A Brief History…

UPDATE #2: The polls are showing bad news for Obama.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of the nation’s voters say they’ve seen news coverage of the McCain campaign commercial that includes images of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton and suggests that Barack Obama is a celebrity just like them. Of those, just 22% say the ad was racist while 63% say it was not.

However, Obama’s comment that his Republican opponent will try to scare people because Obama does not look like all the other presidents on dollar bills was seen as racist by 53%. Thirty-eight percent (38%) disagree.

McCain’s viral marketing is working.

UPDATE: Those shadows on Obama’s front porch are vultures that flew over from the primary. They are home to roost for a while.

Matt Lauer interviews both campaign managers and Axelrod essentially concedes the racial meaning of the “dollar bill” comment.

[W]hat it means, what he was saying – and he does this in a self mocking way – look, I know I’m not from central casting when it comes to presidents of the United States. I’m new, I’m relatively young, I haven’t spent my life in Washington. And yes, I’m African-American – and that’s going to be some fodder.

The president on the dollar bill, Washington, never spent a day in Washington, DC and he had never held elective office. Andrew Jackson, on the $20 bill was also a general and never spent a day in Washington until he was elected. Abraham Lincoln had been a Congressman for one term and Thomas Jefferson, while he had been governor of Virginia, had not served in Washington. Benjamin Franklin, who had never been president, is on the $100 bill but, again, the capital was in Philadelphia and New York while Franklin spent most of his time in Europe as ambassador. There is just no other interpretation of Obama’s remark except that McCain was referring to his race. Axelrod concedes this. Even the Los Angeles Times admits the fact that the remark was about his race and that Obama accuses McCain of attacking him because of his race.

Obama has since called the race charge “a typical pattern” of the GOP campaign.

But now Obama’s chief campaign strategist, David Axelrod, admits his candidate was referring in part to his race when he suggested the McCain campaign wants voters to fear Obama because he doesn’t look like other presidents.

Shelby Steele, who is biracial like Obama, has written books about the dilemma of young men who are black but have white mothers. Obama has chosen, by his choice of the church he attended and other choices, to seek his black identity. He has called his grandmother, who raised him in his teens, “a typical white person.” On the other hand, he is trying to attain the highest office in American politics, which requires a majority of votes from whites. Steele has described two tactics used by black strivers to deal with the majority white society. He calls one of them “bargainers,” those who present a nonthreatening face and seek approval from whites. Oprah Winfrey is Steele’s example. David Ehrenstein called Obama, “The Magic Negro” as a way of describing the same persona of a black man who seeks white approval and does not mention the anger and alienation that is felt by other blacks and which he, himself, may feel but conceals.

The other tactic described by Steele is the “challenger” who does show anger and demands concessions from whites to assuage his anger and their guilt for past oppression of blacks. Two examples he gives are Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton. Jackson once tried to run for president but challengers are not going to get any votes from the vast majority of whites who, while aware of past injustices, feel no responsibility for them and who themselves are free of racial bias.

If Obama, under the pressure of the campaign and frustrated at his failure to achieve the high poll numbers he is convinced that he deserves, slips into the challenger role, he will fall quickly from grace. The votes from blacks and guilty whites are not enough to carry more than a couple of big cities. This may have been the first slip. The tactic worked against the Clintons in the primary but Democratic primary voters are far from the American mainstream.

H/T to Powerline and Politico.

Tags: Obama, race

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 2nd, 2008 at 7:51 am and is filed under politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.