A recent AFP article has suggested: Obama’s toughest sell for White House bid may be to other blacks. The article’s main subject is that the civil rights establishment is lukewarm about Barak Obama because:
The article, which includes only interviews and no polling on the subject, recognizes that: “African-Americans however, who are are accustomed to leaders who emerge from the civil rights movement, sometimes appear to struggle to relate to Obama.”
To me, one of Obama’s most important aspects of being a credible Black candidate for President is that he is not part of the civil rights movement (or perhaps, more accurately, came of political age in the post-civil rights movement era). As such, he does not appear to view and express issues through a lens of racial injustice. Similarly, he is not loaded with the baggage (to the white populace) of the civil rights movement. He presents himself as a down-to-earth intellectual, and not with the strong cadences of the civil rights preacher-leaders.
Although he is criticized by some of those quoted in the article for the purported inauthenticity of his Black experience, his first book, Dreams from my Father, focuses on how he dealt with growing up Black in America and his experiences a political organizer in an almost entirely Black neighborhood on the South Side of Chicago. Although his upbringing was not that of the stereotypical Southern rural or Northern urban Black, it is apparent from his writing that he has strong, first-hand experience of the difficulties and discrimination faced by Blacks in this country and cares deeply about racial issues and reconciliation.
It seems to me that there is a strong element of jealousy in the comments of the civil rights leaders quoted in the article, or perhaps more charitably, a feeling that Obama is coasting into an opportunity that is only available because of their unacknowledged hard work. To the extent that civil rights leaders claim to speak for all American Blacks, the emergence of someone like Obama outside their orbit threatens their claim.
To the extent that a Black candidate aspires to national office, he or she must appeal to more White voters than Black voters, and thus cannot be seen to be focused primarily on Black issues. Thus, Obama, Powell and Rice have national potential, where someone like Sharpton (his other faults aside) do not. I can’t see how racial divisiveness and pandering would play outside a primarily Black constituency.
Although some of the civil rights leaders seem to be crying in their beer that one of them isn’t likely to be the first credible Black Presidential candidate, I don’t know why any other of the serious candidates would have stronger Black appeal.
So, is this article just an attempt to come at Obama from a different angle then deluge of stories positioning him as the Great Black Hope, or is there really discontent with Obama among the Black “leadership”? And more significantly, what is the view of the Black voter on the street?
