The Race Card Is In The Deck. It’s Dishonest Not To Play It.

I struggled with my column last week.  It was slugged, “Blacks and Obama," and related an evening recently when I was sitting around a table in Elk Grove with a number of neighbors who had in 2008 been ardent Obama supporters.  They still are, actually, although their ardor may be tempered by the results of the two years he has been in office.  

In all the conversation that night, there was one part that stood out for me, and that was what I was trying to write about.  One of the women—let's call her Carole—spoke up.  "When are we going to stop ignoring the fact that so much of what goes on about Obama is about race?"  There was a stunned silence and then everyone in the group, of whom only two of us were white, had something to say.

That’s what I wanted last week’s column to be about—except I wasn’t sure what the point actually was. Did I want to recreate the conversation as a way of introducing the topic to my readers? Yes, but I was also taken with the fact that the topic was even brought up in this racially-mixed group of Elk Grove residents.  In the end, I couldn’t get a handle on it and so I wrote about Halloween instead. 

But the evening and the conversations and my feelings about it were still burbling in the back of my mind and then on Sunday night, while watching the Chris Matthews Show, they took form.

The show featured Matthews’s new biography of John F. Kennedy.  The hook, somewhat self-serving, was to compare Obama to Kennedy.  Candidate Obama had been invested with the promise of being a Kennedy-esque figure, Matthews reminded viewers.  “He promised us change, said he'd be transformative, the kind of president who turned history.” The show that followed featured a panel of journalists who asked and answered the question, “What happened?” almost as if it were the punchline to that joke, “I’m Jack Kennedy and you’re not.”  

Matthews in particular, full as he was of admiration for the subject of his book, seemed angry that Barack Obama has turned out to be, well, Barack Obama.   Obama lacks, for example, an emotional connection with the people.  “He’s never asked us to join [anything],” said Matthews. “No Peace Corps, no special force units, no get out there and do the war effort together. It's all been 'Watch me, I'm smart.' ” 

He’s elusive, said John Heilman, and “because he's not projected a sense of himself that people can attach themselves to, it has allowed his enemies to define him in a way that's been crippling.”  And he lacks, according to Matthews, a certain steel that Kennedy had. The Kennedy brothers were romantic, but they were also tough.  "Jack Kennedy would be the one making other politicians do his bidding. This would mean wooing some, or playing hardball with the ones he couldn't woo."  Obama doesn’t have that, Matthews argued. He lets the opposition make fun of him.

Writing this, I’m hearing the song, “Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like A Man” in my head, but during the program, I was steaming.  Then Bob Woodward said, “But one of the differences...”

Yes, I’m shouting.  Say it, tell us the really big difference between the two men.

“...the very big difference is Jack Kennedy never was a law professor and Barack Obama has been a law professor and it shows,” Woodward finished.

What? That’s the reason Obama doesn’t take a tough stance with Congress and bend them to his will? The reason he allows people to disrespect him, tell him off, lecture him?  

By now I’m yelling at the TV: Why can’t Barack Obama be more like John Kennedy? Because he’s a black man in an America that still hasn’t conquered the issues of race.

The Kennedy brothers were white men born to privilege. They were used to telling people what to do because they’d been raised knowing how to command respect from the help.  They learned to play hardball at their boarding schools and elite colleges, where they were at the top of the pecking order.  As such, they were in the supreme position to call the shots and demand respect. When they got angry, people listened.

Obama, on the other hand, was raised as a black man in a middle-class white culture.  He had to learn to ignore insults and project that message “I’m safe” in order to, frankly, stay alive.  Because what do we do with angry black men?  We lynch them.  We assassinate them.  We silence them in any way we can.  And mothers of black boys know this, so many bring their sons up in such a way as to avoid all conflict. 

That the journalists on the Chris Matthews Show, top reporters all, were missing this, goes directly to the heart of the earlier conversation I had.  People don’t want to talk about how much race has to do with people’s attitudes to Obama, because—well, because talking about race in public is tantamount to acknowledging the elephant that’s sitting in the middle of the room. No one, least of all successful journalists who value their reputation, wants to be accused of playing the race card. And that is the response that is thrown at anyone who brings up race as a factor in, really, anything today. 

It’s an easy answer, a simplistic retort that effectively silences. Which is good for those who don’t want to have that particular conversation.  But bad for our country, because that’s a conversation we sorely need to have. The people around that Elk Grove table know that—and they aren’t quite sure what to do about it.