‘A skinny kid with a funny name’: Barack
Obama’s mixed background
makes him hard to fit in America’s political pigeonholes
makes him hard to fit in America’s political pigeonholes
Barack Obama's 'day that would never come'
By Anne Applebaum 05/01/2008
On the day when Barack Obama first entered America's consciousness I was sitting glumly in the audience. It was the summer of 2004, at the Democratic Convention in Boston. For hours I had sat listening to politicians from around the country denounce Bush, Cheney, Iraq. I watched the delegates - suicidally - rally around John Kerry, and I watched Kerry try not to seem like the Massachusetts liberal he had always been. Hardly surprising, then, that when this Senate candidate got up to speak, I (and several million other Americans) listened with something akin to relief. He was amusing, speaking of himself as a "skinny kid with a funny name". He was cheerfully optimistic, talking about a "generous America" where "you don't have to be rich to achieve your potential". Best of all, he eschewed stereotypes. Instead of denouncing his opponents, he denounced "the pundits who like to slice-and-dice our country into red states and blue states" (that is, Republican states and Democratic states). In what became the most quoted lines of the convention, he went on: "We worship an awesome God in the blue states…and yes, we've got some gay friends in the red states. There are patriots who opposed the war in Iraq and there are patriots who supported the war in Iraq. We are all one people, all of us pledging allegiance to the Stars and Stripes, all of us defending the United States of America."
To the British ear it might sound overblown, but the rhetorical combination was brilliant: Obama had taken the ringing repetitions and soaring metaphors beloved of black preachers and politicians - and mixed them with the language of the Founding Fathers and the American Dream. Still, it was only a speech. Obama was not yet even a senator. Even if elected, he would still be the only black man in the Senate. "Hardly a likely candidate for the presidency," the Washington press corps told itself. "What a pity."
Cut to January 2008, and everything looks different. Two days ago, Obama made another speech, celebrating his own victory in the Iowa caucuses. His very first words addressed the old conventional wisdom: "They said this day would never come," he declared - and his supporters cheered. They knew, as did everyone else, that the "day that would never come" was the day that a black man became a serious candidate for president. Here, of course, is where I should insert the appropriate caveats. To win the Iowa caucuses is not to win the Democratic nomination, let alone the presidency. The rules of the Iowa vote are such that only the most politically dedicated - and atypical - of the state's voters show up. Iowa itself is atypical; success in this Midwestern, white, rural farming state does not guarantee success in the big urban centres of the coasts or in the small towns of the Deep South.
Obama's momentum may well be halted by Hillary Clinton's campaign machine next week in New Hampshire, where at the moment she leads decisively. A month from now - after more than 20 states vote on Feb 5, dubbed "Super Duper Tuesday" - he may be out of the race. Nevertheless, even if Obama goes on to lose New Hampshire, the nomination and a shot at the presidency, it is still worth pausing to mark this moment in American political history, to ask how it is that a black man achieved what was supposedly impossible, and whether - even theoretically - he could win a nationwide election, too.
Some of the explanation of Obama's success lies in his background, as well as in the rapidly changing ethnic landscape of America. Though he describes himself as "black", is married to a black woman and was converted to Christianity in a black church, Obama represents something more complicated. He is the son not of African-Americans but of an African - a Kenyan student - and a white woman from Kansas. He spent part of his childhood in Jakarta with his Indonesian stepfather, part in exotic (even for most Americans) Hawaii, and much time with his Midwestern family. He studied at Occidental College on the West Coast and at Harvard Law School, breeding ground of the East Coast establishment. Then he worked as a community organiser in Chicago.
Many discounted Obama on the grounds of weirdness alone. He was not a mainstream white candidate, nor - in the minds of some black leaders - a "real" black American. Coming from Hawaii and Indonesia by way of Harvard and Chicago, he could not be geographically pigeonholed. And conventional wisdom decreed that no one whose middle name is "Hussein" could possibly win an election in middle America. But all of us who cited that conventional wisdom had forgotten that America is a country of perpetual motion, that old barriers of intermarriage are breaking down, that immigration from Latin America and Asia is at a historic high and that "racial politics" now involves far more than just two races.
A few weeks ago, the writer Andrew Sullivan put it like this: "To be black and white, to have belonged to a non-religious home and a Christian church, to have attended a majority-Muslim school in Indonesia and a black church in urban Chicago, to be more than one thing and sometimes not fully anything - this is an increasingly common experience for Americans, including many racial minorities." Nowadays, to be mixed up is normal.
