Breaking Down Barack

May 20, 2008 by Marc Lamont Hill

Obama No
By Adolph Reed Jr.

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?

Adolph Reed Jr. is Professor of Political Science at the University of Pennsylvania.

Categories: MLH
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29 Comments

1. Marc Lamont Hill wrote:

CHUCH!!!!

May 20, 2008 @ 12:48 pm

2. Garrett wrote:

Barack “McGovern” Obama.

May 20, 2008 @ 12:52 pm

3. james wrote:

did george mcgovern ever attract 75,000 to a speaking event in oregon?

May 20, 2008 @ 1:19 pm

4. Garrett wrote:

McGovern had some huge rallies. Heck, we don’t have to go back to McGovern; Kerry had some huge rallies in 2004 (100,000 in Madison). How’d that work out for ya?

I’ve already written the headline that I’m sure a lot of newspapers will run when Obama loses: “What happened?”.

May 20, 2008 @ 1:43 pm

5. NANDI_ROGUE wrote:

I don’t necessarily like the points that Mr. Reed presents in the article because I am an Obama supporter, but I think it was well written nonetheless.

May 20, 2008 @ 2:00 pm

6. nat wrote:

“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.”

wtf? what a nonsensical statement in a piece that attempts to be taken seriously.

May 20, 2008 @ 2:02 pm

7. Logic wrote:

The republican brand is trash, thanks to GW. All Obama has to do is show up in November.

May 20, 2008 @ 3:06 pm

8. james wrote:

garrett, you seem terribly proud that mcgovern that was beaten by a man who eventually resigned his office.

as for dukkakis, i don’t even think i know how to spell his name. was he really a presidential candidate?

and that kerry rally in madison, springsteen was on hand; those people came to see him peform, not kerry.

May 20, 2008 @ 3:08 pm

9. Bitter Brother wrote:

Unfortunately, I believe your so-called logic(Dr. Hill)consists in finding information that allows you to go on thinking as you always were. You obviously have had a bias against Obama since the outset of this campaign. Us Obamaphiles, as you’ve successfully managed to coin in the pejorative sense, have no illusions that his administration will be a panacea for all the ils plaguuing our country currently; nor that he isn’t resorting to the same ol’ tactics of mainstream politics. Your preoccupation with the wave of Obama support is predicated by your dilusion that one person can be the saviour of America. The President’s role is more inspirational than administrative from my vantage. I would love to hear some of your reformative ideas for the country in lieu of this divisive banter you disseminate on a daily basis. What is incontrovertible is that unlike any Presidential hopeful heretofore, his type of support makes him more beholden to those whom he should be; the people.

May 20, 2008 @ 4:14 pm

10. Logic wrote:

“Obama’s style of being all things to all people” like taking shots of Crown Royal and riding to work with voters, getting coffe at the gas station (which she failed at), claiming that she opposed NAFTA. If Obama was trying to be all things to all people, then why is he labled as elitist and out of touch with the common man?

May 20, 2008 @ 4:15 pm

11. DCI74 wrote:

Cosign Logic, that makes absolutely no sense.

May 20, 2008 @ 4:40 pm

12. Cézsar wrote:

Verbose; superfluous; all these words come to mind when reading this prolix script of yours Adolph. You could have been a whole lot more effective and succinct by simply saying – ‘I dont like Obama’. Everything else you said is just self-indulgent and makes your feigned complexity transparent enough to expose the simplicity that employs it in a vain attempt to hide behind it.

Case in point: “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 (Clinton) or Obama.”

This article of yours proves you have no regard for your own word, your own recorded word. So why should I? Or anybody else for that matter? Do like the song says and “Fall Back” mon frere.

May 20, 2008 @ 4:56 pm

13. BigVic4 wrote:

Adolf?? …your name is Adolf?…….really.

Adolf, you my friend are the definition of a ‘Tavis’ aka a hater

…and I hate that word.

So from now on, instead of saying ‘hater’…replace it with ‘Tavis’…or better yet ‘Adolf’

Example:
“You a Adolf”
“Dont mind him, he just Adolfin”
“You a ol’ Adolfin azz ninja”

May 20, 2008 @ 10:11 pm

14. mel wrote:

who cares

May 21, 2008 @ 9:46 am

15. Derwin wrote:

Like it or not, no matter who gets in office, this corporate run hallucinogen/hologram we call a democracy is hardly going to stop or slow down. Power corrupts. Even if Obama is a good man, if there is no one there to check him,— if we the people don’t demand change, nothing will change. Thats why on some level I think McCain will be better for the country. McCain will make things so much worse for us that we will have to wake up from this bad dream. Obama will only numb the pain in this dull slow death America is facing (that’s all the corporate machine will let him do), whereas McCain will continue to cut and slash our freedoms, economy, and world status until we have no choice but to stand up.

