Race Bait: Obstacles Obama faces as a black candidate will not go away

NYT: January 16, 2008
Race Bait
Timothy Egan

....recent experience shows that campaigning with color is fraught with peril – even in the most liberal of precincts. As Senator Barack Obama may soon find out, it’s O.K. to make history, to allow people to feel good while making history, to be an abstraction. But it’s quite another to be “the black guy.”

For a while, it looked like Obama could be the rare African-American leader whose race was nearly invisible – and he may still be. He’s post-Civil Rights, Oprah-branded, with that classically American blend of a mother from the heartland and a father from a distant shore. And after that Iowa victory speech, people felt something had passed into our collective rear-view mirror, without actually saying what that something was. Now it looks like every mention of race – from the overblown dust-up with Senator Hillary Clinton this week to the calculated comments comparing him to Sidney Poitier – is bad for Obama. A victory in South Carolina, with its heavy black vote, will be seen as one-dimensional. He needs people to look at him and see John Kennedy, or The Beatles, or Tiger Woods in his first Master’s tournament. He needs people to see youth, a break with the past, style under pressure. When they see black this or black that — even a positive black first — it’s trouble.

I say this from the experience of having followed as a reporter two of the most talented African-American politicians in the land — Norm Rice, the former Seattle mayor, and Ron Sims, the chief executive of King County, the 12th most populous county in the United States, which includes Seattle. In their earlier campaigns, race was not a factor because people were too nice, in our Northwest, Scandinavian-liberal tradition, to bring it up. And so it seemed reasonable that both men could step up. Rice ran for governor, and so did Sims, in separate open elections. Rice lost to a man who became America’s first Chinese-American governor. Sims lost to a woman. In both cases, barriers were broken. But the ceiling seemed to remain only for blacks. What happened to them is what could lie ahead for Obama.

“He’s got to stay away from race,” said Sims when I spoke to him this week. “He’s got to stay away from it. Race remains the one thing a black cannot talk about openly in a political campaign in this country.” Obama understands this, and thus the truce on the subject has been called. “I know everyone is focused on racial history,” he said at a church service last Sunday. “That’s not what I’m talking about.”...

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Strip away the nonsense that started this intra-family feud and you find one epic problem for Obama: how to make history, without mentioning what is so historic about his candidacy.

(Timothy Egan worked for 18 years as a writer for The New York Times, first as the Pacific Northwest correspondent, then as a national enterprise reporter. In 2006, Mr. Egan won the National Book Award for his history of people who lived through the Dust Bowl, The Worst Hard Time. In 2001, he won the Pulitzer Prize as part of a team of reporters who wrote the series How Race Is Lived in America.)

http://egan.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/01/16/race-bait/index.html

:shrug:

It SOUNDS like that is the argument you are trying to mount.

"Now it looks like every mention of race – from the overblown dust-up with Senator Hillary Clinton this week to the calculated comments comparing him to Sidney Poitier – is bad for Obama. A victory in South Carolina, with its heavy black vote, will be seen as one-dimensional. He needs people to look at him and see John Kennedy, or The Beatles, or Tiger Woods in his first Master’s tournament. He needs people to see youth, a break with the past, style under pressure. When they see black this or black that — even a positive black first — it’s trouble."

"When they see black this or black that — even a positive black first — it’s trouble."

"But the ceiling seemed to remain only for blacks. What happened to them is what could lie ahead for Obama."

Then you add:

"Strip away the nonsense that started this intra-family feud and you find one epic problem for Obama: how to make history, without mentioning what is so historic about his candidacy."

As a Hillary supporter, it SOUNDS like you are saying it is too risky too have a black man as our nominee. If I am reading you wrong, please tell me.

supporters (i.e. Jesse Jackson, Jr. the freaking moran) brought up race and that is a very touchy subject. Anyone who's not seriously committed to Obama may be scared away. The question of race is likely to scare a lot of voters away so it is best to let him run on his politics, not his color.

or the poster (me). I'm thinking about what the writer says -- and not yet sure of my own response to it.

On edit: I am sure, however, that the writer is not telling people not to vote for black candidates.

it to try and bury him. That's a problem.

She'll keep pointing out race and he's really not in a position to address it. The whole thing sucks.

Many people are believing it or want to.

Hillary is trying to change this process into a choice between selecting the First Black President or the First Woman President

on a regular basis including telling black men to be responsible fathers. I think he is a man running for President who happens to be black,not a man running to be First Black President.

John Edwards has talked about about the "enormous responsibility" he feels on issues of race and civil rights in since he first ran for president in 2003. Howard Dean in 2004 constantly talked about race and, in fact, chided the other candidates for, in his view, not talking about it enough. The media talks about race - especially Obama's race - ad nauseum. Pollsters poll on the impact of race in this campaign seemingly almost daily.

But when Obama or anyone who supports him (in, fact, anyone who hasn't aligned themselves with any other candidate, whether they support Obama or not) utters a word about race, they are lambasted for "injecting race into the campaign." Obama's attacked for doing this even when he hasn't said a word about race. Imagine the reaction if he went around talking about race in every stump speech, as John Edwards does.

Absolutely amazing.