VDH's Private Papers::Beneath the Hope

May 23, 2008
Beneath the Hope . . .
Obama and the politics of grievance
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Magazine

The more Barack Obama racks up majorities in states with large university and African-American populations — what Clinton strategist Paul Begala called the “eggheads and African-Americans” — the more he seems to fare poorly in the electoral-vote-rich states that will be in play in November, most of which have large white-working-class constituencies. Indeed, he may be the first Democratic nominee in memory to lose all the primary elections in California, Indiana, New Jersey, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Texas.

Barack Obama talks passionately about hope, change — and racial transcendence. But what advanced him this far was not merely his eloquence, but also his ability simultaneously to play on, and disguise, the politics of racial grievance. And yet he seems confused and angry when reminded that such a doctrine won’t quite deliver him the presidency. When the anti-American remarks of Rev. Jeremiah Wright were widely aired, Obama seemed at first taken aback. Why would anyone be outraged? After all, there was nothing secret about Wright. Obama had even quoted, in his memoir, Wright’s accusations that white America was responsible for everything from world hunger to genocide against the Japanese, and had bragged in speeches about his intimacy with Wright.

So Obama was naturally confused by the outcry. At first he thought he could shrug his way out of it with the quip that the Trinity congregation was not “particularly controversial”; Wright himself, in Obama’s words, was “brilliant” and a “respected Biblical scholar.” Yet within days Obama resorted to a different defense: that the former Marine and community benefactor Jeremiah Wright was not much more out of the mainstream than the proverbial outspoken and often embarrassing “old uncle.” After that, Obama ended up offering several additional explanations, among them an inspirational speech on race — which unexpectedly turned out to be a sort of get-out-of-jail-free card for Wright, who at the National Press Club confirmed that his earlier inane rants about whites, the AIDS virus, and American culpability for 9/11 in fact were not taken out of context but deeply embedded in his world view.

For all Obama’s eloquence, his clean-up campaign contextualized the serial Wright venom within the familiar saga of grievance and racial victimization: Whites do not understand the theatrical protocols of Wright’s black church. The prior good works of Wright in community outreach and anti-apartheid activism outweigh his occasional unfortunate speech. Wright’s slurs were taken out of context. Wright had been turned into a convenient tool for right-wing politicos. In short, Obama was reduced to pleading on March 18, “I can no more disown him [Wright] than I can my white grandmother — a woman who helped raise me.”

But, of course, that blanket amnesty became inoperative after the enterprising Wright’s National Press Club rant of April 27, whose insulting tone elicited outrage among the liberal Washington press corps, and thus required yet another Obama clarification: “It’s antithetical to our campaign. It’s antithetical to what I’m about. It’s not what America stands for. Rev. Wright does not speak for me. He doesn’t speak for our campaign. I can’t prevent him from making these outrageous remarks. . . . When I say I find these statements appalling, I mean it . . . makes me angry and saddens me.”

Wright, of course, said nothing on April 27 that he had not said previously. To his credit, Wright has been consistent in his views, odious though they may be. It is Obama who on five or six occasions has changed his story about Wright — always under pressure, and always in reaction to the public’s, rather than his own, outrage at Wright.

It’s Not Just Wright

Meanwhile, Michelle Obama, the candidate’s wife, was reported airing her own grievances about a “just downright mean” America. Her serial complaints culminated in the now infamous, “For the first time in my adult life, I am proud of my country.” That revelation, voiced on two separate occasions, raised a storm of protest, since it seemed to confirm that Wright’s anti-American message had been absorbed into the Obama worldview after the couple’s 20 years of attendance at his church.

The most controversial of the growing list of Obama grievances and clumsy retractions was Barack’s dismissal of Pennsylvania’s small-town, middle-America culture: “And it’s not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.”

Like Rev. Wright’s mendacious views on 9/11 and AIDS, almost everything in Obama’s single sentence was either untrue or disingenuous. Pennsylvanians valued gun ownership and religion for centuries before the supposed current economic downturn — and while times are perceived as rough, the unemployment rate in Pennsylvania is still about 5 percent. Obama himself has whipped up “anti-trade sentiment” by trashing NAFTA and other proposed trade accords.

That he gave this speech in liberal, upscale San Francisco only added to the aura of condescension — especially the standard liberal trope of false consciousness: The ignorant working classes turn toward extraneous palliatives rather than follow the advice of Harvard intellectuals to agitate for economic redistribution that would better solve their mostly material problems. Had Hillary Clinton used the same sort of “they” language — say in front of a conservative, Midwestern white audience — to explain why inner-city, gun-toting, church-attending African-Americans were turning out en masse for Obama, her campaign would have been rightly finished then and there.

