VIEW

Barack Obama conceded to Hillary Rodham Clinton in the Pennsylvanian Democratic Primary last week. Though hardly a surprise to those eagerly following the campaign trail, some might have succumbed to wishful thinking, hoping Obama might be able to ride the wave of past momentum and bring a long drawn out and fatigued contest to a resolution. Alas, for Senator Obama and his avid supporters it was not meant to be, as his rival the junior Senator from New York and former First Lady was thrown a desperately needed life-preserver by the registered Democrats of Pennsylvania.

As an outsider looking in, it’s often difficult to assess what exactly Americans on the ground are thinking and feeling about the ups and downs of the campaign thus far waged, as our perceptions are inescapably mediated by the coverage of CNN, BBC World Service, Fox News, Al-Jazeera and the op-ed pages of The New York Times and The Washington Post. We’re susceptible to clichés and stereotypes, just as Americans are so often criticized vis-à-vis their misconceptions and ill-informed opinions regarding Iranians, Islam and the politics of the Middle East.

There has been a constant in the Obama-Clinton race, which has never ceased to bubble beneath the surface, and that is the politics of identity. Though never really absent from the political fray, it was almost inevitable that a stand-off between a woman and African-American for the Democratic Party nomination would spark one of the most heart-wrenching investigations into the meaning of American identity in decades and perhaps one of unprecedented proportions in the run up to a presidential election.1

Obama is an interesting figure for a number of reasons, but foremost among them is that his mixed heritage has forced him to struggle and exhaustively grapple with his identity without succumbing to the temptation to occlude one aspect of himself at the expense of the many other influences which go to make up the man. Obama doesn’t simply conform to the well-trodden tale of a minority who grew up ‘in a white man’s world and made good’, but rather an individual who has crafted and melded the disparate influences and histories that go to make up the American experience into a coherent narrative. And it is in this respect that he has coexisted as both an example of what is best and most damning in American history. Still, his experience is hardly unique; scores of sons and daughters born to immigrants have been compelled to grapple with who they were and how they see themselves in the tapestry of modern American life. The crude answer, is that Obama, unlike his predecessors, has garnered so much attention because he’s a ‘black man’ running for president.

Born to a Harvard-educated Kenyan economist and a white American mother hailing from Kansas, Obama passed most of his childhood and adolescent years in Honolulu and from the ages of six to ten, lived in Jakarta with his mother and Indonesian stepfather. Obama’s cumulative experience and exposure beyond the borders of the land he calls home clearly shaped and molded his formative years, while simultaneously fostering a profound investment in what he regards as the very best traditions and ideals America has to offer and the values he takes such a vision to essentially entail. It is in this respect that he can be regarded as patriotic without being provincial, a trait rarely glimpsed amongst politicians. In the course of his campaign this duality has played the part of both blessing and curse and yet remains undeniable. It also stands as a testament to Obama’s shrewd understanding of the contradictions and complexities which lie at the heart of ‘America’ and the myriad things in the course of its relatively short history it has come to signify. His A More Perfect Union speech of March 18th was just one example of this intricate existential negotiation upon which he has obviously spent considerable time dwelling:

“I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners - an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”2

It’s true, where else is such a tale possible? Obama’s plural heritage has forced him to understand both the terrible history of racism, slavery and genocide in America while at the same time witnessing and struggling toward that history’s transcendence at rare and cherished moments as exemplified and embodied in iconic figures like Abraham Lincoln, Fredrick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., Harriet Tubman and John F. Kennedy. Many have been quick to make exaggerated and grandiose comparisons and have indeed forgotten in their heady delirium that Obama has yet to even win the Democratic nomination let alone the presidency.

Obama is not the prophet of a post-racial America – whether such a thing is possible or even desirable is a question his campaign has arguably neglected. What it has stressed by contrast, is the importance of a moratorium of sorts regarding the politics of race and the pressing need to work together on those issues which bind Americans together irrespective of racial identity. He states unequivocally that ‘I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity, gender identity, sexual orientation, or victimhood generally.’3 Such a message has struck a chord with vast numbers of people and reignited a certain degree of optimism willing to for the time being let racial politics fall by the wayside in order to surmount the deep-seated animosity and adversarial attitude responsible for stymieing so many domestic policy initiatives.

