During the immediate months following Barack Obama's election and inauguration to the office of the presidency, we were continually bombarded by reminders of the "historic" nature of this event. Thankfully, such hosannas as were then sung by his admirers in the media have subsided. Not surprisingly, however, and in spite of their apparently insatiable predilection for ascribing the word "historic" to all things Obama, these very same devotees have shown not the slightest interest in applying it to the decline in the President's popularity, a decline that is unprecedented — i.e. "historic" — for both the precipitous and rapid rate at which it has occurred.
If there were ever any doubts regarding Obama's rising unpopularity, they were decidedly put to rest over the last couple of months, beginning with gubernatorial victories for Republicans in New Jersey and Virginia — two states that Obama won by significant margins just one year earlier — and climaxing in the Massachusetts election of Republican Scott Brown to the senatorial seat that one Kennedy or another had held for over half of a century — a state that Obama carried just 14 months previously by a colossal 26 points!
In light of these dramatic reversals of fortune that our President and his party have been suffering as of late, no short supply of commentators from across the political spectrum have speculated that Obama will move to "the center." Comparisons to the trajectory upon which Bill Clinton launched his presidency following the GOP take-over of Congress in 1994 and his impending re-election in 1996 abound, with commentators noting that Clinton wisely gravitated toward the political center when it became painstakingly clear to him that his left-wing agenda, due to its gross violation of the sensibilities of the vast majority of the electorate and a Republican-dominated Congress determined to act consonantly with those sensibilities, had no hope of materializing. Perhaps, many believe, Obama will follow Clinton's lead.
I am not among those who share this belief.
While there are indeed similarities between these two Democrat presidents that provide a superficial warrant for such comparisons, they are vastly eclipsed by the differences that exist between Obama and Clinton. Both are men of stupendous egos, and both hold a leftist vision of the world, but Clinton's vision is and always has been severely qualified by considerations of a pragmatic and opportunistic sort that have left it sorely (but thankfully) deprived of the ideological zealotry that animates that of Obama's. And it is the former's eschewal of leftist dogma and the latter's embrace of it that accounts as well for the stark contrast between Clinton's affability and Obama's obnoxiousness, a contrast that would otherwise be puzzling given that the narcissism and arrogance of each rivals that of the other.
Yet there is another critical respect in which Obama differs decisively from his Democrat predecessor. Unlike Obama, Clinton has not had a lifelong obsession with proving that he is "authentically" black.
From the time he was at least 13 years of age, Obama has been painfully conscious of his need to establish his "authenticity" as a black person. He discloses his intense racial awareness in his first memoir, the subtitle of which alone suffices to underscore the all-consuming role that race has always assumed in his imagination: A Story of Race and Inheritance. Obama is the offspring of the union of a black African man and white American woman. When he was still a toddler, his father abandoned him and his mother, leaving Obama to be raised, for the most part, by his maternal grandparents, the two people in his life who made it possible for him to not only attend the most prestigious of private educational institutions, but, even more importantly, enjoy the benefits of a relatively stable home environment without which life is rendered exponentially more difficult for those children who have never had it. The overwhelming majority of Obama's classmates were white, as were his closest friends.
Yet in spite of these facts, or, perhaps, precisely because of them, before he was even far along into adolescence, Obama had avowed to no longer identify himself as "white," for he was determined to say or do nothing that could so much as remotely be construed as an attempt to "ingratiate" himself to the members of his mother's race. Whether it is indeed possible for one to affirm one's "blackness" while simultaneously honoring non-blacks, is a question with which we need not here concern ourselves. However, the question of whether it was possible for Obama to affirm his "blackness" while respecting the whites in his life is one to which his autobiography provides a decisively negative response. Its 440-plus pages are replete with several richly imagistic descriptions of the simmering anger, the seething rage, the profound disappointment, the repeated frustration, and the overall sense of racial injustice that whites — including and especially the whites with whom he was closest — provoked in him.
Obama admits to having had a particularly powerful urge to physically assault a white high school friend whose only offense was that he sought to relate to the awkwardness that he assumed his mulatto friend must experience being surrounded by mostly whites on a daily basis. Presumably, this white acquaintance of his never felt Obama's wrath, a fate that another of the latter's white associates — a woman with whom he was romantically involved years later as an adult — didn't escape. Obama shares details of the fight that he had with his date after the two of them had finished watching a black play. Apparently, he deemed this woman's attempts to empathize with the plight of blacks in America as unsatisfactory as his old high school friend's attempt to empathize with Obama, for out of a sense of sheer desperation, she finally implored him to accept that she wasn't black — and could never become so. Evidently, upon coming to terms with the obvious, the two went their separate ways. Tellingly, the invariably glowing terms in which President Obama speaks of his mother and maternal grandmother are no where to be found in his autobiography. They are replaced by less flattering references to his two primary care-givers in which he all but convicts them of being "racists."
Indeed, while the great Saint Augustine's classic Confessions is most plausibly read as a quest on its author's part to overcome the fragmented condition of his intellectual and spiritual life by achieving a sense of wholeness through the unconditional embrace of God, Obama's autobiography is best read as its author's quest to resolve the racial "double-mindedness" with which he has had to struggle by realizing a sense of racial wholeness through an embrace of "authentic blackness." Actually, it is more akin to The Autobiography of Malcolm X, a work that Obama confesses resonated with him on a personal dimension unlike any other.