Michelle resonated these same themes of liberal superciliousness when she announced that “Barack is one of the smartest people you will ever encounter who will deign to enter this messy thing called politics.” She even expanded on Barack’s dismissal of Pennsylvanians, by suggesting that all of America suffers from the same blinkered parochialism: “Barack will never allow you to go back to your lives as usual, uninvolved, uninformed.”

More disturbing than the original grievance was Obama’s rationalization for his Pennsylvania comment. He didn’t apologize for the sentiments expressed, but instead lamely pleaded that he might have “mangled” or “conflated” what he intended to say. Later Obama suggested that his message about Middle America’s misery and bitterness was true. But when Obama’s formal clarification of Pennsylvania’s problems followed, it once again only emphasized his accustomed slipperiness: “So people they vote about guns, or they take comfort from their faith and their family and their community. And they get mad about illegal immigrants who are coming over to this country or they get frustrated about, you know, how things are changing. That’s a natural response.”

Note how the original “cling” now becomes “vote about” and “take comfort from.” Likewise, “antipathy to people who aren’t like them” morphs into “their family and community” — as fundamentalist xenophobes are really just beleaguered folks who band together. Obama lectured the San Francisco-area wealthy about the “anti-immigrant” scapegoating habits of Middle Americans. But he really meant, or so he later said, that they are merely “mad about illegal immigrants.” Note again, in the clarification, how Obama’s nativists, who oppose all immigrants, legal and illegal, transform into reasonable people becoming understandably angry only about those coming here illegally.

Yet when all that still didn’t work, Obama simply said he was a churchgoer himself, so how could he ridicule devout Pennsylvanians? — omitting altogether that he had slurred them as clinging to “antipathy to people who aren’t like them or anti-immigrant sentiment.”

Silver Spoons

Why do the affluent, astute Obamas cling to such doctrinaire grievances, and then offer insulting clarifications when called on them? The obvious explanation is that Barack Obama had previously navigated only on the small lakes of the Ivy League and Chicago politics, where the drumbeat of grievance pays real dividends and easy anti-American throw-off lines are hardly gaffes. But now, for the first time in his life, he is buffeted by the gales of an ever-widening national campaign where his once-persuasive themes suddenly sound absurd.

The problem with Obama’s former habitat — and the Democratic-primary landscape — is not just that activist African-Americans, students, and Ivy Leaguers are not a good cross-section of the American population. Rather, such sympathetic audiences ensured that every whine that he and his wife have voiced over 20 years has been applauded rather than examined — and so they became deeply ingrained into the Obama psyche. When pressed on Wright’s Press Club slurs, Michele Obama announced: “You know what I think. . . . We’ve got to move forward. You know, this conversation doesn't help my kids.” With Michelle, it is never about reassuring “uninvolved, uniformed” Americans that she condemns Wright, the abject racist — but always about her own family’s travails.

An upscale Chicago neighborhood hardly thinks that past familiarity with self-described bomber Bill Ayers is a liability. If an Obama associate like Rev. James Meeks blasts homosexuals, or Los Angeles Obama supporter Rev. Eric Lee spouts anti-Semitic drivel, they do so under the accepted cover that African-American victims cannot themselves be victimizers. And Rev. Wright’s tirades no more offended 8,000 in the present congregation of Trinity Church than it apparently did the Obamas, who, far from walking out, simply refined Wright in softer and more elegant terms in their own writings and speeches. Those at Columbia or Harvard readily buy into the What’s the Matter with Kansas? pop neo-Marxism — namely, that the Democratic party’s inability to garner a majority of the electorate is caused entirely by the fact that Karl Rove’s Republicans confuse and manipulate ignorant yokels, who, in their desperation and fear, stupidly retreat to guns, God, and racism.

So in his defense, Obama was only voicing what is now the elitist doctrine of many Democrats. Newsweek essayist Michael Hirsh recently scoffed that the problem with the “white working class” that mysteriously cannot appreciate Obama goes back to the pathological nature of American history that plagues us still: “The outcome was that a substantial portion of the new nation developed, over many generations, a rather savage, unsophisticated set of mores. Traditionally, it has been balanced by a more diplomatic, communitarian Yankee sensibility from the Northeast and upper Midwest. But that latter sensibility has been losing ground in population numbers — and cultural weight.”