Even Vanity Fair’s Christopher Hitchens, a fierce opponent of identity politics, has conceded Obama has refused to bow to calls that he identify with a particular community, as opposed to the broader American polity.4 Obama’s best-selling The Audacity of Hope is itself strident in putting forth his ambition to divest the political process of its stultifying dogma which he regards as no longer germane to the contemporary predicament which Americans face. It’s ‘doctrinaire thinking and stark partisanship’ he claims ‘that have turned Americans off of politics.’5 That being said Obama’s voting record was ranked as more liberal than some 86% of his Senate colleagues in 2006. Whether that is a laudable or lamentable is in the last instance for the voters to decide.

There’s an adage which says that when America sneezes, the world catches a cold, so perhaps it’s no surprise that the Obama campaign has aroused a remarkable welter of opinions and views not only within the US, but around the world. On Facebook – a now well-established global social network – one can become an Obama fan and follow the progress of his campaign with updates and video feeds of his speeches – and at a cursory glance one can espy not only US citizens, but a veritable pastiche of nationalities encompassing Paraguayans, Cubans, Russians, Georgians, Turks, Egyptians, Kenyans, Brits, French, Spaniards, Ghanaians, Indians and many more besides. At my last count Obama had some 793,252 fans to Clinton’s relatively modest 150, 949. Perhaps the one thing Obama’s recent loss proves is that Facebook is deeply flawed as a barometer of US public opinion, since those of us whom engage in brief exchanges of levity and vampire and zombie attacks online can hardly be said to be the same blue collar voters whom continue to be recalcitrant to ‘Obamania’.

Obama’s opponents on various occasions have attempted to paint him as a passing fad whose lofty words and charismatic appeal like the legendary melodious tones of the Pied Piper of Hamelin, once managed to cajole and coax the young and youthful at heart, but whose ‘rhetoric’ is just that, and ultimately lacking in substance and that ever-vague term ‘political realism’. In short, it’s alleged he’s peddling pipe dreams in a game of politics which is inherently dirty, cynical and predatory.

At the opening of the contest to become the Democratic presidential nominee, Clinton as the supposedly ‘inevitable’ victor regularly came under fire and her record under serious scrutiny. But as the momentum of Obama’s campaign picked up speed and undercut the hitherto conventional wisdom that Clinton was the presumptive nominee, Obama has come in for a barrage of criticism and now countless attempts to pigeonhole him as the representative of a narrow group defined by either race, economic status or a limited section of the Democratic party. In some quarters he has been portrayed as a ‘black candidate’, or more recently a ‘liberal elitist’. Obama has also been the subject of persistent Internet rumors suggesting he is a Muslim, was educated at a madrassah in Indonesia and took the oath of office using a Quran. Obama did spend part of his childhood in Indonesia but attended Catholic and public schools there. He took the oath of office on a Bible. Unfortunately Obama has been virtually inaudible in his condemnation of the use of ‘Muslim’ as a pejorative and disparaging term which has in recent month formed part of an orchestrated ‘smear campaign’, to which his Democratic rival has very much been party.6

The Jeremiah A. Wright affair, as well as Obama’s comments more recently in which he claimed that in the face of political apathy and economic frustration, some Pennsylvanian voters sought solace in those touchstones, which most deeply shape their lives such as religion and firearms, have provided his opponents with additional fodder for the purpose of defining him as either this or that. In the last couple of months both the GOP and the Clinton campaign have surreptitiously segued from propagating Obama’s past and present affiliations, to impugning the latter’s ‘patriotic credentials’. This chain of events found its denouement in the heavily criticized ABC debate between Obama and Clinton in which Obama was questioned by a Pennsylvania resident on whether he bore a grudge against the American flag because he failed to sport the stars and stripes on his lapel.

The fact however, whether you like or loathe the man and what he stands for, is that he is undoubtedly one of America’s sons, and in lieu of an ‘exotic’ curiosity, encapsulates the best and worst of the American experience of both oppression and liberation, and a history pregnant with centuries of struggle in the name of a message which purports to be universal in its scope: life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The question of whether Obama is sufficiently ‘patriotic’ or even ‘American’ must surely be seen as little more than a malicious potshot and attempt to appeal to voters’ most parochial and intolerant instincts. The real question is whether Obama will be able to live up to the expectations and bright-eyed optimism he has evoked in his supporters, and whether his eloquence had been masking chutzpah all along, and on this count only time will tell.