David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker, has produced a doorstop of a book on the first Afro-American President of the United States. Yet, despite its 656 pages, there is a lot missing. It finishes with Barack Obama’s inauguration and, in terms of the primary campaign with Hillary Clinton and the Presidential campaign against John McCain, limits itself to the politics of race. Now there is no question that race was an important issue. Many Afro-Americans voted for Obama because he was perceived as black while white Americans voted for Obama despite his “colour” rather than because of the promises he offered them. Not being George W Bush being one of the most significant, along with his reputation for being against the “dumb” war in Iraq. As Chicago Tribune columnist Don Terry put it in a piece called The Skin Game: “Do white voters like Barack Obama because ‘he’s not really black’?”
Obama’s victory was thus both because he was black – pushing up Afro-American support and turn out to unprecedented levels – and because he wasn’t, at least in terms of resembling Jesse Jackson’s earlier campaigns for the nomination. He was a chameleon switching between persona and capable of talking to black audiences in south Chicago, rich liberals on the east coast and the white middle class in Iowa. Not surprising for a man with such an eclectic background – he was brought up in Kansas as well as Hawaii – and worked as a community organiser in Chicago as well as being elected president of the Harvard Law Review.
His strength is as a man politically committed to compromise and pragmatism and to finding the best in people. He was the model for Matt Santos in series six and seven of The West Wing and then emulated fiction – and Abraham Lincoln’s famous Team of Rivals – by offering Clinton a place in his Cabinet as Secretary of State, driven by LBJ’s maxim that it’s better to have a rival “inside the tent pissing out than outside the tent pissing in”.
Obama was lucky. He got his first break because Congressman Mel Reynolds from the Illinois second district was charged with child sex crimes, while his run against Clinton would have been dead in the water had he allowed Jeremiah Wright to give the invocation at the launch of his campaign. But an aide was warned that Rolling Stone was going to feature Wright, and his “God damn America” sermons, and he was dropped. Despite his penchant for compromise, Obama has a ruthless streak. In his first campaign he knifed Alice Palmer, a black left-wing Illinois state senator, in the back, using legal manoeuvring to stop her re-election bid and leaving him as the only serious candidate in the race. And he has been swift to shed loyal staff and agents as well as pastors as his ambition outgrew them. No good deed goes unpunished.
Barack Obama is probably not a man you should choose as a friend, yet he is someone you might want to take on America’s rabid right, like Sarah Palin, or those who collude and collaborate with them.