Given his worldview, it’s entirely predictable that Obama will continue, if inadvertently, to voice grievances that offend those in Middle America. He can win the Democratic nomination the same way McGovern, Mondale, Dukakis, and Kerry did — by appealing to an activist-liberal base. And he will never really offer unequivocal apologies for what he declares or what his associates say, because he doesn’t feel he’s done anything wrong — at least by the standards of his past that are continually buttressed by his own campaign staff and much of the mainstream media. Better to blame Pennsylvania, the “white working class,” or the illiberal Southern and frontier strains within American history for the fact that Obama’s genius is insufficiently appreciated.

Obama thinks mea culpas are not necessary, because his eloquence will always remedy what offends. That’s why someone who was named by the National Journal as the Senate’s most doctrinaire liberal can, with a straight face, persuade millions that he is running on a record of bipartisanship. Obama may advocate engaging Iran’s President Ahmadinejad, who has advocated the annihilation of Israel; but he can also condemn Jimmy Carter’s recent embrace of Hamas leaders with, “We must not negotiate with a terrorist group intent on Israel’s destruction.”

Obama frequently resorts to false analogy. For him, as we have seen, context is everything — and it is often established by false comparison. So, for example, Rev. Wright is not that venomous, but a sort of everyman’s eccentric uncle — as if we can choose blood relatives as we do pastors. Wright’s racism is shared by all, and not meant to be pernicious, in the manner that his grandmother’s fear of young black males on the street is that of a “typical white person” — as if one were right to embarrass a once-nurturing but now-aged grandmother to absolve a political crony; as if there were not statistics suggesting black male youths are more prone to commit violent crimes than their white and Asian counterparts.

According to Obama, unrepentant bomber Bill Ayers is analogous to Sen. Tom Coburn (R.-Okla.), who once suggested that laws might be drafted allowing capital punishment for the abortionist — as if the terrorist in fact were the same as the zealous physician-senator in theory. This is 1960s relativism and “they do it too” at its very worst.

It’s not just inexperience or the climate of the Democratic party, but also the current state of race relations that ensures the Obamas will continue to say things they should not—and then make it worse by rationalizing what they say. For all the incessant calls for a much needed “national conversation about race,” racial grievance is about all we have been talking about the past few years. But it has been an unfortunate one-way sermon, in which well-off African-American activists lament the legacy of slavery, present-day racism, and the need for various forms of reparations, while their white interlocutors accept that there is to be no reference to miseries within the black community that are not explicable only by prejudice — such as inordinate rates of drug use, illegitimacy, and crime.

True “conversations” cannot proceed, because all sorts of taboo topics cannot be raised — from the success of Asians and other minorities to the previous successful integration of millions of blacks into the mainstream of American life. We saw that one-sided dialogue on the airwaves, with too many African-American intellectuals defending Wright by redefining Martin Luther King down as a similar principled firebrand, by arguing that there was often truth to Wright’s slanders, and by associating him with widely shared and legitimate black angst — until Wright embarrassed them all by deliberately going after Obama and insulting a sympathetic white-liberal D.C. press corps.

A Rev. Wright cannot move into a multimillion-dollar estate of over 10,000 square feet by downplaying racial differences, much less by preaching racial reconciliation and self-help. He lacks the talent and character of a Clarence Thomas, Condoleezza Rice, or Colin Powell — indeed, he lacks the ability of the millions in the black middle class that he serially damns. Instead Wright profits by lambasting “black middleclassness,” the U.S., and white people. This offers a sort of Sunday venting for some African-Americans who in effect hire him to “contextualize” and transfer their personal failures and complaints onto some higher plane of cosmic racism — which may well bring them government or social compensation, both material and psychological.

Again, the culmination of Wright’s audacity, and his complete confidence in the exemption that his apparent black authenticity provides, was his infamous April 27 keynote address to the Detroit NAACP’s 53rd Annual Fight for Freedom Fund dinner, in which he delineated racial differences between blacks and “Europeans” in their respective manners of learning acquisition. Wright outlined a “right brain” black emphasis on spirituality and musicality versus a white “left brain” aptitude for analysis and logic — just the sort of Bell Curve racialism that at one time earned blanket condemnation, but it won Wright a standing ovation from an audience of the nation’s premier civil-rights organization (and brought not a word of condemnation from Obama himself).

Sources of Obama Conduct

Obama learned from, but radically refined, this racial approach. A Barry Obama who never attended Trinity Church — one who would write not a memoir called Dreams from My Father, but a more accurate one called Dreams from My Grandparents, in praise of those who raised him — would be evaluated entirely on his own merits. He would find it difficult to transmogrify into a racial sensation that appeals to, and is used by, an entire host of others. In political terms, that might have made him a charismatic and eloquent African-American of mixed heritage in Congress, one who ignores race — like the talented and successful former congressman Harold Ford. If Obama had been a white media sensation, such a newcomer without congressional accomplishment might have matched the third-place finish of suave John Edwards. Without either racial packaging or legislative accomplishment, a talented first-term senator surely would not become a president — as liberals from Black Entertainment Network billionaire Robert Johnson to veteran politico Geraldine Ferraro have pointed out.

