March 18, 2008, - 11:22 am
The Audacity of a Black Man Exposing Obama
By Debbie Schlussel
When we criticize and expose Barack Hussein Obama, we’re called “racists.” But when a Black intellectual does it, he’s probably called an “Uncle Tom.”
Regardless, in today’s Wall Street Journal, the great American thinker, Shelby Steele (who happens to be Black), has the guts to say what others will not. Here is part of it, but you must read the whole thing, which is solid gold. He writes of “bargainers” (Obama) versus “challengers” (Jackson and Sharpton):
Race helps Mr. Obama in another way — it lifts his political campaign to the level of allegory, making it the stuff of a far higher drama than budget deficits and education reform. His dark skin, with its powerful evocations of America’s tortured racial past, frames the political contest as a morality play. . . .
Because he is black, there is a sense that profound questions stand to be resolved in the unfolding of his political destiny. And, as the Clintons have discovered, it is hard in the real world to run against a candidate of destiny. For many Americans — black and white — Barack Obama is simply too good (and too rare) an opportunity to pass up. For whites, here is the opportunity to document their deliverance from the shames of their forbearers. And for blacks, here is the chance to document the end of inferiority. So the Clintons have found themselves running more against America’s very highest possibilities than against a man. And the press, normally happy to dispel every political pretension, has all but quivered before Mr. Obama. They, too, have feared being on the wrong side of destiny.
And yet, in the end, Barack Obama’s candidacy is not qualitatively different from Al Sharpton’s or Jesse Jackson’s. Like these more irascible of his forbearers, Mr. Obama’s run at the presidency is based more on the manipulation of white guilt than on substance. Messrs. Sharpton and Jackson were “challengers,” not bargainers. They intimidated whites and demanded, in the name of historical justice, that they be brought forward. Mr. Obama flatters whites, grants them racial innocence, and hopes to ascend on the back of their gratitude. Two sides of the same coin.
But bargainers have an Achilles heel. They succeed as conduits of white innocence only as long as they are largely invisible as complex human beings. They hope to become icons that can be identified with rather than seen, and their individual complexity gets in the way of this. So bargainers are always laboring to stay invisible. (We don’t know the real politics or convictions of Tiger Woods or Michael Jordan or Oprah Winfrey [DS: Here, I beg to differ with Mr. Steele, as we are well aware of Ms. Winfrey’s uber-left-wing politics, even if they are couches in a colorful glossy magazine and an insipid daytime talk show.], bargainers all.) . . . .
Thus, nothing could be more dangerous to Mr. Obama’s political aspirations than the revelation that he, the son of a white woman, sat Sunday after Sunday — for 20 years — in an Afrocentric, black nationalist church in which his own mother, not to mention other whites, could never feel comfortable. His pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, is a challenger who goes far past Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson in his anti-American outrage (“G-d damn America”).
How does one “transcend” race in this church? The fact is that Barack Obama has fellow-traveled with a hate-filled, anti-American black nationalism all his adult life, failing to stand and challenge an ideology that would have no place for his own mother. And what portent of presidential judgment is it to have exposed his two daughters for their entire lives to what is, at the very least, a subtext of anti-white vitriol?
What could he have been thinking? Of course he wasn’t thinking. He was driven by insecurity, by a need to “be black” despite his biracial background. And so fellow-traveling with a little race hatred seemed a small price to pay for a more secure racial identity. And anyway, wasn’t this hatred more rhetorical than real?
But now the floodlight of a presidential campaign has trained on this usually hidden corner of contemporary black life: a mindless indulgence in a rhetorical anti-Americanism as a way of bonding and of asserting one’s blackness. Yet Jeremiah Wright, splashed across America’s television screens, has shown us that there is no real difference between rhetorical hatred and real hatred.
No matter his ultimate political fate, there is already enough pathos in Barack Obama to make him a cautionary tale. His public persona thrives on a manipulation of whites (bargaining), and his private sense of racial identity demands both self-betrayal and duplicity.
Amen, Brother!
Tags: Al Sharpton, America, Barack Hussein Obama, Debbie Schlussel, Jeremiah Wright, Jesse Jackson, Michael Jordan, Oprah Winfrey, Shelby Steele, Shelby Steele Calls, Wall Street Journal
You mean I’m only going to vote for Obama because I’ve been manipulated?
I thought it was his level-headedness, his cool persona while others are in hysterics, his enabling of the Earned Income Tax Credit for Illinois, his work on behalf of the Wounded Warrior Project at Walter Reade Hospital, his plan for universal health care, his quest to bring the troops home in a careful and responsible manner, his college tax credit for students willing to give back, his rollback of tax breaks for the wealthy, the way in which he’s conducted the most amazing campaign of my lifetime and derailed the Clinton machine, and finally, the way he’s inspired thousands upon thousands to get involved with the political system who never have before. More democrats have voted in the 2008 primaries than in 2000 and 2004 combined.
Nah, no substance there. Just an empty suit who manipulates.
Please.
http://www.republicansforobama.org
Audacious on March 18, 2008 at 11:45 am