Monday - August 25, 2008

Obama won’t lose for being black but for not being American enough. (AWESOME EDITORIAL)

I have been thinking along these lines re. the election excuses the left and especially the anti-American crowd over here will utter if Rama-Lama loses.  And no matter the reason, it shouldn’t be the business of outsiders anyway.  I think most of us have this take on it. Won’t matter what the truth is.  The hate America left at home and here aren’t interested any truth they do not create to fit their agenda.

Obama won’t lose for being black but for not being American enough

By Janet Daley
Last Updated: 12:01am BST 25/08/2008

The Left is preparing its excuse in advance for Barack Obama losing the presidential election. All together now, let’s hear it: It’s All About Race. However few Americans there may be who are actually prepared to utter the words, “I wouldn’t vote for a black man”, the truth, it is said, is that racial bigotry is at the heart of Obama’s failure to take a convincing lead.

Indeed, on some accounts, the fact of people refusing to utter those words is proof that racism is the main issue in this campaign. So if you say them you’re a bigot, and if you don’t say them, you’re a closet bigot. And on what evidence is this argument, which it is logically impossible to disprove, being based? From what I can see in the published versions, it rests largely on some crass jokes from the shock-jock community, the mumblings of gun-shop customers and a “virulent internet campaign”.

The first two categories are roughly the American equivalents of tabloid headline-writers and taxi drivers. As for the “virulent internet campaign”, the internet is much as it is here: the home of the Green Ink brigade who have got access to the Universe. How would you like it if the mood of Britain were to be judged by the blathering of that small army of dysfunctional men in dressing gowns hunched over laptops spewing out gratuitous hatred at an unappreciative world?

So no, Obama’s failure to close the deal is not “all about race”. Nor will his defeat (as I believe it will be) in the election be evidence of endemic American prejudice. This election will be a little bit about race, a lot more about class and a very great deal about what it means to be identifiably American. The problem that the issue of class in the US presents to British observers (sorry, I must pull rank, as a vestigial American) is that it is very much less explicit and clearly defined than here. The notion of blue collar versus white collar is not strictly comparable to the British working-class and middle-class stratifications, where the distinction denotes a chasm in social attitudes and inherited culture.

In the conventional American political wisdom, it is blue-collar workers who are generally assumed to be among the most aspirational and determinedly upwardly mobile. The blue-collar success story – the child of the manual-worker father who goes on to professional achievement in a learned profession – is the true American dream. This is what Joe Biden is alluding to in his repeated references to having been an “Irish Catholic boy from Scranton, Pennsylvania”, which is the American equivalent of being “from a mining village in the Rhondda Valley”.

Significantly, when Biden plagiarised Neil Kinnock’s rhetoric about being the first in his family to go to university, it was to achieve a different political effect. Kinnock was paying homage to the state for having given educational opportunity to a boy from his background, whereas Biden was making a claim about the quality of his own character. (Which is also what Obama is doing when he makes proud references to his running mate’s rise from humble roots.)

In this important respect, Joe Biden is an answer to a problem about which the Obama campaign is becoming increasingly defensive: its candidate’s failure to offer any life experience with which striving, struggling working-class America can identify. But if Biden may appear to cancel one “negative”, he introduces another: Obama began by presenting himself as the great Outsider. He could bring “change” to Washington just because he was not one of its battle-weary old denizens (such as Hillary Clinton or John McCain). He was going to transcend the old partisan divide and introduce a new era of enlightened cross-party politics. Now he has strapped to his side one of the most entrenched Washington insiders of his generation: a partisan warrior of the old school in whose mouth the word “change” rings pretty hollow. Well, after all, this is politics. You win some, you lose some. But what has been lost here – or at least severely compromised – is precisely the unique selling point of Obama’s idealistic appeal. What is left of his uniqueness is now the awkward part to which I alluded above: the difficulty one has in understanding the sense in which he is identifiably American. This is something that I find difficult to explain to British friends who are accustomed to being able to place people in class terms and therefore find the sense of identity that exists in American life difficult to grasp.

How can these disparate individuals who may themselves be immigrants, or else anything from first to fifth-generation descendants of migrants from virtually every part of the globe, feel that there is any unifying core of nationality that makes them one people? What is it that binds them together in spite of all their manifest differences in personal and ethnic history? The official answer is the Constitution and the political settlement that it represents. But in truth, it is the American experience: the fact of having chosen this nation and this way of life (or being descended from someone who made that choice) as an act of individual will, with all the consequences for personal responsibility and action that that entails.


And that means having had an American childhood with its self-consciously patriotic schooling, which is purpose-made for a revolutionary republic that assimilates wave after wave of newcomers. It means having been immersed throughout adolescence in the popular culture which (to a sometimes risible degree) inculcates optimism and the values of family and community that are so important to displaced people.

It is that core of experience – of growing up American – which Obama lacks. His problem is not so much that he is an African-American in the modern political sense of being a black American. It is that he is an African-American in the literal sense of being half African and only half American, who spent much of his boyhood abroad and who borrowed a consciously constructed black American identity from the south side of Chicago.

To say that this election is all about race is to perpetrate a dangerous myth. It would permit Obama’s loss of it to license a fresh wage of infantile anti-Americanism at just the moment when the great democratic nations need, more than ever, to make common cause.

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Posted by Drew458     on 08/25/2008 at 03:13 AM   
Filed Under: • Democrats-Liberals-Moonbat Leftists • Editorials •  
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