May 21, 2008 @ 10:23 am

16. Tone wrote:

This article is completely stupid. Adolph, is Hiliary Clinton promising you a cabinet seat or something…lol.

May 21, 2008 @ 4:27 pm

17. Miss Martin wrote:

ALRIGHT NOW DERWIN! YOU JUST MIGHT BE ON TO SOMETHING…..

May 21, 2008 @ 5:20 pm

18. DCI74 wrote:

I hear you Derwin but I don’t need to stick my hand in a fire again to know I’ll get burned, 8 years of 3rd degree Bush burns is enough for me.

May 21, 2008 @ 5:46 pm

19. Dionne wrote:

“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.”

Why are Obama supporter reduced to being characterized as cult members? If you have read any poll or watched the news Hillary supporters are the ones who are refusing to vote for Obama in greater numbers than the reverse. If that’s not cult like than I don’t know what is! I don’t want to get into name calling but, I think doing a little research is important and making an assumption based on a few anecdotal incidents is not research.

As for those people using their children as their inspiration, I don’t know about you all, but I have never been able to convince my mother to do anything (even if it was good for her!). Choosing to support a candidate is a very personal decision that I took very seriously. I was not swayed by the crowds, nor did I give in to peer pressure, I did my homework, saw which one was most in line with what I envision for the future of the country. Then and only then I decide.

May 21, 2008 @ 6:24 pm

20. Kingblack842003 wrote:

It never seizes to amaze me that some Democrats will actually stay home or vote McCain (mistakingly thinking he has their best interest in mind). I say to those people; “you will deserve everything you get if you help McCain win”.

As for Darwin-

I totally agree that McCain will make things worst, I am skeptical however, seeing as we managed to vote Bush twice. Also Hillary winning Ohio based off of a commercial says something too. The fact that her name is synonymous with NAFTA, and all she had to do is say she will “reexamine” that decision to win,…just….baffles me.

May 22, 2008 @ 12:15 am

21. Garrett wrote:

More government isn’t the answer.

May 22, 2008 @ 7:09 am

22. CLM wrote:

Adolph, quit hatin!

Sen. Obama is campaigning to be President, not Messiah. Good grief.

Some of you folks are perpetually in the ‘opposition’ and never prepared to be ‘Government’. Fine. Stay on those benches. Complaining all day about what is wrong. Cloaking yourselves with fine and beautiful righteous indignation about the rotting, stinking corpse of the body politic in this country.

In the meantime, we are trying to elect a President and trying to bring some helpful, meaningful change to the lives of our people.

Keep hatin’ and critiquing, Adolph. I’m still voting and I’m still filled with an audacity to HOPE!

p.s. we could all learn some lessons from observing the ANC in South Africa; moving from ‘opposition’ to ‘Government’ isn’t easy and is often messy, ugly, and pain-filled. But, it’s necessary.

May 22, 2008 @ 9:47 am

23. DCI74 wrote:

Garrett you are always talking about how more government is bad yet how has less government worked out for this country in the last 8 years? If more government isn’t the answer and clearly less governemt doesn’t work, what’s the alternative?

May 22, 2008 @ 1:37 pm

24. Richard Kane wrote:

With all the rare rich intact extended families running this country it is incredible that Adolph could harp on whether Obama’s wife grew up in poverty or was a government worker. The Kennedy clan was good for the country and the Bush clan bad for the country starting with Grandfather Preston being an integral part of the international Nazi movement.

The world, as Derwin’s comment hinted at, is on an almost unstoppable race for the bottom. However politicians like Bush Jr. and McCain can be blamed when things go wrong instead of the ruling class.

However, the collapse of the dollar may not mean working class solidarity against the elites. McCain’s idea of using anti-Castro Cubans to role back Venezuela, and Cuba, will lead to allowing them to bring more of their friends into this country. And young people coming to this country to join the armed forces is already increasing immigration, even without all McCain’s new wars. So an economic collapse under McCain will lead to blaming immigrants for the mess, making the US resemble the new South Africa. But under Hillary a collapse will mean an attempt to chase both Jews and Muslims out of the country to fight their wars in their part of the world not ours.

I admit I don’t know what will happen if the economy collapses despite three year of Obama trying to stop it from happening, but at least we won’t be starving and fighting with each other three months into his term like we might be with McCain.

When ancient Rome collapsed European population declined 90% from starvation and crime. Maybe one different Emperor back then would have made a difference maybe not. Today we are all far away from the farms and armed robbers may in the future be stealing tomatoes from window gardens. Perhaps it will get so bad that only cannibals will survive. But with McCain’s sparing with Russia, the new Dark Ages might have to be further burdened with genetic deformities.