Instead, Harvard Law Review editor Barack Obama had to sit through years of Wright’s lunacy precisely to prove to his future constituents that he would air their grievances and establish his own bona fides as a voice of the ghetto oppressed. Once these street credentials were painfully acquired, the Ivy League-educated Obama would — like Wright — win a guilt-free context for an elite lifestyle, and a political base from which to transcend, soaring with a message of social and racial misery. It is a winning combination: Unlike black conservatives, Obama taps into the identity politics of victimization and grievance; unlike white liberals, he resonates racial authenticity; and, unlike race hustlers such as Al Sharpton or Rev. Wright, he is eloquent rather than at times crude and off-putting.

The Obamas may have made over $4 million in 2007, but Michelle can still credibly preach on the stump that a nebulous “they” raised the bar on them—as Ivy League loans, private school, camp for the kids, and costly piano lessons do their part to take them down. The “man” of the ’hood — the “man” who smothers black aspirations — is ubiquitous. Indeed, Michelle can testify that he becomes “they” who hound African-Americans even in the white suburbs after they have become millionaires: “Folks set the bar, and then you work hard and you reach the bar — sometimes you surpass the bar — and then they move the bar!”

To the Obamas, the multifarious “they” are also sometimes the illiberal white working classes, who did not accept hope and change and so lost them Pennsylvania and now Indiana. For Michelle Obama, another “they” changed the rules of campaigning and made the Obamas raise ever more cash and create ever more organization: “They tell you to raise money, you raise money. They tell you to build an organization, and you build an organization.”

If, to acquire lucre and power, a Jeremiah Wright realized that he had to allow angrier African-Americans from time to time to vent their own unhappiness by articulating the role of sinister cosmic forces — such as government-induced HIV viruses and magic bombs that target only blacks and Arabs — a Barack Obama sensed that he could trump that, by franchising his politics of grievance to a new neighborhood of affluent white intellectuals and professionals. Obama gave his Pennsylvania “they cling” speech to a nodding Bay Area audience. While white elites lack the economic resentments of Rev. Wright’s flock, they have psychological needs that a mellifluous Obama brilliantly discovered how to address.

Their zealotry for Obama singularly reassures white liberal elites spiritually that they really are empathetic to minority needs, but need not feel that their own riches came at the expense of others. Through her Huffington Post, an Arianna Huffington can voice the Obama concern for the oppressed while cruising the shores of Tahiti in David Geffen’s 457-foot yacht. So there is no reason to join a Trinity outreach program to tutor the ghetto youngster or dismantle the wall around the gated compound, when you can put an Obama sign on your Brentwood lawn. Abroad, the dividends are even greater. A President Barack Hussein Obama, who emblemizes grievance and contrition, can refashion America’s global image. The affluent liberal American wants to be liked every bit as much as he enjoys his hybrid Mercedes, his granite countertops, and having a daughter at Princeton.

This is the maze that Obama worked through in brilliant fashion — in Chicago, in Illinois statewide, and in the primaries. But now, as the general election looms, he is in a much larger, more unfamiliar labyrinth, and he hasn’t quite figured it out yet — even though a war, a troubled economy, and an unpopular Republican president have given him openings not shared by other Democrats since the post-Watergate election of 1976.

Most Americans are tired of racial victimization and opportunism, especially as the country becomes more multiracial, with a myriad of competing grievances. They haven’t elected a Northern liberal president since JFK, nearly half a century ago. They don’t like hypocritical elites preaching to them about their supposedly reactionary habits. And yet some of their votes are still essential, if Obama is going to win the presidency.

So the question remains how quickly an adept, adaptable, and seemingly unprincipled Barack Obama will come to understand that he can no longer say — or contextualize — what was so successful in bringing him this far. Instead, in Bill Clinton fashion, from time to time he will have to bite his lip, look humbled — and then simply apologize for the silly grievances he voices, and the even sillier people that for so long he has befriended. If he cannot do that, then the next six months will be characterized by more smug, off-the-cuff dismissals of middling America, more innate condescension from Michelle Obama, still more racism from the malicious Rev. Wright, more skeletons yet to appear out of Barack Obama’s vast progressive cemetery of the last 20 years — and, by October, the greatest case of Democratic buyer’s remorse since the McGovern campaign of midsummer 1972.