James Wolcott, Obama and Race
Wed Mar 19, 2008 at 12:34:29 PM PDT
I'm a regular reader of James Wolcott's blog at Vanity Fair. Even when I don't agree with him his writing is reliably intelligent and witty. He has just posted some comments about Obama's speech on race and I think his comments are emblematic of a strawman argument that contrasts Hillary as a down to earth scrabbler and Obama as a head in the clouds academic.
To quote Wolcott:
I watched most of Obama's speech afterwards online and found it serious, moving, in a Tiger Woods league of its own, but I question that a "conversation" or dialogue about race is what the country wants or needs right now--it may be a pedagogical aria that appeals to the political media elite and other word-crafters but occupies a plane irrelevant to most people's concerns as the economy implodes.
Actually race has been very much apart of economic and labor issues since the country's inception. The very successful Republican Southern Strategy was just a means to an end. The goal was the destruction of the New Deal and the return to that golden age for Robber Barrons, the good old days of non-union, unregulated cheap labor and an unfettered capital class. The politics of racial resentment were and still are the critical tool that keeps working class whites from voting their own economic self-interest and supplies the necessary votes to keep the Club for Growth types in the drivers seat of the economy. The enemy aren't those greedy New York bankers anymore, it's the Liberal elites who are giving the country away to the minorities at the expense of hard working white males.
You can measure the success of the Republican coalition born of the Southern Strategy by the dangerous state of the unraveling Ponzi scheme that the Republicans call an economy, the degree of devastation in rust belt white ethnic neighborhoods, the declining economic state of African-American communities and in the fear that now pervades the new scapegoats and victims of the politics of racial resentment, Hispanics.
Obama's speech was not just a 'pedagogical aria' it was a cold, clear eyed look at the resentments, distrust and ignorance in the black and white communities that have been used and abused by all the forces that hold this country back and threaten it's economic security and harmony. He has reframed the debate and given the public a different way to think about race that they can understand. That rings true to the experiences of their own families and exposes the bankruptcy of the Pat Buchanan's, Karl Rove's and Louis Farrakhan's of the world. It is a vital and needed reckoning if we are going to build a coalition for change and get past the debilitating identity politics of the past.
So this was not some philosophical detour, a distraction from the bread and butter issues that are front and center. This was very much about the economy, civic life and the political well being of the nation. Once again Obama has forsworn the easy political formulas so near and dear to the professional losers that have run the Democratic party for a generation and has gotten to the heart of the issue.
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