Expose in the NYTimes Tuesday morning chronicles the Obama campaign's playing racial politics from before he even announced his entry into the race.
Aides to Mr. Obama, who asked not to be identified because the campaign would not authorize them to speak to the press, said he stayed away from a civil rights demonstration and did not publicize visits to black churches when he was struggling to win over white voters in Iowa. Then, a month after Representative John Lewis of Georgia endorsed Mrs. Clinton, setting off concerns about black voters’ ambivalence toward Mr. Obama, the campaign deployed his wife, Michelle, whose upbringing on the South Side of Chicago was more familiar to many blacks than Mr. Obama’s biracial background.
This is just one example of many that come from deep inside the campaign.
Link, more excerpts and analysis after the flip.
The link:Seeking Unity, Obama Feels Pull of Racial Divide
All I can say is, finally a piece of real news that gets to the heart of how Obama has wanted to play it both ways with the race issue. he has shunned the black community when he needed to appeal to white voters and he played up his - and Michelle's - blackness when he had to win back black voters after shunning them to win over whites.
Its refreshing to have a reliably sourced article that gets at this aspect of his hard-core racially driven politics of divide and unite - strong language, but that is what it appears to be from one point of view.
According to the Times, this dynamic was in play from the very firsst day of the his campaign:
The dynamic began the first day of Mr. Obama’s presidential bid, when white advisers encouraged him to withdraw an invitation to his pastor, whose Afro-centric sermons have been construed as antiwhite, to deliver the invocation at the official campaign kickoff. Then, when his candidacy was met by a wave of African-American suspicion, the senator’s black aides pulled in prominent black scholars, business leaders and elected officials as advisers.
The Times further shows how this racically divisive black vs. white politics has hurt him with Latinos, and why it could cripple him in Texas:
The campaign’s strategy in the first contests left Mr. Obama vulnerable with Latinos, which hurt him in California and could do the same in the Texas primary on March 4.
Faulted by Latino leaders as not being visible enough in their communities and not understanding what issues resonated with immigrants, the campaign has been trying hard to catch up, scheduling more face-to-face meetings with voters, snaring endorsements from Latino politicians and fine-tuning his message.
But, you can't be all things to all people.
David Axelrod, furthermore, as the Times reports, has been at the heart of several "racially charged elections:"
As a consultant to several black elected officials, Mr. Axelrod has been steeped in racially charged elections. And he said Mr. Obama had faced the challenges of racial politics in the campaign that propelled him to the Senate, where he is only the third black elected since Reconstruction.
Axelrod has been, one suspects, the main advisor to shape which black personalities can and cannot appear with Obama, and when; but this parsiing of blacks to suit whites and to create a false image of a post-racial candidate has angered many prominent black notables who, one suspects, see this for the racially charged politically driven opportunism it is:
Questions about Mr. Obama’s “blackness,” though, quickly threatened to obscure the reasons he believed himself most qualified to become the country’s next president. A Rolling Stone article linked him to the militant preaching of his pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. The story quoted the minister as saying in a sermon, “Racism is how this country was founded and how this country is still run.”
Mr. Axelrod said he and Mr. Obama decided to take Mr. Wright off the program for the campaign announcement in February 2007, concluding that the attention would drag the pastor into a negative spotlight and might distract from efforts to portray the senator as a candidate capable of unifying the country.
The day after the rally, which was on the steps of the Old State Capitol in Illinois, Mr. Obama was sharply criticized by African-American academics, media celebrities and policy experts at a conference in Hampton, Va. Among the most often cited was Cornel West, the renowned Princeton scholar. He and others argued that Mr. Obama should speak forcefully about the legacy of racism in the nation and not cast the problems that disproportionately affect blacks as social ills shared by many Americans.
It apparently hasn't been easy for Obama to keep this "tightrope" balancing act going and so after that event, he wanted to get over 50 notable black personalities together. He convionced them of his "strategy" and brought some of them on board, but it was clear to them that all of this was not much more than a "rhetorical tightrope." The Times:
Mr. Obama was so annoyed by the complaints, one aide recalled, that he asked staff members to invite more than 50 influential African-Americans, including some of his critics, to meet with him, hoping to win them over with the gale force of his charisma.
But his aides cautioned that such a large event would be sure to draw press attention. Instead, they suggested that Mr. Obama establish a smaller advisory council of prominent black figures. In a two-hour telephone call, he not only persuaded Dr. West to serve on the panel, but also convinced him that his rhetorical tightrope — reassuring whites without seeming to abandon blacks — was necessary.
Dr. West recalled the conversation, saying that if Mr. Obama focused on disparities caused by a history of white privilege, “he’d be pegged as a candidate who caters only to the needs of black folks.”
Early on, he apparently made a secret deal with Al Sharpton, in order to keep Sharpton at bay. He skipped a march in Jena, LA in order not to be seen politicizing an issue important to southern black voters, and he told Sharpton he would do what he could from the inside, if Sharpton stayed on the outside:
Aides said Mr. Obama’s campaign was unaware of the magnitude of the tensions brewing in Jena, La., over charges of attempted murder that had been filed against six youths involved in a schoolyard fight until plans for a march, organized by Mr. Sharpton, began to appear in the news media.
Mr. Obama was the first presidential candidate to respond to Mr. Sharpton’s call to denounce what was going on in Jena, saying the cases against the students were not a matter of black versus white, but a matter of right versus wrong. He then called Mr. Sharpton to explain that he had important votes in the Senate, and that he would not attend the march because he did not want to politicize the issue.
“We agreed on inside-outside roles,” Mr. Sharpton said, referring to himself and Mr. Obama, echoing a famous conversation between President Lyndon B. Johnson and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. “I would continue my work agitating the system from the outside, and he would do what he could to make changes from the inside.”
This gives a much greater insight in the hundred-some-odd "present" votes in the Illinois State Senate, and his skipping out on the vote of the Kyle-Liberman amendment - the desire to steer way clear of any issue or event that may seem even in the slightest way possible at all compromising, that may in any small way make associate him with a principled stand on a particular issue. The episode in Jena was, to anyone with eyes, a racially motivated event - and yet he would see it in more universalizing terms - which does not in any way address the lack of social justice in this case for the black people of the south to whim this happens over and over again.
There was apaprently some conflict inside the campaign about where to put the most energy: on winning over white voters or on convincing black voters:
Aides said it proved a pivotal moment in the campaign, with some staff members — mostly white — urging Mr. Obama to stay focused on Iowa, while others — most of them black — warning that he needed to court black voters and elected officials more actively.
“Nobody put race explicitly on the table,” one aide said. “But there was certainly the feeling among some of the black staff that some of the white staff did not care enough about winning black votes.”
This back and forth was played between Iowa and South Carolina - he was in Iowa while Michelle was sent down to South Carolina.
But this tightrope and playing of white and black bonafides when necessary has totally alienated the Latino cumminty:
While Mr. Obama has made great strides in appealing to white and black voters, his campaign has proved less effective in drawing Latino support. While a few experts point to longstanding rivalries between blacks and Hispanics over jobs and other opportunities, most faulted him as doing too little, too late.
“Obama’s campaign failed to rise to the occasion,” scolded La Opinión, the leading Spanish-language newspaper in California, which had endorsed Mr. Obama.
They are trying to remedy this now, of course, but the real and historic racial divide between blacks and hispanics - something Obama has refuted in public, but which the campain acknowledges exists - will now be very hard for him to overcome. The Latinos, in fact, seem to see him as a polarizing figure for the very racially charged politics he has played with white and black voters over the course of the campaign so far. They see what others are not seeing.