Republican Congressman Geoff Davis of Kentucky, speaking Saturday night about Barack Obama:
"I'm going to tell you something: That boy's finger does not need to be on the button," Davis said. "He could not make a decision in that simulation that related to a nuclear threat to this country."
At the same time Hillary Clinton's campaign is trying to make him out to be an elitist, one of the retrograde elements of the GOP, what in DC might be organized as the mouthbreathing caucus, used a racial epithet to describe Obama. Davis sent Obama a letter of apology, but he apologized for a "poor choice of words when discussing the national security policy positions of the presidential candidates." OK, let's be generous and accept his explanation. Let's forgo the possibility that he intentionally used the word "boy" because he's a mouth breathing Republican, it's a derogatory term used by Whites to refer to adult Black men, and assume that Davis regularly refers to White men who are less than three years younger than him as "boys."
Uh huh. Sure.
The late Lee Atwater is generally regarded as the most important practitioner of racially charged politics since George Wallace. Atwater figured out how to gussie up George Wallace's "not in mixed company" racism to be more socially acceptable, and in the process used the Willie Horton ad to help elect plutocrat George Herbert Hoover Walker Bush.
Since the Willie Horton ad, however, the Republicans have realized they have a problem. There are a lot of swing voters, especially suburbanites in the Midwest and the Southwest, who aren't particularly racist, and don't want to feel that if they vote for a Republican they're supporting a racist party. It was to assuage these concerns, to change the perception that the GOP plays on hatred and doesn't care about anyone other than middle class and wealthy Whites, that Karl Rove et al hatched the Compassionate Conservative BS in 1999 and 2000. The idea was the George W. Bush may be conservative, but he wasn't one of those Jesse Helms cartoon conservatives, the good ole' boys who pine for the good ole' days of Jim Crow, when women were barefoot and pregnant, when tax dollars didn't go to welfare, and the Blacks knew their place.
Rove had no interest in doing anything to move beyond distrust and racial divides, but he knew the Republicans would need some voters who would prefer a less racially divided, racially charged country.
Then along comes Barack Obama.
Maybe the best examination of Obama's appeal to many voters comes from John Judis, who describes Obama as an American Adam:
[T]he idealism of the early nineteenth century would ultimately be thwarted by an issue that has bedeviled every generation of Americans before and since: race. Today, nearly two centuries later, there is probably no other topic on which Americans' need for a clean break with the past is so acute--no issue on which we crave an Adam figure quite so much. And many Americans believe they have found that figure in Obama.
While some white voters have rejected Obama because he is black, plenty of others have been more inclined to vote for him for the same reason. These are whites who grew up in the shadow of the '60s civil rights movement and who came to venerate Martin Luther King, observing his birthday as a national holiday. They yearn for racial reconciliation, and they see voting for Obama as a means to achieve that.
There are no polls to measure this sentiment, but it pops up repeatedly in interviews. One Obama supporter told The Washington Post at a campaign event in Tampa, Florida, that he hoped "someday we'll erase all this nonsense about race. " His support for Obama, he said, was "reverse prejudice. It's just about time that someone of color got some credibility in a race like this for president." Joe Lance, an independent, wrote on a Tennessee website that he was backing Obama "because he transcends the old divides between black and white Americans. ... It is thrilling to imagine that in electing this person to the highest office, we could see centuries' worth of animosity and despair start to melt."
[...]
Not any African American could have created such high hopes for racial reconciliation, but Obama's background has made him especially well-suited to capitalize on these sentiments. He is at once part of black America and also removed from it and from its political history--an Adam figure with respect to the country's oldest and most painful conflict.
Although born to a Kenyan father and white mother, Obama is a black American and a black American politician. In the United States, blackness has always been a social rather than an ethnic category, so that, if someone looks black and has some African blood, he is black, even if one of his parents was white. "If I'm outside your building trying to catch a cab," Obama told interviewer Charlie Rose, "they're not saying, 'Oh, there's a mixed race guy.'"
At the same time, Obama was brought up by white relatives, lived in Hawaii, and attended elite schools. His divergence from previous black politicians like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton comes out most clearly in his unwillingness to embrace race-specific remedies or any program that smacks of reparations. "An emphasis on universal, as opposed to race-specific, programs isn't just good policy; it's also good politics," Obama writes in The Audacity of Hope, which he published on the eve of the campaign. Obama also has little of the typical black politician's underlying outlook. Many black politicians descend from slaves brought from West Africa. That is part of their frame of reference when speaking about the United States. Jackson, for instance, reminded Michael Dukakis, his rival for the Democratic nomination in 1988, that his ancestors had come over on "slave ships" while Dukakis's had arrived on "immigrant ships. " Just before the Democratic convention that year, miffed that Dukakis had passed him over for the vice presidency, Jackson claimed that the Massachusetts governor wanted to use him as a "vote picker" to bring his followers to the "big house." Obama, by contrast, is the son of an East African whose ancestors were not shipped to the New World as slaves. He wouldn't simply shun these kind of metaphors; they probably wouldn't occur to him because they aren't part of his political heritage. To put it in Adamic terms, he is outside of America's racial history and conveys little resentment over his own racial past.
As he tells it, Obama's message is very much that of the successful immigrant who has miraculously transcended the racial divide. Speaking in the town in Kansas in which his maternal grandfather grew up, Obama said:
Our family's story is one that spans miles and generations, races and realities. It's the story of farmers and soldiers, city workers and single moms. It takes place in small towns and good schools, in Kansas and Kenya, on the shores of Hawaii and the streets of Chicago. It's a varied and unlikely journey, but one that's held together by the same simple dream. And that is why it's American. That's why I can stand here and talk about how this country is more than a collection of red states and blue states--because my story could only happen in the United States.
When white Americans hear these words, they don't feel guilt about past injustices, but rather hope for racial reconciliation.
Some observers argue that Barack Obama can't win, that America is not ready to vote for a Black man to be our president. On the contrary, many Americans crave the opportunity to vote for a Black man. Judis is correct, of course, that Obama is possibly uniquely suited for that role. Beyond his amazing gifts as a candidate—indeed, it may in fact be one of his gifts—is a history that doesn't include the slave heritage or ancestors who lived through the wrenching century between emancipation and full citizenship. It doesn't include the history Obama described as negatively influencing African-Americans of Jeremiah Wright's generation. And he's not an effective surrogate for the feared or disdained African-American stereotypes of the 1960's and 1970's, such the Black Panther, the urban rioter, or the supposedly unqualified affirmative action hire that got a job that Geraldine Ferraro's ideal constituency is still upset about not getting.
This must terrify the Republicans. The shrewder among them, like Rove, must realize that Obama doesn't scare swing voters the way someone like Jesse Jackson surely did twenty years ago. And they must also realize that the ignorant racism of Republicans like Geoff Davis will expose the racism just below the surface of so many of the traditional Republican campaign appeals of the last 40 years.
Geoff Davis' outburst showed that there's still a lot of racism in America. But it also showed that a lot of it is concentrated within the Republican party and its electoral base. Karl Rove did his best to cover over the Republican's racism, and it helped George W. Bush come close enough to Al Gore in 2000 that the Supreme Court was able to install Bush as president. But the ignorant Republicans like Davis won't be able to help themselves, seeing a Black man on the verge of being president. Their racism will repeatedly ooze out of them, and the racism that has divided America for so long might finally be used against itself, and in what to the racists will seem a paradox, their racism will help elect Barack Obama.
