ETHNICITY AND ELECTABILITY

The very essence of Obama’s appeal is the idea that he represents racial idealism—the idea that race is something that America can transcend. That’s a very appealing idea. A lot of Americans would truly love to find a black candidate they could comfortably vote for President of the United States.

—Shelby Steele, a black research fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution 18

There is little doubt that in the 2008 presidential campaign ethnicity was an issue. Just a generation ago, Barack’s racial heritage would be a fatal disadvantage to his candidacy. By running for president and being considered a front-runner, he was clearly making history, but the notion of his racial heritage being a detriment to his electability was a concern for the Democratic Party, his supporters, and his organization. While many Americans hungered for a change in U.S. politics and as many looked for any optimistic sign that racial tension in the United States had at least eased or, more optimistically, gone away, the question remained whether voters would elect him because he was African American. Many in the United States wanted to elect a black candidate to demonstrate to the world that there was no bigotry left in this country. Other voters sup- ported him, obviously not concerned about his race, and still others didn’t support him because he was black. But, according to a study by the Pew Research Center, Americans were ready for a black president. The study showed that 92 percent said they would be prepared to vote for a black candidate, up from 37 percent in 1958. The study also showed that white voters no longer appeared to be lying when they said they would vote for a black candidate. In the early 1990s, polls conducted just prior to elections between a black candidate and a white one typically predicted that a black candidate would do much better than he or she actually did, showing that voters said one thing but did another once they entered the voting booth. This change was clearly encouraging and to Barack’s advantage. 19

105 Barack was born in 1961, the year the Freedom Riders—civil rights ac-

T H E C A M PA I G N F O R T H E P R E S I D E N C Y

tivists who rode on interstate buses into the segregated southern states— were arrested for trespassing and unlawful assembly. The Riders were met with firebombs and riots, and many suffered at the hands of racists. The result of what happened to the nearly 450 activists during this journey was direct action in civil rights campaigns, voter registration, and the black power movement. Barack was just two years old when Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. made his historic “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington, D.C. By the time Barack was seven years of age, King and Malcolm X had been assassinated and Congress had voted to protect the right to vote. Barack learned in school and from history books about these important events that helped shape the civil rights movement. When he visited Selma, Alabama, to address the Brown Chapel AME church on the anniversary of Bloody Sunday (when, on March 7, 1965, 600 civil rights marchers were attacked by state and local police with clubs and tear gas), Barack told the assembly that the event in Selma enabled his parents, a mixed-race couple, to fall in love and marry. These events and many more like them shaped the black activists and politicians that came before Barack ever entered politics. However, because he was born much later, Barack is the most prominent figure in what is now a new generation in black politics. These new black leaders and politicians include Massachusetts Governor Deval Patrick; Newark, New Jersey, Mayor Cory Booker; and former Tennessee Congressman and Democratic Leadership Council chair Harold Ford Jr. The civil rights movement opened the doors of academia, corporate America, and elite universities for this new generation. Cory Booker is a graduate of Yale Law School, Deval Patrick went to Harvard, Harold Ford went to the University of Pennsylvania, and Barack to Columbia University and Harvard Law. All these politicians and leaders and others just like them have been hailed not just as a development in black U.S. politics, but as a repudiation of black U.S. politics; not just as different from the likes of Jesse Jackson, but rather the epitome of the

anti–Jesse Jackson. 20 Terence Samuel, of American Prospect magazine, wrote that Barack “is in many ways the full flowering of a strain of up-tempo, non-grievance, American-Dream-In-Color politics. His counterparts are young, Ivy League professionals, heirs to the civil-rights movement who are determined to move beyond both the mood and the methods of their forebears.” 21

Angela Davis, professor of history of consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, wrote that Barack “is being consumed as the embodiment of color blindness. It’s the notion that we have moved beyond racism by not taking race into account. That’s what makes him

BARACK OBAMA

conceivable as a presidential candidate. He’s become the model of diversity in this period . . . a model of diversity as the difference that makes no difference. The change that brings no change.” 22 Barack’s racial heritage may or may not be an issue in his winning primaries in 2008 and becom- ing the Democratic Party’s nominee; however, based on his overwhelm- ing margin of victory in his Senate campaign to become the third black senator since the Reconstruction era after the Civil War, his ethnicity certainly wasn’t an issue. In a campaign for the presidency of the United States, the ethnicity issue may be vastly different. While the 2008 campaign is historic on several levels, the change in voting patterns is en- abling black candidates to make substantial rather than symbolic runs for state and national office. A report by the Pew Research Center found that “fewer people are making judgments about candidates based solely,

or even mostly, on race itself.” 23 All this was good news for Barack and his campaign. Still, there was a lack of enthusiasm among black voters. One explana- tion was that African Americans didn’t believe Barack was representative of them, being the son of a black Kenyan man and a white American woman. Many black voters weren’t naturally or eagerly gravitating to Barack. Some were even stating he wasn’t “black enough” to be their candidate. Barack is African and he is an American, but he isn’t an African American. His ancestors didn’t come to the United States on a slave ship. This sets him apart from many blacks in the United States. In April 2007, Barack appeared at a meeting of black political organizers and said African Ameri- cans “have been complicit in diminishing ourselves and engaging in the kind of self hatred that keeps our young men and young women down. That’s something we have to talk about in this election.” He added that

he didn’t want the black vote simply because he was black because that is not what America is about. “I want it to be because of what I’ve done, and how I’ve lived, and the principles I stand for, and the ideas I promote.” While Barack was warmly received by this crowd of organizers, his recep- tion wasn’t a rousing success. 24

Although Barack has said that he settled his own struggle with racial identity in his late teens and the questions about his authenticity were not new to him, he felt the debate over the issue of race was more about America’s state of mind than about him and his candidacy: “I think America is still caught in a little bit of a time warp: the narrative of black politics is still shaped by the ’60s and black power. That is not, I think, how most black voters are thinking. I don’t think that’s how most white voters are thinking. I think that people are thinking about how to find a job, how to fill up the gas tank, how to send their kids to college. I find

107 that when I talk about those issues, both blacks and whites respond well.”

T H E C A M PA I G N F O R T H E P R E S I D E N C Y

According to a Newsweek Poll in July 2007, race was no longer the barrier it once was to electing a president. A clear majority, 59 percent, said that the country is ready to elect an African American president, up from 37 percent at the start of the decade. 25

ETHNICITY AND ELECTABILITY