Obama Trumped By Race Card Up His Sleeve

When you’ve got an ace in the hole, or a wild card, or an abundance of trumps, you can play with confidence.  If you’ve tucked the only Joker in the deck up your sleeve, only allowing it to magically appear when needed, you can wipe out your opposition without breaking a sweat.  But when another player, seemingly low on chips and on his way out the game, suddenly not only goes all in, but produces an even bigger Joker than yours, showing yours to have been a rather poor imitation of the real thing all along, your ass is punked.

After Obama relinquished his seat in November, there were no blacks in the Senate.  In all of American history, there have only been five Senators of African descent.  Only three African Americans have been elected to the Senate since Reconstruction; two of those Senators were from Illinois, and Barack Obama had a hand in the election of both of them.

Recruited by Sandy Newman to head up the Chicago chapter of Project Vote! in 1992, the group credited with increasing black voter turnout and putting Chicago’s first black U.S. Senator, Carol Moseley Braun over the top, Obama, before he became “post-racial,” actively, shamelessly, and successfully promoted black voter participation.  From Chicago Magazine, 1993:

Within a few months, Obama, a tall, affable workaholic, had recruited staff and volunteers from black churches, community groups, and politicians. He helped train 700 deputy registrars, out of a total of 11,000 citywide. And he began a saturation media campaign with the help of black-owned Brainstorm Communications. (The company’s president, Terri Gardner, is the sister of Gary Gardner, president of Soft Sheen Products, Inc., which donated thousands of dollars to Project Voters efforts.) The group’s slogan-”It’s a Power Thing”-was ubiquitous in African-American neighborhoods. Posters were put up. Black-oriented radio stations aired the group’s ads and announced where people could go to register. Minority owners of McDonald’s restaurants allowed registrars on site and donated paid radio time to Project Vote! Labor unions provided funding, as, in late fall, did the Clin¬ton/Gore campaign, whose national voter-registration drive was being directed by Chicago alderman Bobby Rush.

Though Obama later claimed he never worked for the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now, (ACORN) Project Vote! is, at least now, affiliated with them, and the two groups collaborated on a voter drive on his behalf.  In 1995, a Chicago Reader profile documented a community organizing relationship with ACORN that went undisputed by Camp O, even though the article does not chronicle direct employment.

Once Obama became a candidate for the U.S. Senate himself, however, it became necessary to distance himself from his radical blackness and adopt a more conciliatory demeanor.  This facade was shaped in some measure by his defeat for Bobby Rush’s Congressional seat, when he was perceived as being out of touch with black reality:

Mr. Obama’s Ivy League education and his white liberal-establishment connections also became an issue. Mr. Rush told The Chicago Reader, “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool. We’re not impressed with these folks with these Eastern elite degrees.”

Mr. Rush and his supporters faulted him for having missed experiences that more directly defined the previous generation of black people. “Barack is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it,” Mr. Rush told The Reader.

Mr. Obama was seen as an intellectual, “not from us, not from the ’hood,” said Jerry Morrison, a consultant on the Rush campaign. Asked recently about that line of attack, Mr. Rush minimized it as “chest beating, signifying.”

The implication was not exactly that Mr. Obama was “not black enough,” as some blacks have suggested more recently; his credentials were suspect. “It was much more a function of class, not race,” Mr. Adelstein said. “Nobody said he’s ‘not black enough.’ They said he’s a professor, a Harvard elite who lives in Hyde Park.”

No dummy he, Mr. Obama quickly learned to exploit both his blackness and his whiteness successfully.  Playing up his bi-raciality while at the same time being conveniently black only when necessary, placing himself above historical racial “distractions” was a neat trick, deftly executed, and proved to be irresistible to voters of all races.   However, it was not without pitfalls, nor were racial aspects eliminated from the equation.  Far from it.  He just had to be clever about when, where, and how he chose to be “just black enough” to turn a given situation to his built-in advantage of being the only person of color in his races subsequent to the disastrous one against Rush.   When you’re the only black guy running, you can define what blackness is without challenge.

Therefore, when you can get the Secret Service to protect you just because you’re black, when your wife can channel Spike Lee and implore blacks to “wake up” and vote for you, when you can get the safest, most beloved  Mammy-figure since Aunt Jemimah to embrace and endorse you, when black mainstream media pundits and politicians champion the idea and ideals of your candidacy over it’s substance, it is akin to having an entire deckful of Aces up your sleeve.  You can feign outrage over every perceived slight you can find to blow out of proportion, casting your opponent in the most vilely negative light imaginable in that situation, while nullifying the legitimacy of any condemnation of your actions.  After all, how can a white person tell a black person how to feel about racism?  How can a black person in their right mind defend such attacks against a “brother” who says he’s being demeaned?  And, even if some things might seem overblown, and others inexplicably dismissed, when the players in the game all agree that the new guy has a right to the race cards up his sleeve simply because they know he knows they used to cheat guys who looked like him on a regular basis, the game becomes an exercise in futility for all but the guy it’s being guiltily thrown to.

Rod Blagojevich, who enjoys a lot of support in the black community himself, knows exactly how the game has been played, and saw clearly who was letting pots go, and who was slipping chips under the table to who.  Seeing his own stack dwindle to almost nothing, he decided to call in the only guy to have ever beaten Barack Obama at the game he taught him, and by appointing an equally safe, seemingly unassailable black man to fill Obama’s vacant seat, go all in on having a bigger pair.  From CNN:

Illinois Rep. Bobby Rush, who appeared at the Tuesday news conference, warned senators about blocking Burris.

“There are no African-Americans in the U.S. Senate. And I don’t think any U.S. senator who’s sitting in the Senate right now wants to go on record to deny one African-American from being seated in the U.S. Senate,” he said.

“I would ask you to not hang or lynch the appointee as you try to castigate the appointer and separate the appointee from the appointer,” Rush said.

Unlike Obama, Rush has no incentive to pretend to be racially ambiguous; he is not, nor has he ever been; the former Black Panther has always been radically black.  Now that all the race cards are face up in the middle of the table, it will be interesting to watch how Obama plays his hand.