The Color of Obama’s Politics

In the wake of her narrow victory in the Indiana primary and Barack Obama’s decisive victory in North Carolina, Hillary Clinton attempted to make a strong case for her continued candidacy by playing the race card against Obama, claiming to have a “much broader base” on which to build a winning coalition. Citing an Associated Press article, she inched a bit further out onto the limb of racial politics and class warfare, saying that, “Senator Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans,” was on the decline, and that “whites in both states who had not completed college” were supporting her.
The relationship between blacks and white Democrats has always been so cynical, so artificial, such a marriage of convenience, that neither side has ever had the courage to discuss it openly. Hence, it is extraordinary to see one Democrat play the race card so blatantly against another…a tactic normally reserved for conservatives and Republicans.

Looking at the situation from afar, it is clear that Mrs. Clinton had but two choices: She could attack Obama on the basis of race and elitism, or she could attack him on the basis of ideology. And since she could not attack him on ideological grounds – the two of them being cut from the same bolt of cloth, ideologically – she was left with just one alternative.

In his memoir, Dreams from My Father, Obama tells of his years in Hawaii before leaving for college. His mother was divorced from both his father and his stepfather, and in the absence of a father figure his only mentors were his white grandfather and an elderly black poet named Frank Marshall Davis. Apparently Obama was not anxious to identify Davis, a Soviet-era communist, so he refers to him simply as “a poet named Frank.”

Obama tells of a visit to “Frank’s” home just prior to his leaving for Occidental College in Los Angeles. When Obama admitted that he didn’t know what he expected to get out of college, Davis gave him some advice. He said that the real price of admission to college was “leaving your race at the door…leaving your people behind.” He warned Obama, “You’re not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get trained….They’ll train you to manipulate words so they don’t mean anything anymore.…They’ll train you so good you’ll start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the American way…”

After arriving at Occidental, Obama chose his friends carefully. He tells us that, among his friends he included “the more politically active black students, foreign students, Chicanos, Marxist professors, feminists, and punk rock performance poets.” Then, after transferring to Columbia University two years later, he found that “political discussions, the kind that at Occidental had once seemed so intense and purposeful,” took on the flavor of the “socialist conferences” he sometimes attended at New York’s Coopers Union.

As Obama was preparing to graduate from Columbia he wasn’t sure what he wanted to do with the rest of his life. Finally, in 1983, he decided to follow in the footsteps of one of his heroes, radical leftist and communist fellow traveler, Saul Alinsky. He concluded, “That’s what I’ll do…I’ll organize black folks at the grass roots…for change.”

“There wasn’t much detail to the idea,” he says. “I didn’t know anyone making a living that way. When classmates in college asked me just what it was that a community organizer did, I couldn’t answer them directly. Instead, I’d pronounce on the need for change. Change in the White House, where Reagan and his minions were carrying on their dirty deeds. Change in the Congress, compliant and corrupt. Change in the mood of the country, manic and self-absorbed. ‘Change won’t come from the top,’ I would say. ‘Change will come from a mobilized grass roots.’ ”

He moved to Chicago, Alinsky’s hometown, and established himself as a community organizer. (Oddly enough, another of Alinsky’s most ardent admirers turned out to be the woman who is now his principal opponent for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Rodham Clinton. Her 1969 senior thesis at Wellesley College was titled, There is Only the Fight: An Analysis of the Alinsky Model.)

Throughout his memoir Obama gives us numerous examples of his views on race and racism, but few direct expressions of his ideological bent. However, in discussing his decision to become a community organizer, he provides a disturbing hint of his attitude on class and social position. He says, “Organizers didn’t make any money; their poverty was proof of their integrity.”

By implication, Obama appears to believe that those who take advantage of their educational opportunities, who work hard, and who stay out of trouble, are somehow less worthy. He seems to imply that their integrity is somehow questionable by reason of their social and economic advancement.

I seem to recall a couple of other famous “social reformers” who believed in the “dictatorship of the proletariat,” who thought that the bourgeoisie were inherently evil and that the proletarians were, because of their poverty, people of a higher order and more deserving. Their names were Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

The truth is, it is not the color of Obama’s skin that makes him unelectable, as Mrs. Clinton seems to suggest (Republicans Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Michael Steele, and J.C. Watts, for example, are all highly capable and eminently electable), it is the color of his politics…which falls somewhere between pink and red on the color spectrum.