Is Obama One of Us?
Muwakkil, Salim
By Salim Muwakkil Illustration by Robin Eley Is ObamaOne of Us? Should progressives be happy about the Presidential candidacy of Senator Barack Hussein Obama? That is one question little asked...
...And then there’s the issue of his fidelity to “blackness...
...Nor is Obama’s light skin and biracial parentage a barrier: Garvey’s rival and scholar W. E. B. Du Bois had an even lighter complexion than Obama and is acknowledged as one of African America’s greatest heroes...
...He said it was time to stop coddling the Iraqis,” Ford says...
...In general, says Ford, Obama is “bobbing and weaving and ducking and paying homage to conventional wisdom” when it comes to Middle East policy...
...Critics charge he has made a dramatic turn to the right while positioning himself for a national run...
...Bositis says political prognosticators see a significant Democratic gain in the Congress in 2008 (“especially if the Iraq War continues to rage”), with a continuing deterioration of the “Republicans’ brand...
...Ford even takes issue with Obama’s language concerning the Iraq War...
...but wouldn’t an Administration run by someone nurtured by the left, with a professed affection for leftist ideas, be better than an Administration run by someone else...
...Obama’s manifest talents (he had a quick legal mind, progressive concerns, and extraordinary charisma) soon attracted notice, and he began making political moves...
...Silverstein outlined a host of lobbying firms and political action committees that are funneling money to the freshman Senator...
...Obama left that job to attend Harvard Law School, where he later was elected to the executive board of the Black Law Students Association and president of the Harvard Law Review...
...But some dismiss Obama’s campaign as a progressive illusion...
...Barack’s no radical...
...He’s done some things to heal the wounds and some things to exacerbate them,” says Worrill...
...And even if he is the son of a white Kansan mother and black Kenyan father, doesn’t his rise represent a significant retreat from the xenophobic expressions of America’s past...
...Some of that suspicion lingers...
...It’s up to us to widen that context...
...Salim Muwakkil is a senior editor at In These Times who also writes for the Chicago Tribune...
...He says Obama’s rude entry into Chicago politics painted him as an impudent outsider, somewhat defiant of protocol...
...That is one question little asked in the furor surrounding the forty-five-year-old Illinois Senator’s entry into the Presidential sweepstakes...
...He led the legislative fight for an earnedincome tax credit, the expansion of early childhood education, and a crackdown on predatory lenders...
...That question is beside the point to David Bositis, a senior research associate with the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, a black-oriented think tank...
...com...
...Born and raised mostly in Hawaii (he lived in Indonesia for four years, from six to ten years old), Obama came to Chicago in 1985 after graduating from Columbia University in New York with a B.A...
...After all, white Americans finally seem willing to back a black man for President...
...By our measurements he is no progressive,” notes Glenn Ford, cofounder of two web magazines, BlackCommunicator.com and blackagendareport...
...But let’s be real...
...In fact,” he adds, “I was beginning to doubt if I would ever see the day...
...Obama may not be perfect (who is...
...He was very bright and dedicated and respectful and he sought help from us old heads in his organizing efforts,” recalls Black...
...Liberal pundits, those slightly left of center, seem to be the primary pushers of the Obama bandwagon...
...In a nation disillusioned by feckless leadership and a seemingly interminable war, the time is ripe for that discussion...
...Bositis disagrees...
...As unofficial arbiters of racial authenticity, black nationalists often measure a black candidate’s base of support...
...He even joined a campaign to amend the state constitution to define health care as a basic right...
...Obama graduated magna cum laude in 1991 and returned to Chicago to direct Illinois Project Vote, where he helped the group register more than 100,000 new voters...
...Congress...
...Obama’s progressive identity has also been called into question by his reliance on the usual network of money and corporate influence...
...He co-sponsored a bill to raise the minimum wage and was instrumental in expanding the children and family health insurance program in Illinois...
...Questions like: “Is he really black, or black enough...
...There’s no doubt that it’s a real sign of racial progress to have a black man as a serious—and I mean serious—Presidential candidate,” says Timuel D. Black, eighty-eight, professor emeritus at City Colleges of Chicago and participant in virtually every progressive movement in Chicago for the last sixty years...
...There still is some reluctance among African Americans to support him because many are not yet convinced he can actually win...
...This, of course, is bad news for those who envisioned Obama as a progressive town crier, willing to risk political marginalization to speak troublesome truths about social justice, militarism, and market tyranny...
...Well, yes and no...
...has coddled nearly 600,000 Iraqis to death...
...And then there was the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, the tousled-hair Harlem Congressman who looked white but called himself a black nationalist...
...In an examination of those links, Harper’s Magazine’s Ken Silverstein wrote that it’s “startling to see how quickly Obama’s senatorship has been woven into the web of institutionalized influence-trading that afflicts official Washington...
