Richard Wolffe: Barack Obama confronts America over the racial divide
[Richard Wolffe is the author of Renegade: the making of Barack Obama]
The interview was over and Barack Obama was slumped in a chair in his conference room, under a framed copy of some minor legislation of which he had been the author. After an hour of talking about race and politics, his handler wrapped up the conversation and suggested it was time to leave.
Then Mr Obama asked me to turn the audio recorder back on. He had something more to say. His staffer looked concerned, but the man himself looked relaxed.
"This is unprompted by a question," he admitted, "but it's prompted by the cut or the angle you guys are taking. I may be off base here. But the impulse I think may be to write a story that says Barack Obama represents a quote-unquote 'post-racial politics'. That term I reject because it implies that somehow my campaign represents an easy shortcut to racial reconciliation. It's similar to the notion that if we're all color blind then somehow problems are solved.
"Solving our racial problems in this country will require concrete steps, significant investment. We're going to have a lot of work to do to overcome the long legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. It can't be purchased on the cheap. I am fundamentally optimistic about our capacity to do that. And I do assert that there's a core decency in the American people and in white Americans that makes me hopeful about our ability to deal with these issues. But these issues aren't just solved by electing a black president."
He could hardly have known how prescient his analysis would be. At the time, in the early summer of 2007, he was a long way from winning a single contest in the presidential election and 18 months away from his inauguration as the country's 44th president. Our interview – for his first Newsweek cover as a presidential candidate – revolved around the media's incessant questions about race and politics: whether he could move beyond race, or move the country beyond its legacy of race...
... However, Democratic candidates have a poor track record of playing such racial politics. Republicans promptly cast themselves as the victims of Carter's comments, a tactic that worked well for Ronald Reagan in 1980, when none other than the Carter campaign tried to suggest that Reagan was voicing racist sympathies in his support for states' rights.
Mr Obama himself experienced something similar last year, when he suggested that his opponents would try to make him scary by pointing out that "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." When his Republican opponents took umbrage, Mr Obama's campaign promptly backed down, conceding that John McCain was not playing on racial fears.
The complexities of racial politics in America are hardly new to Mr Obama. After he was elected the first African American to edit the prestigious Harvard Law Review, he wrote a memoir about finding his racial identity, Dreams from my Father. That book appeared shortly before he entered the Illinois state senate, where he sought friends and allies less among his fellow black Democrats from Chicago, than among conservative white Democrats and Republicans from more suburban and rural districts.
He ran for Congress in 2000 and lost in large part because he failed to play the game of Chicago's racial politics. And when he finally headed for victory as a US Senate candidate, in 2004, he called for the coming together of red and blue America, as much as black and white America.
So the return of racial politics will not shock Mr Obama or his inner circle, who believe that race is catnip to the media. Yet the intensity and speed of its return is unusual. At a time of exceptional economic hardship, history suggests that public anger and racism finds fertile ground across the world.
That intensity will test Mr Obama's strategy on racial politics to its limit. He would prefer to keep his historic position on race as an implicit message, not an explicit one: to lead as a role model, not as a preacher.
When he was deciding whether or not to run for president in late 2006, he and his friends were compelled in part to move forward by the example he would be setting for young African-Americans across the country: that they too could achieve anything they set their mind to. Mr Obama has rarely expressed anything like those sentiments in public, suggesting instead that kids simply need to work hard to succeed.
The days for those implicit messages may be drawing to a close. "There is some space between never talking about race and talking about it all the time," says Prof Dyson. "I know he wants to play the ostrich, hoping that they can hold on and it will go away. But it just keeps on recurring. It would be better to get ahead of the curve rather than responding in a reactionary fashion."
Barack Obama wants to be remembered as the president who took the country – and the world – out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. But the history books will surely record him first as the nation's first African-American president. Between the dire economy and Mr Obama's historic position, there is just enough tension to keep a concerned White House quiet, and its opponents exceptionally – even offensively – vocal.
