From a good New Yorker Article I’m reading about Obama:

“If you’re a black male, you don’t have to try hard to impress people with your aggression,” [George] Haywood says. “There was a period when black politicians started to be successful, and it was understood that if you wanted to be mainstream you’d better have gray hair. Doug Wilder was an example. David Dinkins. Mayor Bradley in L.A. To be popular with the broader white electorate, you’d better look safe, you’d better not look angry. Now, I don’t think Barack made a conscious decision to come across this way, but it is a happy accident. Some people may have seen his speech at the Democratic Convention, or heard that he rocked the house, and they may be disappointed, but the mainstream is not ready for a fire-breathing black man.” (It seems likely that, consciously or not, Obama has learned from these examples, and knows that the election of a President Obama wouldn’t mean a revolution in race relations, any more than women prime ministers were a sign of flourishing feminism in South Asia. Bigotry has always made exceptions.)

I’m only getting started, but the piece is already giving me deep insight into the candidate. Found via Amy.

[Click through for more excerpts and personal reflections that struck me as I read on.]

Obama’s take on his family’s wanderings, a “running strain of innocence, an innocence that seems unimaginable, even by the measures of childhood” hit me personally. It is an eloquent critique of one of my most closely-held ideals: personal freedom.

Innocence, freedom, individualism, mobility—the belief that you can leave a constricting or violent history behind and remake yourself in a new form of your choosing—all are part of the American dream of moving west, first from the old country to America, then from the crowded cities of the East Coast to the open central plains and on to the Pacific. But this dream, to Obama, seems credulous and shallow, a destructive craving for weightlessness. When Obama, as a young man, went to Kenya for the first time and learned how his father’s life had turned out—how he had destroyed his career by imagining that old tribalisms were just pettiness, with the arrogant idea that he could rise above the past and change his society by sheer force of belief—Obama’s aunt told him that his father had never understood that, as she put it, “if everyone is family, no one is family.” Obama found this striking enough so that he repeated it later on, in italics: If everyone is family, no one is family. Universalism is a delusion. Freedom is really just abandonment. You might start by throwing off religion, then your parents, your town, your people and your way of life, and when, later on, you end up leaving your wife or husband and your child, too, it seems only a natural progression.

This personal freedom remains a central part of my identity, but this is a reminder to embody it as a paradox, in the buddhist sense. As a maximalist philosophy, it is no better than selfishness.

Here’s another quote, further revealing Obama as a man after my own heart:

This is, again, partly a matter of temperament. “By nature, I’m not somebody who gets real worked up about things,” Obama writes in his second book. “When I see Ann Coulter or Sean Hannity baying across the television screen, I find it hard to take them seriously.” He tends to think of his opponents as deluded and ridiculous, rather than as demons. “I’ve never been a conspiracy theorist,” he says. “I’ve never believed there are a bunch of people out there who are pulling all the strings and pressing all the buttons. And the reason is that the older I get, the more time I spend meeting people in government or in the corporate arena, the more human everybody becomes. What I do believe is that those with money, those with influence, those with control over how resources are allocated in our society, are very protective of their interests, and they can rationalize infinitely the reasons why they should have more money and power than anyone else, why that’s somehow good for the society as a whole.”

Obama presents himself as (and, I believe, is) deeply humble. Even on gay marriage, which he personally supports on moral grounds, he might still defer to long-standing religious views.

“Rawls talks about civic toleration as a modus vivendi, a way that we can live together, and some liberals think that way,” Sunstein says. “But I think with Obama it’s more like Learned Hand when he said, ‘The spirit of liberty is the spirit which is not too sure that it is right.’ Obama takes that really seriously. I think the reason that conservatives are O.K. with him is both that he might agree with them on some issues and that even if he comes down on a different side, he knows he might be wrong. I can’t think of an American politician who has thought in that way, ever.”

I am probably much less humble than Obama, especially on moral issues such as these. But I suppose that’s why he’s a politician and I’m a misanthropic programmer, ensconced in protective confines of the bay area.

The article also hits a point that I’ve been making for a long time: that Obama is electable because he addresses the shame that white people have around the inequities of race and class in our country. My feeling on this is cynical; I don’t believe that privileged people (myself being one) deserve to have that shame mitigated. The article makes the point more broadly and with less anger:

The only politician he discusses at any length in his first book is the black man who was mayor of Chicago when Obama first moved there, in 1985, Harold Washington. [...] Washington’s victory, Obama saw, had produced in people an almost religious feeling of deliverance. “Like my idea of organizing,” he concluded, Washington “held out an offer of collective redemption.” It is unlikely that Obama would speak of his own candidacy in these terms—that would be embarrassing. But his talk of unity, his avoidance of blame, and his promise to end the war all seem intended to gesture to a similar prospect of redemption: not only for black people but for white people (for voting for a black man), for Republicans (for embracing unity with a Democrat), and for Americans (for saying to the world that the war was a mistake).

… and that’s the end of the piece. Highly recommended.

Related Posts:

• Obama: So Close, So Far (January, 2008)
• Mudslinging (March, 2008)
• The Lobbying vs. the Lobbyist (April, 2008)
• Dennis Kucinich (May, 2007)
• US Military Decides They Must Destroy Iraq To Save It (October, 2005)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 27th, 2007 at 4:04 am and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.