
Bush era is not so much the policies Republicans championed but "the
process" or lack of process "by which the White House and its
Congressional allies disposed of opposing views." In the end, all he
offers is the promise of a 'hope' that he will manage the process
better than the other guy or gal.
So then, why write the book?
Obama's face is everywhere. And, there is no shortage of opinion about
him, which makes it difficult to read his book and sort things out
without atmospheric bias. But The Audacity of Hope plays on the
creation of a Kennedy-like mystique. I've spoken to a couple of writer
friends who attended an Obama event and in both conversations the
comparison to John Kennedy was bandied about. On cue, Obama plays the
Kennedy-card throughout his book, tossing in passages from Profiles in
Courage.
Although we now know that John F. Kennedy did not write Profiles in
Courage, the book is one you have on your shelf that you might look
through on occasion and actually enjoy rereading. Profiles in Courage
is a historical marker in a way Audacity of Hope will never be. Not
that I am a fan in the slightest regard of the early John and Robert
Kennedy. There was much to dislike about them even before the days when
they authorized then-FBI director J. Edgar Hoover to bug Dr. King,
after which the top cop and closet cross dresser (no disrespect to
cross dressers) in turn authorized his agents to try to prod King into
killing himself.
Not everyone writes a book before running for the Presidency. But some
do, and those books reveal things about the person and the time.
Jackson's Straight from the Heart, of which many people contributed to,
still holds up as a record of where progressive stood at a particular
point and where many progressives stand today. Ross Perot's United We
Stand at least tried to confront some familiar problems such as the
federal debt. And he actually wrote of reforming the system of campaign
finance, increasing electoral participation, and eliminating the
Electoral College.
The title of a book usually tells the story. Sometimes it may take
reading the entire book, down to the last page before you realize how
telling or appropriate a title is. The Audacity of Hope. You can't
chant it in a crowd like, well, "Keep Hope Alive!" Or "Keep the Faith,
Baby!" or "Power to the People!" And while the book is technically well-
written with aspirations to inspire, Obama falls far short of the
mountaintop. In the end, the feels trapped in a valley of buzzwords,
catch-phrases, and insider jargon with words like "halcyon" thrown in
for good measure.
So, if you are searching Obama's book for hints or even the language
of the kind of change that means something in a structural and systemic
way, it's not there.
But I'm afraid people are going to discount Obama not for what he
says, but for who he is. I was at the bank talking politics, among
other things, with Maria, the head teller. As I spoke in my usual
unrestrained and audible way, so as to let anyone hear me without
having to eavesdrop, Obama's name came up. An older white gentleman
standing next to me said, "Ya know his middle name is Hussein? This
country will never elect a man named Hussein President!" To which I
could only respond, "Well, the country elected a man that is insane!"
Kevin Alexander Gray is lead organizer of the Harriet Tubman Freedom
House Project in Columbia, South Carolina, which focuses on community-
based political and cultural education. He is also a contributing
editor to Black News in South Carolina. Gray served as 1988 South
Carolina coordinator for the Presidential campaign of Jesse Jackson and
as 1992 southern political director for Iowa Senator Tom Harkin's
Presidential bid. He can be reached at: [log in to unmask]
This review originally appeared in the print edition of The
Progressive.
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