Read entire article at telegraph.co.uk
The interview was over and Barack Obama was slumped in a chair in his conference room, under a framed copy of some minor legislation of which he had been the author. After an hour of talking about race and politics, his handler wrapped up the conversation and suggested it was time to leave.
Then Mr Obama asked me to turn the audio recorder back on. He had something more to say. His staffer looked concerned, but the man himself looked relaxed.
"This is unprompted by a question," he admitted, "but it's prompted by the cut or the angle you guys are taking. I may be off base here. But the impulse I think may be to write a story that says Barack Obama represents a quote-unquote 'post-racial politics'. That term I reject because it implies that somehow my campaign represents an easy shortcut to racial reconciliation. It's similar to the notion that if we're all color blind then somehow problems are solved.
"Solving our racial problems in this country will require concrete steps, significant investment. We're going to have a lot of work to do to overcome the long legacy of Jim Crow and slavery. It can't be purchased on the cheap. I am fundamentally optimistic about our capacity to do that. And I do assert that there's a core decency in the American people and in white Americans that makes me hopeful about our ability to deal with these issues. But these issues aren't just solved by electing a black president."
He could hardly have known how prescient his analysis would be. At the time, in the early summer of 2007, he was a long way from winning a single contest in the presidential election and 18 months away from his inauguration as the country's 44th president. Our interview – for his first Newsweek cover as a presidential candidate – revolved around the media's incessant questions about race and politics: whether he could move beyond race, or move the country beyond its legacy of race...
... However, Democratic candidates have a poor track record of playing such racial politics. Republicans promptly cast themselves as the victims of Carter's comments, a tactic that worked well for Ronald Reagan in 1980, when none other than the Carter campaign tried to suggest that Reagan was voicing racist sympathies in his support for states' rights.
Mr Obama himself experienced something similar last year, when he suggested that his opponents would try to make him scary by pointing out that "he doesn't look like all those other presidents on the dollar bills." When his Republican opponents took umbrage, Mr Obama's campaign promptly backed down, conceding that John McCain was not playing on racial fears.
The complexities of racial politics in America are hardly new to Mr Obama. After he was elected the first African American to edit the prestigious Harvard Law Review, he wrote a memoir about finding his racial identity, Dreams from my Father. That book appeared shortly before he entered the Illinois state senate, where he sought friends and allies less among his fellow black Democrats from Chicago, than among conservative white Democrats and Republicans from more suburban and rural districts.
He ran for Congress in 2000 and lost in large part because he failed to play the game of Chicago's racial politics. And when he finally headed for victory as a US Senate candidate, in 2004, he called for the coming together of red and blue America, as much as black and white America.
So the return of racial politics will not shock Mr Obama or his inner circle, who believe that race is catnip to the media. Yet the intensity and speed of its return is unusual. At a time of exceptional economic hardship, history suggests that public anger and racism finds fertile ground across the world.
That intensity will test Mr Obama's strategy on racial politics to its limit. He would prefer to keep his historic position on race as an implicit message, not an explicit one: to lead as a role model, not as a preacher.
When he was deciding whether or not to run for president in late 2006, he and his friends were compelled in part to move forward by the example he would be setting for young African-Americans across the country: that they too could achieve anything they set their mind to. Mr Obama has rarely expressed anything like those sentiments in public, suggesting instead that kids simply need to work hard to succeed.
The days for those implicit messages may be drawing to a close. "There is some space between never talking about race and talking about it all the time," says Prof Dyson. "I know he wants to play the ostrich, hoping that they can hold on and it will go away. But it just keeps on recurring. It would be better to get ahead of the curve rather than responding in a reactionary fashion."
Barack Obama wants to be remembered as the president who took the country – and the world – out of the worst recession since the Great Depression. But the history books will surely record him first as the nation's first African-American president. Between the dire economy and Mr Obama's historic position, there is just enough tension to keep a concerned White House quiet, and its opponents exceptionally – even offensively – vocal.