Deeply pained by the fact that he had white ancestors, Malcolm X expressed the desire to "purge" himself of the "white blood" that ran through his veins. Obama admits to having this same desire. And just as the narrative within which Malcolm X situates the events of his life depicts its chief protagonist as moving through a series of increasingly dramatic steps from the abyss of racial self-forgetfulness to racial enlightenment, so too does Obama relay his life as an odyssey from the wilderness of racial ignorance to a restoration of racial clarity. There are other similarities. The subsequent falling out that transpires between them notwithstanding, for some time, Malcolm X adored "the Honorable Elijah Muhammad," the founder of the black separatist, anti-white "Nation of Islam" and the only person who he identifies as having been instrumental toward his salvation. The person upon whom Obama's salvation centers is Jeremiah Wright, a person whom he has acknowledged repeatedly as his "spiritual mentor." Wright is a Christian pastor, it is true, but his racial sentiments are virtually identical to those of Elijah Muhammad, a fact established not just by the innumerable anti-white, anti-Jewish, and anti-American tirades that he has launched from the pulpit over the decades, but as well by the consideration that he has honored Louis Farrakhan, Muhammad's successor. While Malcolm X refers to Allah, and Obama to Christ, the "salvation" that they both describe is really "liberation," not from the bondage of their own sinful condition, but, rather, from the "white oppression" that they have internalized, for although the teachings of their respective mentors purport to speak from different religious traditions, they are equally saturated in "Black Liberation Theology." Finally, whereas Malcolm X's quest for authentic blackness culminates in a journey beyond the white world of the United States in Africa and then, Mecca, Obama's also terminates far from the shores of America in his father's native Kenya.
Leftist ideology, which traces back centuries, is not explicitly racial, but it is undeniable that underlying its contemporary expressions is a racial subtext. White leftists are at the very least subtly, and more often than not, not so subtly, driven by an aching desire to prove to themselves, one another, and non-whites that, unlike the vast majority of their contemporaries, and virtually all of their ancestors, their proverbial cup of racial good will is "overflowing." Through the endorsement of their ideological vision, white leftists, in effect, symbolically renounce their own race. Actually, from the vantage point of this very ideology, this racial self-renunciation can be interpreted as something more than symbolic, for it has become the conventional wisdom among leftists to view race as an ideological or "social" construction; thus, in rejecting "the ideology of white 'supremacy' or 'privilege'" — i.e., "whiteness" itself — white leftists, well, literally reject their race.
The convictions of black leftists are similarly informed by racial motivations, but in contrast to their white counterparts, they seek to affirm their racial affiliation. Although calls for the exponential expansion of the federal government and the centralization of authority and power that this entails are (usually) issued in such race-neutral terms as "social justice," "a more equitable distribution of social and economic resources," "greater equality," etc., inasmuch as the majority of the ostensible beneficiaries of these changes are non-white minorities, mostly black and Hispanic, and the majority of the subsidizers white, egalitarian policies of the sort characteristically advocated by leftists of all colors constitute war by other means — and in this case, it is racial warfare that they are waging against the white majority. That is, while their motivations are the mirror image of one another — white leftists are desirous of renouncing their race and black leftists desirous of affirming theirs — both are equally anti-white in their effects.
None of this is to suggest that all or even, necessarily, most leftists (of any race) see themselves as being "anti-white," much less that they actually dislike individual whites. But this doesn't change the fact that whether in principle or execution, laden within leftist ideas of the kind that regularly finds expression in contemporary America is a scarcely concealable hostility toward its historic institutions and, thus, the white race that created and has always sustained them. Furthermore, that black leftists perceive their ideology as a badge of racial pride and "authenticity" is established by their readiness to attribute traitorous motives to all blacks who eschew their vision of the world. Thus, Thomas Sowell, Walter E. Williams, Shelby Steele, Clarence Thomas, and Ward Connerly are among those black "conservatives" (read: non-leftists) who black leftists routinely denounce as "Uncle Toms," "house slaves," and an assortment of other pejoratives designed to reinforce the verdict that they are not "authentically" black.
In addition to his autobiography, there is a wealth of evidence — from his days as both a student and teacher in academia, when Obama was surrounded and nurtured by radical leftist mentors and colleagues whose ideas and proclivities for activism he eagerly imbibed, to the streets of Chicago where he made the first of many attempts to come at implementing Saul Alinsky's Rules for Radicals as a "community organizer," to his attending Louis Farrakhan's "Million Man March," to his host of alliances with radicals whose anti-Americanism is chilling — that perceiving himself and so being perceived by other blacks as "authentic" remains a goal of President Obama's, and, moreover, a goal of categorical importance. Yet only by enthusiastically, indeed, zealously, embracing a leftist ideology does he stand any chance of achieving this goal.
Hence, Obama cannot make any serious move to the political center without risking his "authenticity." And this is a risk that I am ready to bet all he is not willing to take.
