America is in the midst of one of the most significant and fascinating presidential election campaigns of this or any other lifetime. We will end up with a new president who will be different from any other we have ever had in our history. Our president will be either the first woman, the first black or the oldest candidate to ever win the office.
And that is just the tip of this electoral iceberg. There are so many firsts and so many new and different developments that, as some have put it, we are inaugurating the era of open field politics where no one can predict with any certainty what will happen next.
Trying to make sense of it all is a very tall order, especially given the wide spectrum of sources to peruse. One of the best out there however is New West Notes by Bill Bradley (not the Knickerbocker). Mr. Bradley brings decades of first hand political experience and savvy to the table each and every day while working tirelessly to inform his readers of what goes on behind the scenes. He illuminates what the rest of the media misses and he does so without promoting a partisan agenda. He is a Democrat by party, but he is an expert by training and he can write as well.
If you have yet to read his work, start with what follows. The best advice available after that is to visit New West Notes daily and pay close attention to the inside information you will find there. If you have even the slightest interest in politics, it will help you clear up all the confusion and chaos. His web site is linked via the header immediately below.
THE MORNING COLUMN
The week ahead in presidential politics, as may be the case with much of the next seven-odd months, is dominated by the racial politics swirling around Barack Obama. And by the questions yet unanswered by his speech last Tuesday in Philadelphia. These questions are at least as much about patriotism as they are about race.
John McCain, returned from his tour of the Middle East and Europe, is in California for three days this week to raise badly needed funds and to try to stake a claim to the Golden State in the general election. On Wednesday morning at the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles, he delivers a major address on national security and geopolitical matters, addressing what he learned in Iraq and the other nations he toured last week.
Notwithstanding the firestorm of controversy over the past comments of his former pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and some consequent teetering in the polls, Obama had a good week last week. For one thing, it became apparent that he had far more cash on hand at the end of February than rival Hillary Clinton, not to mention John McCain, whose best month of fundraising doesn’t match Obama’s best week. And that his fundraising machine, centered on the Internet, was humming along.
For another, Hillary’s fading hopes for the nomination took a major hit when it became apparent that there would be no do-over primaries in Florida or Michigan, two states which she had previously claimed notwithstanding the fact that she’d earlier agreed with the Democratic Party’s decision not to recognize their rogue primaries in which no one campaigned. The hurdles to hastily organized primaries at the tail end of the season in June were too high, and Clinton forces sought to block independents who participated in the real Republican primary — largely on behalf of McCain — from voting in a real Democratic primary.
By week’s end, it was apparent that Clinton almost certainly could not catch Obama in delegates won in the primaries and caucuses or in the popular vote. The media counts, incidentally, which have Obama over 700,000 votes ahead of Clinton, do not include, oddly, votes cast in the caucuses. Most of those have had record turnouts, making them easily the equivalent of smaller primary elections. Include those in the popular vote, as they should be, and Obama’s lead is well over a million votes.
And Obama got a good start on addressing his Jeremiah Wright last week. But only a start.
As I wrote in real time as the Jeremiah Wright firestorm broke 10 days ago, it was a clearly survivable situation.
And as I wrote in real time when Obama gave his speech on race in America and the Jeremiah Wright controversy six days ago, he solved much of his problem with regard to the Democratic nomination fight. Polls show that his speech worked, especially with Democratic voters, and largely with independent voters.
An even more recent poll for CBS News showed, as does the Rasmussen poll, that most Americans think highly of Obama’s speech.
Nevertheless, Barack Obama’s path to the White House has certainly gotten longer and more perilous.
I think that Obama is not going to become president unless he can explain Malcolm X (Wright’s most outrageous statements are a stand-in for what he represented), the anger that produced him, and the preposterous statements that not infrequently emanate from the black church.
He can’t simply float as the easy post-racial figure, a man Americans can vote for as a salve for the issue of race in America.
Which may have been inevitable. And was certainly inevitable when he decided not to be a Hawaiian, or a nice Ivy League lawyer, but a black Chicago politician who ended up running for president.
For Obama made a choice. He was born and in large measure raised in Hawaii, America’s polyglot paradise in the Pacific, a place where questions of racial background can become so complex as to be irrelevant. But after a glittering Ivy League debut, he decided to enter into politics, not as a multi-racial, post-racial figure in Hawaii or California — where he spent two years attending Occidental College — but in a 76% black state senate district in Chicago.
Why he decided to embrace his blackness as a very young man may be a matter more for the psychologically inclined than the politically inclined. In any event, it is what he did.
As a man who was neither a movie star nor super-rich, Obama needed a base for his rise. As he is a politician and not a deity, he is by nature an opportunist. (All politicians are opportunists. The question is the degree of egregiousness.) A big part of his opportunity was being a member of what is arguably the leading black church in Chicago.
For a man with a missing father, Trinity United Church of Christ and the Rev. Wright played a key role in Obama’s life. Mothered by a white woman and raised in large measure by white grandparents, Obama sought what he did not have in his life as a biracial boy. A black family. The black church in Chicago became a stand-in for that. And Wright, a complex man who, by most accounts, has done some serious good in Chicago to balance his now well-publicized ranting, became in Obama’s own recent words, an “uncle.”
The church also answered the formerly frequently posed question about Obama. Is he “black enough?”
But as a result of this embrace — and Obama notably refused to disown Wright even as he renounced his now infamous comments — Obama still has serious questions to answer.
He has to explain to America — and in particular, to key voting groups such as the Scots-Irish who make up much of the working class and patriotically-oriented in the country — the anger that produced such irrational notions as the US government inventing AIDS to destroy the black people. And the idea that the US may have deserved 9/11. And why men such as Wright, whose generation grew up with a frequently rugged racism directed toward them and developed within them, have a chip on their shoulder today.
It’s certainly not what Obama wanted to do when he launched his candidacy on a wave of high-flown, impressively-delivered rhetoric, floating over the historic divisions of America on a cloud of post-racialism.
But it is what he must do now. He didn’t intend to run as “the black candidate” but as a candidate who happened to be black. But being black, or at least, “black enough,” as it turns out, was at least in part a choice for Obama. And as a result of that choice, he rose in Chicago enough to become a United States senator. And as a result of being a senator, he has enough stature to wage this campaign.
This conversation about race will continue throughout the campaign.
As will a conversation about patriotism. “God damn America” is not a concept that goes down well with most voters.
This may be even more of an imperative for Obama than the racial issue, though the two are joined.
What is his idea of America? How is he an American patriot in a time of war?
What can he do to convince the Scots-Irish American voter that he is enough of a patriot to take on the uber-patriot, John McCain, a man who does not have to wave the flag because his very presence waves the flag?
In many respects, Obama represents an emerging America. Multi-racial, with an internationalist perspective. But he will not represent any America, at least as president, until he demonstrates that he represents the enduring America.
You can always see the full MMQ on PJ Media.