by Frank James
The ever thoughtful Shelby Steele has an interesting take on why Jesse Jackson obviously isn't feeling Sen. Barack Obama the way so many other African Americans are.
The editors of The Wall Street Journal's op-ed page gave Steele's piece the grabber of a headline "Why Jesse Jackson hates Obama."
According to Steele, one of the most interesting commentators on race in America, Jackson is angry at Obama because the senator from Illinois has turned his back on the tactic that civil-rights leaders used to gain leverage against whites, which is essentially white guilt.
He could have taken up the mantle of the early Martin Luther King (he famously smeared himself with the great man's blood after King was shot), and argued for equality out of a faith in the imagination and drive of his own people. Instead -- and tragically -- he and the entire civil rights establishment pursued equality through the manipulation of white guilt.
Their faith was in the easy moral leverage over white America that the civil rights victories of the 1960s had suddenly bestowed on them. So Mr. Jackson and his generation of black leaders made keeping whites "on the hook" the most sacred article of the post-'60s black identity.
They ushered in an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage. To argue differently -- that black development, for example, might be a more enduring road to black equality -- took whites "off the hook" and was therefore an unpardonable heresy. For this generation, an Uncle Tom was not a black who betrayed his race; it was a black who betrayed the group's bounty of moral leverage over whites. And now comes Mr. Obama, who became the first viable black presidential candidate precisely by giving up his moral leverage over whites.
This is somewhat different than what many people assumed was really the cause for Jackson's outburst against Obama, that is, simple, or maybe not so simple, jealousy.
Black America has seen this movie before. There was the rivalry between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. DuBois at the start of the 20th Century. That contest was based partly on ideology as to the best way for African Americans to advance in a racist nation. But it was also personal.
Later, any number of civil-rights leaders like Roy Wilkens of the NAACP and Whitney M. Young of the Urban League were thought to be jealous of Martin Luther King Jr. for, in their view, not having paid sufficient dues and for giving short shrift to their organizations' civil-rightsefforts.
Given this, it's curious that Steele doesn't mention jealousy as a possible reason for Jackson's raw feelings expressed over that "hot mike."
After establishing why he believes Obama has earned Jackson's ire, Steele, a scholar at the Stanford University's Hoover Institution, a home base for numerous conservative thinkers, takes a shot at the all-but-official Democratic presidential nominee, essentially accusing Obama of being politically agnostic, of having a candidacy that's more about changing the way Americans confront race than it is about a specific political agenda.
But here lies his essential contradiction: His campaign is more cultural than political. He sells himself more as a cultural breakthrough than as a candidate for office. To be a projection screen for the cultural aspirations of both blacks and whites one must be an invisible man politically. Real world politics, in their mundanity, interrupt cultural projections. And so Mr. Obama's political invisibility -- a charm that can only derive from a lack of deep political convictions -- may well serve his cultural appeal, but it also makes him something of a political mess.
Already he has flip-flopped on campaign financing, wire-tapping, gun control, faith-based initiatives, and the terms of withdrawal from Iraq. Those enamored of his cultural potential may say these reversals are an indication of thoughtfulness, or even open-mindedness. But could it be that this is a man who trusted so much in his cultural appeal that the struggles of principle and conscience never seemed quite real to him? His flip-flops belie an almost existential callowness toward principle, as if the very idea of permanent truth is passé, a form of bad taste.
A novel theory, that Obama believes in no permanent truths. Not quite sure how Steele gets there, even acknowledging Obama's several revisions on policy issues.
It seems Obama must believe in at least one permanent truth to which all successful politicians subscribe. It is that if a politician is to gain power in order to exercise it and fulfill his agenda, he must do what he needs to, within reason, to first get elected.
Posted by Frank James on July 22, 2008 11:48 AM