Perhaps more importantly, Obama is at the moment the only candidate, Democrat or Republican, for whom the "culture wars" of the 1960s were not a formative influence. Though born in 1961, at the tail end of the baby boom, he was too young to demonstrate for or against Vietnam, too young to take sides for or against flower power and women's lib. He also missed out on the partisan warfare of the 1990s, when the baby-boomers replayed their struggles in Washington, and the Republican Revolution went head-to-head with the Clinton machine. He can talk about red states and blue states as if it genuinely doesn't matter which was which - something neither Hillary nor John Edwards seems able to do. Whether he would, as president, be as non-partisan, even apolitical, as he sometimes likes to sound is another matter. But in the meantime, his soothing language appeals to a younger generation, one tired of the baby-boomers and their left/right, hippy/straight, long-hair/crewcut political divisions.
Obama's relative youth and outsider status also give him an unexpected perspective on traditional racial politics. He is not only post-Vietnam, he is post-civil-rights-movement, too. Unlike Jesse Jackson or Al Sharpton, he did not march in Selma or Birmingham, did not make his name in the struggle. Both he and his wife, the eloquent and accomplished Michelle Obama - they met when she interviewed him for a job at a law firm - are beneficiaries of the civil rights era, but they no longer use its language or tactics. They are financially and professionally successful by any measure and have raised two lovely, obviously well-adjusted daughters, Natasha and Malia Ann. This too makes them seem less combative, less angry and more self-confident than some of their predecessors. This subtly different attitude appeals to white voters, but it might also win Obama more enthusiasts among younger minority voters than the pundits have so far assumed. And here I speak with a shred of experience, since one of my (black) university classmates - a law professor who, by age and temperament, is also post-civil-rights-movement - emailed me a few months ago to let me know he was working for the Obama campaign. I was not in the least surprised.
 Barack
Hussein Obama (born August 4, 1961)
is the junior United States
Senator from Illinois and a leading candidate for the Democratic
nomination in the 2008 presidential election. He is the fifth African
American Senator in U.S. history, the third popularly elected African
American Senator, and the only African American currently serving in
the U.S. Senate.Born in Honolulu to a Kenyan father and an American mother, Obama grew up in culturally diverse surroundings. He lived most of his early life in Hawaii and spent four of his pre-teen years in Jakarta, Indonesia. A graduate of Columbia University and Harvard Law School, Obama worked as a community organizer, university lecturer, and civil rights lawyer before running for public office. He served in the Illinois Senate from 1997 to 2004, launching his campaign for U.S. Senate in 2003. Obama delivered the keynote address at the 2004 Democratic National Convention while still an Illinois state legislator. He went on to win election to the U.S. Senate in November 2004 with a landslide 70% of the vote in an election year marked by Republican gains. As a member of the Democratic minority in the 109th Congress, Obama co-sponsored the enactment of conventional weapons control and transparency legislation, and made official trips to Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. In the 110th Congress, he has sponsored legislation on lobbying and electoral fraud, climate change, nuclear terrorism, and care for returned U.S. military personnel. Since announcing his presidential campaign in February 2007, Obama has emphasized ending the Iraq War, increasing energy independence, and providing universal health care as major priorities. He married in 1992 and has two daughters. He has written two bestselling books: a memoir of his youth titled Dreams from My Father, and The Audacity of Hope, a personal commentary on U.S. politics. In February 2007, standing before the Old State Capitol building in Springfield, Illinois, Obama announced his candidacy for the 2008 U.S. presidential election. Describing his working life in Illinois, and symbolically linking his presidential campaign to Abraham Lincoln's 1858 House Divided speech, Obama said: "That is why, in the shadow of the Old State Capitol, where Lincoln once called on a house divided to stand together, where common hopes and common dreams still live, I stand before you today to announce my candidacy for President of the United States of America." Speaking at a Democratic National Committee meeting one week before the February announcement, Obama called for putting an end to negative campaigning. "This can't be about who digs up more skeletons on who, who makes the fewest slip-ups on the campaign trail," he said. "We owe it to the American people to do more than that." Obama's campaign raised US$58 million during the first half of 2007, topping all other candidates and exceeding previous records for the first six months of any year before an election year. Small donors, those contributing in increments of less than $200, accounted for $16.4 million of Obama's record-breaking total, more than for any other Democratic candidate. His campaign reported adding 108,000 new donors through third quarter fundraising, for a total of 365,000 individual contributors in the first nine months. Amid concerns for his safety as the first black candidate seen as having a viable chance of being elected president, the U.S. government assigned Secret Service protection to Obama 18 months before the general election. In October 2007, with two months remaining before the Iowa Democratic caucuses and New Hampshire primary and national opinion polls showing him trailing Hillary Clinton, Obama began directly charging his top rival with failing to clearly state her political positions.Campaigning in Iowa, he told the Washington Post that as the Democratic nominee he would draw more support than Clinton from independent and Republican voters in the general election. At Iowa's Jefferson-Jackson fundraising dinner in November 2007, Obama expanded the theme, saying that his presidency would "bring the country together in a new majority" to seek solutions to long-standing problems. Attended by 3,000 supporters, including representatives from each of Iowa's 99 counties, the event was described by an Obama campaign press secretary as a "pretty good dry run" in preparation for the 2008 primary season's first electoral contest. Obama won the January 3, 2008 Iowa Democratic caucuses with 38% support, ahead of 30% for John Edwards and 29% for Hillary Clinton. On the role of government in economic