David Dante Troutt

How Right to Be So Wrong: Barack Obama and the Essential Surprise

Sometimes there’s nothing more satisfying than being completely wrong.

The good white folks of Indiana made sure of this in last week’s primary, just when Barack Obama’s candidacy was supposed to hinge on the “coalition” of working-class white voters Hillary Clinton had accumulated in Pennsylvania.  Pennsylvania’s “bitter” whites gave Clinton renewed hope by dashing the hope that Democrats might transcendently vote the issues and the odds rather than any prejudices they might harbor.  Pennsylvania made me wonder if I’d been right about race in America after all.  But white folks turn out to be less predictable than Hillary thought.

The Obama campaign has taught us many things so far.  He was right about the wisdom of running for president so soon.  His campaign awakened new voters with positive substance rather than negative pushback.  Intellectuals are discovering the value of a clearer line between secular black leadership and religious leadership.  Pundits are learning the importance of Chicago politics to multiracial politics and the South Side as a laboratory for American urban politics.  Liberals are re-examining their assumptions.

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Deficient Differences: How Barack Obama Deals with a Loss in the Family

Barack Obama’s emphatic denunciation of his former pastor, Jeremiah Wright, for a series of comments the reverend made to news outlets last week is far more than politics.  Rev. Wright reveled in a bewildering litany of racial differences.  He repeated his most charged political beliefs and characterized this tempest in the racial trope of an attack on black faith before Obama finally cut him loose.  But this spectacle is more personal than political and more universal than racial.

Instead, we are riveted by some lasting mythology about human bonds.  The Obama-Wright breach is intriguing for its psychological familiarity, and as compelling as a car crash.  If cultures and religions invent eternal myths as narrations of life, where does this story fit and what could it mean for Obama?

The obvious analogy is an inversion of the Oedipal struggle, where the enraged father seeks the death of his son but accomplishes only their mutual destruction.

Or try Roman mythology with Reverend Wright as the ruler of the universe, Saturn, whose children were prophesied one day to depose him.  As each is born, he devours them.  Yet one gets away, Jupiter, who ultimately defeats his father.  This myth even reaches into astrology where Saturn is associated with old age, melancholy and the domineering father.  Jupiter—Barack—represents goodness.

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