...Ford cites Obama’s votes for tort reform, the renewal of the Patriot Act, and the confirmation of Condoleezza Rice...
...have dominated the public discourse so far...
...Conrad Worrill recalls thinking...
...But that is no barrier to racial acceptance: Marcus Garvey, a Jamaican, started the United Negro Improvement Association in New York City, and it became the largest African American organization in the nation’s history...
...Discussions of the tangled issues of race and culture are long overdue, and Obama’s public prominence offers an opportunity to address many of them...
...The U.S...
...That’s like saying the Belgians ‘coddled’ the Congolese during their genocidal colonial rule...
...Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has hinted he is the son of a Portuguese Jew...
...As Bositis notes, Obama is a progressive in the context of Washington...
...in political science...
...Where did this dude Obama come from...
...His well-publicized embrace of religious values also appeals to those slightly right of center as well...
...He’s a practical politician who understands that a true progressive agenda is not possible until the Democrats win the White House and get a bigger Congressional cushion,” he says...
...Ford said a perusal of the votes Obama has cast during his short Senate tenure reveals his political allegiances...
...After a short stint working as a technical writer for a business firm, he served for three years as director of the Developing Communities Project, a nonprofit program that worked in low-income neighborhoods to help establish a range of community development programs...
...Such support is a crucial element in Obama’s ability to tap into the black vote as a bloc...
...He wondered how a reform candidate could be successful in a political system so dependent on big money “without the kind of compromising and horse-trading that may, in fact, render him impotent...
...Bositis believes Obama is a genuine progressive in the narrow political context that frames Washington, D.C...
...He challenged Palmer’s petition to retain her spot on the ballot and she was forced to bow out...
...Worrill is director of the Jacob Carruthers’ Center for Inner City Studies at Northeastern Illinois University and one of Chicago’s most influential black organizers...
...He sponsored a racial profiling bill that required police departments to record the race of stopped motorists and a bill requiring that interrogations and confessions in capital crime cases be videotaped...
...While not explicitly pro-Obama, Worrill says he is “inclined to support the mass motion and the hopeful atmosphere that surrounds his candidacy...
...Ford also condemns the Senator’s refusal to join Senator Barbara Boxer’s attempt to address voting irregularities in Ohio...
...Already, he’s provoked serious (and not-so-serious) discussions about the nature of race and culture...
...With a residue of fear still hanging over the electorate and a still-potent GOP, Obama’s cautious moves are strategic...
...Until then, he says, we are not likely to see much progressive legislation no matter how bitterly we criticize the ruling Democrats...
...His lack of an ancestral narrative shaped by the trauma of chattel slavery does differentiate him a bit from other African Americans...
...The dilemma was neatly summed up by Princeton University Professor Melissa V. Harris-Lacewell, who told The Washington Post that “you can be elected President as a black person only if you signal at some level that you are independent from black people...
...But Obama refused to step down...
...His chief strategist, David Axelrod, is considered one of the sharpest minds in the political consultant game, and he knows that by targeting the center-left to the center-right, Obama is focusing on the electoral bull’s-eye...
...When he unsuccessfully challenged Representative Bobby Rush for the First Congressional seat in 2000, Obama reinforced that impression...
...Although Worrill calls himself a black nationalist, he was a prime mover in Washington’s initial mayoral campaign and knows the value of coalition politics...
...Black has known Obama since the early 1980s, when he arrived in Chicago to work as an organizer on the city’s far South Side...
...He also began teaching at the University of Chicago Law School...
...His first target was the Illinois senate’s Thirteenth Legislative District, and the way initially seemed greased when he was endorsed by the incumbent, who was leaving to make a run for the U.S...
...Until the system is changed, any candidate who is going to win is going to have these financial supporters,” he says...
...This is no accident...
...Obama’s entry into the electoral fray certainly raises the level of public discourse...
...If black nationalist activists are willing to submerge their prickly sensibilities into the candidacy of a dedicated coalitionist like Obama, the bandwagon could pick up steam...
...As an Illinois state senator, Obama was a paragon of progressivism...
...He then joined a small law firm dedicated to social justice cases and headed by Judson Miner, former corporation counsel for the late Harold Washington, Chicago’s first black mayor...
...If a candidate wants to score some anti-corporate points but doesn’t really want to win, they can disdain the financial network...
...But isn’t his political viability itself a reason for progressive celebration...
...This maneuver tainted his relationship with Chicago’s notoriously insular black activist community...
...Senator Alice Palmer, a well-liked legislator with a rich history of progressive activism, was the incumbent who later changed her plans and decided to remain in her state senate seat...
Vol. 71 • April 2007 • No. 4