affairs, Obama has written: "We should be asking ourselves what mix of policies will lead to a dynamic free market and widespread economic security, entrepreneurial innovation and upward mobility [...] we should be guided by what works." Speaking before the National Press Club in April 2005, he defended the New Deal social welfare policies of Franklin D. Roosevelt, associating Republican proposals to establish private accounts for Social Security with social Darwinism. In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, Obama spoke out against government indifference to growing economic class divisions, calling on both political parties to take action to restore the social safety net for the poor.Shortly before announcing his presidential campaign, Obama told the health care advocacy group Families USA: "I am absolutely determined that by the end of the first term of the next president, we should have universal health care in this country." Meeting with Google employees in November 2007, Obama pledged to appoint a Chief Technology Officer to oversee the U.S. government's management of IT resources and promote wider access to government information and decision making. Reaffirming his commitment to net neutrality legislation, Obama said "once providers start to privilege some applications or web sites over others, then the smaller voices get squeezed out, and we all lose." Campaigning in New Hampshire, he announced an $18 billion plan for investments in early childhood education, math and science education, and expanded summer learning opportunities. Obama's campaign distinguished his proposals to reward teachers for performance from traditional merit pay systems, assuring unions that changes would be pursued through the collective bargaining process. At the Tax Policy Center in September 2007, he blamed special interests for distorting the U.S. tax code. "We are taxing income from work at nearly twice the level that we're taxing gains for investors," Obama said. "We've lost the balance between work and wealth." His plan would eliminate taxes for senior citizens with incomes of less than $50,000 a year, repeal tax cuts for the wealthiest 1 percent of Americans, close corporate tax loopholes and restrict offshore tax havens, and simplify filing of income tax returns by pre-filling wage and bank information already collected by the IRS. Announcing his presidential campaign's energy plan in October 2007, Obama said: "Businesses don’t own the sky, the public does, and if we want them to stop polluting it, we have to put a price on all pollution." He proposed a cap and trade auction system to restrict carbon emissions and a 10 year program of investments in new energy sources to reduce U.S. dependence on imported oil. Obama was an early opponent of Bush administration policies on Iraq. In the fall of 2002, before the start of the Iraq War, he addressed an anti-war rally in Chicago, saying: I know that an invasion of Iraq without a clear rationale and without strong international support will only fan the flames of the Middle East, and encourage the worst, rather than best, impulses of the Arab world, and strengthen the recruitment arm of al-Qaeda. I am not opposed to all wars. I'm opposed to dumb wars. Speaking to the Chicago Council on Global Affairs in November 2006, Obama called for a "phased redeployment of U.S. troops from Iraq" and an opening of diplomatic dialogue with Syria and Iran. In a March 2007 speech to AIPAC, a pro-Israel lobby, he said that while the U.S. "should take no option, including military action, off the table, sustained and aggressive diplomacy combined with tough sanctions should be our primary means to prevent Iran from building nuclear weapons." Detailing his strategy for fighting global terrorism in August 2007, Obama said "it was a terrible mistake to fail to act" against a 2005 meeting of al-Qaeda leaders that U.S. intelligence had confirmed to be taking place in Pakistan's Federally Administered Tribal Areas. He said that as president he would not miss a similar opportunity. Obama addressed the Save Darfur rally at the National Mall in Washington, D.C. on April 30, 2006.In a December 2005 Washington Post opinion column, and at the Save Darfur rally in April 2006, Obama called for more assertive action to oppose genocide in the Darfur region of Sudan. He has divested $180,000 in personal holdings of Sudan-related stock, and has urged divestment from companies doing business in Iran. In the July-August 2007 issue of Foreign Affairs, Obama called for an outward looking post-Iraq War foreign policy and the renewal of American military, diplomatic, and moral leadership in the world. Saying "we can neither retreat from the world nor try to bully it into submission," he called on Americans to "lead the world, by deed and by example." Obama has encouraged Democrats to reach out to evangelicals and other religious people, saying, "if we truly hope to speak to people where they’re at—to communicate our hopes and values in a way that’s relevant to their own—we cannot abandon the field of religious discourse." In December 2006, he joined Sen. Sam Brownback (R-KS) at the "Global Summit on AIDS and the Church" organized by church leaders Kay and Rick Warren. Together with Warren and Brownback, Obama took an HIV test, as he had done in Kenya less than four months earlier. He encouraged "others in public life to do the same" to show "there is no shame in going for an HIV test." Before the conference, 18 pro-life groups published an open letter stating, in reference to Obama's support for legal abortion: "In the strongest possible terms, we oppose Rick Warren's decision to ignore Senator Obama's clear pro-death stance and invite him to Saddleback Church anyway." Addressing over 8,000 United Church of Christ members in June 2007, Obama challenged "so-called leaders of the Christian Right" for being "all too eager to exploit what divides us." |
None of this answers the big question. Even if Obama continues his improbable trajectory and wins the Democratic nomination, can he make it to the White House? I find that when my British friends ask this question, what they really mean is: will Americans - in Mississippi, in Alabama, in the red states - vote for a black man? I won't presume to make predictions, at least not in such an unpredictable election year. But I will note that - at least for the moment - this question isn't being put quite that way by Americans themselves, at least not in the immediate aftermath of a black man's victory in a state as white as Iowa. The questions being asked, rather, are whether a man who talks more about the "idea of America" than about particular policies can win; whether a man with such a complex personal history can win; and whether anyone can raise enough money over the internet to compete with the Clintons.
