Ishmael Reed, Obama, and Progressives

Leave it to Ishmael Reed (shown at left) to hit a topic on the head. The award-winning author contributed an opinion piece in today's New York Times which points out the fault line between race and the perspectives of white political progressives, using perceived "deportment" as a point of departure. The final two paragraphs of the piece offer Reed's challenging insights:

When these progressives refer to themselves as Mr. Obama’s base, all they see is themselves. They ignore polls showing steadfast support for the president among blacks and Latinos. And now they are whispering about a primary challenge against the president. Brilliant! The kind of suicidal gesture that destroyed Jimmy Carter — and a way to lose the black vote forever.

Unlike white progressives, blacks and Latinos are not used to getting it all. They know how it feels to be unemployed and unable to buy your children Christmas presents. They know when not to shout. The president, the coolest man in the room, who worked among the unemployed in Chicago, knows too.

For some time, I viewed white progressive embrace of Obama as fundamentally a class issue, in which progressives brushed aside race. Obama was "someone like us." He went to Harvard, he played basketball, he was thin, he was an attorney, he was comfortable with ideas that played well in aspirational households. In many ways, Obama was the anti-George W. Bush, whose boorish behavior and thoughtless leadership repulsed progressives (and others, eventually).

The class prejudice became evident when the Republican Party nominated Sarah Palin as its vice-presidential candidate in the 2008 presidential election. The smarmy vituperation against the former Alaska governor was striking for its free-for-all intensity. She was "white trash," "stupid," "vain"; she was the anti-Hillary Clinton. She didn't read what "our kind of people read," a point Katie Couric's interview with Palin made evident. The point of Couric's question was to give Palin a chance to show she was "someone like us." (That approach of Couric's inquiry has been the essence of the "fairness" argument on the CBS News anchor's behalf.) Once Palin whiffed on Couric's question, the classists expressed alarm that a backwoods moron could be a McCain heart attack away from the Oval Office. (The classists conveniently forgot about Ronald Reagan and his equally light intellectual curiosity.)

White progressives have assumed since the 2008 Democratic primaries that Obama was "one of us." Instead of viewing the then-US senator as a human being with ambitions and flaws, he became a "cause" with "fans." This fragile, insubstantial perspective would inevitably be shattered once Obama became president. To some extent, Obama courted this disenchantment by vaguely promising "change" in the 2008 election.

The wake-up call for classists came in the 2010 election, in which right-wing candidates routed nearly anyone associated with Obama and the Democratic Party. For classists, the election meant a return to being out of power, and taking comfort in an unjustified attitude of smug superiority. Maybe they could take a collective year away, like Elizabeth Gilbert did, write a memoir about their experiences, and have Julia Roberts be the bankable star for the film version of the work. The bad news for the classists is that Sarah Palin wrote a best-selling memoir, too. Unlike Gilbert, she does not have a Hollywood doppelganger.

Let's just say each book had its unique audience. Obama, to his credit, understands this class divide. Now he has to work to maintain a coalition of classists and out-of-the-money folks (mainly African-American and Latino) to counterpoint Tea Party fanatics, in-the-money fixers, and those who profit or believe in the American political status quo.

Keep in mind Republican harassment of Obama, via congressional hearings and other dreadful witch-hunts, will escalate in January 2011. Now there's a "deportment" issue waiting to happen.