Cuba has so far shown that the race for the bottom is so far not inevitable. Perhaps, Obama will make an accord with Cuba and Venezuela and the race for the bottom not be inevitable after all.

When we take a plane or a train we want an expert in the driver’s seat, but for a little while the US was satisfied to have, mentally speaking, an average Joe or perhaps a little less in the White House. Let’s see what is going to happen if instead a real genius pilots our ship.

Average Joe in the White House expanded on,
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/cont/node/6228
Not dropping or postponing good causes just to make it easier for Obama,
http://www.capitolhillblue.com/cont/node/7403
RichardKanePA
Richard Kane

May 24, 2008 @ 3:39 am

25. Richard Kane wrote:

However, the collapse of the dollar may not mean working class solidarity against the elites. McCain’s idea of using anti-Castro Cubans to role back Venezuela, and Cuba, will lead to allowing them to bring more of their friends into this country. And young people coming to this country to jo in the armed forces is already increasing immigration, even without all McCain’s new wars. So an economic collapse under McCain will lead to blaming immigrants for the mess, making the US resemble the new South Africa. But under Hillary a collapse will mean an attempt to chase both Jews and Muslims out of the country to fight their wars in their part of the world not ours.

Carter, Johnson, Kennedy, and Roosevelt were trying to confront the race to the bottom. Circumstances not original intent helped add Johnson to the struggle against the downward descent. Bill Clinton was the one President who succeeded in stopping union organizing under his watch, so he succeeded economially by giving the US a stable lower plateau in the downward dissent. So how much Obama is sincere at change may not matter as much as how hopeless it might me. I admit I don’t know what will happen if the economy collapses despite three year of Obama trying to stop it from happening, but at least we won’t be starving and fighting with each other three months into his term like we might be with McCain.

Cuba has so far shown that the race for the bottom is so far not inevitable. Perhaps, Obama will make an accord with Cuba and Venezuela and the race for the bottom not be inevitable after all.

Average Joe in the White House expanded on, capitolhillblue.com/cont/node/6228
Not dropping or postponing good causes just to make it easier for Obama, capitolhillblue.com/cont/node/7403
RichardKanePA

May 24, 2008 @ 9:22 am

26. drydock wrote:

Dr. Hill– great post. i support Obama but Reed makes, as usual, important criticisms.

Off topic: I would note that Reed said that Mumia is an example of when the guilty get railroaded. Reed has also launched some excellent dis articles at Dyson, hooks, and West. I think Hitchens called Reed the top intellectual in the country.

May 24, 2008 @ 8:02 pm

27. R.oB. wrote:

There is a difference between criticism and bile. There is so much wrong with this article, it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s hard to take a man seriously when he sounds exactly like the GOP scream machine. Adolf sounds like Rush Limbaugh with the names and nouns changed. Fundamentally, Adolf is off base and he should know better.

STRUCTURALLY (a word he should love) our system of democracy produces politicians who must appeal to as many people, all with conflicting interests, as possible. That’s why liberals who complain that Obama isn’t liberal enough or is sinister because he dares to break with their orthodoxy come of as ideological jerk offs. Liberals don’t represent this country nor do they speak for it. Now if they can offer a vision, an agenda that the country can get behind. ***Then and ONLY then*** will liberals speak for this country. That’s democracy for you.

I’m tired of non-sensical, get nothing done, sanctimony from liberals who can’t seem to get anything done. The only reasons that Democrats have a chance at winning is because the GOP have made an unholy mess and it’s not even guaranteed. I don’t know a worse indictment of liberalism.

May 24, 2008 @ 11:49 pm

28. VCF wrote:

Based on my read of Adolph Reed’s assessment of black “public intellectuals” from the 90’s onward (from Kelley to hooks to Dyson), it would seem to me that he would offer a similar suspicion to your work, Marc. Reed still speaks from a fatalistic ideological rigidity that is not open to new strategies of/for social change. Obama ain’t perfect, but damn. Is he saying that Barack’s done NOTHING right?

This article would have been much better had Reed offered examples of how Obama dismantled the progressive foundation he laid in the state senate and how Obama’s “neoliberalism” hoodwinked black folk in Chicago into uncritically accepting public policy that hurt them and benefitted white elites. Instead, his obsession with style makes his indictment on Obama’s substance hollow. It’s not like Obama is above negative critique. But worrying about how Obama panders to white liberals doesn’t raise or answer the question of whether Obama has any real credibility in his claim to a “new kind of politics.”

May 26, 2008 @ 4:01 pm

29. Garrett wrote:

DCI74,

If we compare the Bush & Clinton administrations, I don’t think we’d see much of a difference in terms of the size of the federal government.

Life isn’t easy. I just think that government, whether it’s local or federal, can only do so much. And should only do so much.

May 26, 2008 @ 6:38 pm

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