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.

Beyond these unique aspects of the Obama campaign are larger realities most of us miscalculated.  One is the meaning of celebrity to a new generation of voters, and how politics matters but traditional politicians don’t.  Another is the importance of demographic shifts, especially in the South and among traditional GOP voters, that have debunked conventional assumptions about “red” states and “blue.”

But nothing—nothing—has been so underappreciated this campaign season than the relentless force of George Bush’s unmitigated failure as a president.  In war, Katrina, civil liberties, wealth inequality, government secrecy, and grammar, Bush’s unprecedented awfulness has, like political Omega-3 injections, enhanced every strength, excused every weakness of Obama’s candidacy and readied voters for seismic change.

However, it took the color line—that signature issue of the last century—to end the dynastic hopes of the previous frontrunner, Hillary Clinton, in ways she, her husband Bill and I could not have imagined.  Again, Barack knows something many don’t want to believe.

Hillary’s latest (and probably last) comments about Barack and race are not dispositive—we knew she was milking whiteness—but they are instructive about why she and the school of political thought she represents are fundamentally unqualified to be president.  Choosing to remember an AP article this way to USA Today, Clinton said, “Senator Obama’s support among working, hardworking Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how the, you know, whites … who had not completed college were supporting me.”

It’s not just the motive, it’s the language that kills.  The phrase clearly repeats the oft-made association between whites and hard work, the gulf that’s presumed to exist between a black and a hardworking American, all in a shorthand that is repeated by every journalist who mindlessly asserts something unexamined about “lunch bucket,” “blue collar,” “soccer moms,” and “Nascar dads” in the “swing” states of the “heartland.”  The political privilege of being one of these is based on race, geography, religious affiliation and a whole lot of stereotype that certain of us cannot hope to shout above the consensus.  Very little of it holds up to scrutiny.  All of it must be qualified.  Everybody is all of those things in some places.  But kept to age-old binaries, Barack, she assserted, couldn’t reach “them.”

In some circles, we call this either-or oversimplification of social identity “essentialism.”  Essentialism is the playground of misperception, and the games can get deadly when the essentialism turns racial.   Much to Hillary’s surprise, the message spoke mostly for the messenger.

The Clintons seemed dumbfounded by all the backlash.  Their attacks on Barack did the party a favor, they argued, by vetting him for the worst things Republicans will do to him.

The truth in this is equal to its poison.  The Clinton campaign manipulated the essentialism of negative stereotypes about blacks and working-class whites to create a divisive frame in which she’d come out the winner.  It played upon class and race, but did nothing to address the real struggles of either—classic wedge politics.  She could have made a different choice.

Now, John McCain is beginning the same game against Barack, lately in foreign policy.  McCain took a comment by a Hamas leader professing support for an Obama presidency and turned it into a simplistic endorsement of anti-Israel sentiment and, by extension, anti-Semitism.  (Hillary suggested the same thing about Farrakhan’s endorsement of Barack.)  McCain threw in Obama’s willingness to engage Iran diplomatically as further evidence that Barack = bad, McCain’s opposition to diplomacy = good.  Reduced to essentialist opposites, the merits are hard to reach.  Complex issues are regularly re-framed as either “you’re with us or you’re against us,” which is precisely the approach that led to Bush’s Iraq invasion with virtually no support from our allies.

Essentialist language works like segregation: Both wall us off from the means to communicate the range of our humanity with each other.  None of us knows exactly what it takes to join in shared interest.  At the very least, what an Obama presidency could mean is a new context and a new commitment to finding out how better to communicate beyond difference.  This is no small thing.  This was supposed to be the American thing for which we’re admired around the world and of which we are ourselves are most proud.

For those who never saw this coming, we should be grateful to be so wrong.

David Dante Troutt’s most recent books are “The Importance of Being Dangerous” and “After the Storm: Black Intellectuals Explore the Meaning of Hurricane Katrina.”  He is a professor of law at Rutgers University (Newark).

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