A More Perfect Union?

Barack Obama's speech this week on race was honest, thoughtful, moving, and I fear, an unmitigated political disaster. I think he knew all along that it would become necessary at some point during the campaign to give a speech like this with regard to some racial incident arising during the campaign. I believe, however, that he expected it to be necessary at a later date in the campaign in response to some kind of race-baiting carried out by the Republicans. (I hope an incident like that doesn't occur, but sadly I am fully expecting it from some 527 group) I don't think he expected it to become necessary in response to an uproar over the outrageous statements of his own pastor.

The speech itself was one of the best I've heard from any politician on the subject of race. He dealt with causes of resentments on both sides and spoke from the heart in my opinion. The results of the speech are where I see some problems arising that may come back to haunt him in the fall. The idea that we need a national dialogue of some sort on issues of race relations is something I think is absolutely true. But here's the rub. (Read the next sentence two or three times because if I had to some up my view of politics in one sentence, by which I mean elections not actual governing, this would be it.) Politics is not about saying what is true; politics is about saying what people want to believe is true. I don't have numbers to back this up, but I don't think most blue-collar white voters (who will decide the election in the key rust-belt states) want to have a dialogue on race. For one, it sounds like the kind of conversation that could lead to someone getting their ass kicked. Secondly, as a nation our preferred way of dealing with major issues is to ignore them and hope they go away. For example, I had a conversation with a blue-collar white man the other night who said: "I just don't see racism as a problem. I think it's a waste of time to talk about". This was amusing to me on one level because racism wasn't a problem for us white men in 1960 or 1860 for that matter. But I think this is indicative of many people who saw Senator Obama as kind of a Tiger Woods of politics up until now, but now view him as "the black candidate". The white people who do realize need for such a dialogue are more likely to be educated, up-scale, and politically liberal. This also happens to be the heart of Obama's constituency. As Obama noted in his speech, less wealthy whites are largely immune to the "white guilt" phenomenon and are less likely to support Obama in the fall. These are the voters who have been the ones staying with Hillary in large numbers, even prior to the Wright stuff. This group not only is less likely to suffer from white guilt but are the most likely to experience the opposite phenomenon, a (hopefully small) portion of this group are the people I believe are fuelling the surging nativism in this country, blaming their economic woes on minorities. This is a voting bloc that would otherwise be tailor-made for a Democrat running for the White House in the current economy. I had a conversation with a co-worker the other day who was going on about how the economy is bad because of Iraq and how Bush just wanted the oil,etc. (which I wish was true, that would be less frightening to me than the reality that he believes he's on a mission from God.) So this guy should be someone the dems could bank on in November. But he ended the conversation by saying: "but we're gonna have a race war if that LaBamba gets elected!" There's no way of knowing how many people like this are out there and I hope it's a small number but I have a nagging suspicion otherwise. Fortunately for the Obama campaign all this happened in March and not October. The sooner he can get back on message and have us talking about hope and change rather than black and white, the better. I don't want to see him lose the election because of the race issue, I want to see him lose the election because his solution to this issue laid out at the end of his speech is the same as his solution to every issue: throwing more money into failed government programs. In a forthcoming post, I'll lay out what I would do to rejuvenate America's poor inner-city communities (and at the same time the large black and Latino populations therein) and how McCain can make up some ground in these areas.