Perhaps it sounds odd, but at least today, Obama's skin colour suddenly seems like an advantage. His victory makes Americans feel good about themselves. And they might not want to stop feeling good. David Brooks, the centre-Right columnist, put it like this: "When an African-American man is leading a juggernaut to the White House, do you want to be the one to stand up and say 'No'?"
Maybe Hillary will defeat this unlikely candidate in the long run. But, for a few days at least, we can savour Obama's victory as a step towards a post-baby-boom, post-civil-rights-movement - even a post-racist - America.
Cultural and political image
Supporters and critics have likened Obama's popular image to a cultural Rorschach test, a neutral persona on which people can project their personal histories and aspirations. Obama's own stories about his family origins reinforce what a May 2004 New Yorker magazine article described as his "everyman" image. In Dreams from My Father, he ties his maternal family history to possible Native American ancestors and distant relatives of Jefferson Davis, president of the southern Confederacy during the American Civil War. Speaking to an elderly Jewish audience during his 2004 campaign for U.S. Senate, Obama linked the linguistic root of his East African first name Barack to the Hebrew word baruch, meaning "blessed." In an October 2006 interview on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Obama highlighted the diversity of his extended family: "Michelle will tell you that when we get together for Christmas or Thanksgiving, it's like a little mini-United Nations," he said. "I've got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I've got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher. We've got it all."
With his Kenyan father and white American mother, his upbringing in Honolulu and Jakarta, and Ivy League education, Obama's early life experiences differ markedly from those of African American politicians who launched their careers in the 1960s through participation in the civil rights movement. During his Democratic primary campaign for U.S. Congress in 2000, two rival candidates charged that Obama was not sufficiently rooted in Chicago's black neighborhoods to represent constituents' concerns. In January 2007, "The End of Blackness" author Debra Dickerson warned against drawing favorable cultural implications from Obama's political rise. "Lumping us all together," Dickerson wrote in Salon, "erases the significance of slavery and continuing racism while giving the appearance of progress." Film critic David Ehrenstein, writing in a March 2007 Los Angeles Times article, compared the cultural sources of Obama's favorable polling among whites to those of "magical negro" roles played by black actors in Hollywood movies. Expressing puzzlement over questions about whether he is "black enough," Obama told an August 2007 meeting of the National Association of Black Journalists that the debate is not about his physical appearance or his record on issues of concern to black voters. "What it really lays bare," Obama offered, is that "we're still locked in this notion that if you appeal to white folks then there must be something wrong."
Writing about Obama's political image in a March 2007 Washington Post opinion column, Eugene Robinson characterized him as "the personification of both-and," a messenger who rejects "either-or" political choices, and could "move the nation beyond the culture wars" of the 1960s. Obama, who defines himself in The Audacity of Hope as "a Democrat, after all," has been criticized by progressive commentator David Sirota for demonstrating too much "Senate clubbiness", and was encouraged to run for the U.S. presidency by conservative columnist George Will. But in a December 2006 Wall Street Journal editorial headlined "The Man from Nowhere," former Ronald Reagan speech writer Peggy Noonan advised Will and other "establishment" commentators to avoid becoming too quickly excited about Obama's still early political career. Echoing the inaugural address of John F. Kennedy, Obama acknowledged his youthful image, saying in an October 2007 campaign speech, "I wouldn't be here if, time and again, the torch had not been passed to a new generation."
See also
Barack Obama enters the ring
Obama is thinkin' Lincoln
Obama v Clinton: showdown in the pulpits
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