Marty Peretz: Andy Young, Barack Obama and the Black Vote

The old-time black politicians and other public figures are mostly in Hillary Clinton's camp. It is, of course, habit -- how could it not have been otherwise? -- for"people of color" to sue for patronage and programs before the white office-holders whom they had helped elect. For nearly eighty years this meant that most people of color (how this differs so greatly from" colored people" is a mystery to me, but...) voted Republican because the Democratic Party as a whole was mortgaged to the Democratic Party of the South and, oh, yes, Abraham Lincoln was a Republican. That began to change with Franklin Roosevelt, and the black vote has been going Democratic (hugely) since then.

Jesse Jackson hijacked part of the black vote and used it to acquire personal position and sway in the country, and he did this at no time so deftly during than the Clinton administration, in which he served as the country's totemic plenipotentiary in Africa. Along with his sidekick, Susan Rice, and from this position, he put America on the wrong side of the calamity in Liberia and Sierra Leone. Jackson was the hip-hop pontificator and Al Sharpton the buffoon in this arrangement of power, such as it was.

Barack Obama threatens all these cushy contracts. He has enormous support among whites and less support among blacks. But his victory in the Democratic Party, even if he doesn't actually win the election, would alter the dynamics of American politics, in general, and of racial politics, in particular. In fact, there would be much less drama in the racial issue and much more achievement on matters touched with race. No one could say that Obama was at bottom a racial politician, and that's because he hasn't been. Still, no one could deny that he was elected -- if he is elected -- in the full consciousness of the American people that he is an Afro-American. And his mixed-race origins make him more and more like other people identified as Afro-American. This paradigm fits the type of other Americans: mixed race, mixed religion, mixed ethnicity, even mixed class. This is also an American experiment, an American achievement.

Sorry about this long prelude. But these are some reflections on the news I read in The Economist that the alter ego of Martin Luther King, the Reverend Andrew Young, now a businessman lucratively representing American companies in Africa and African states in America, had endorsed Mrs. Clinton. This is no surprise. No longer a moralist but a calculator, Andy is entrapped in the ways of the old regime, a huge part of which is the dependency of blacks on whites. Bill Clinton's black appointments were largely symbolic in what has been historically black turf. Looking at her top campaign staff, is there reason to think that Hillary would appoint a black person as secretary of state or attorney general, spots into which George Bush put two blacks and one Latino? Not particularly distinguished appointments but hardly less distinguished than his other designees....