The great black and white hope?
Monday, April 30th, 2007To understand all the fuss that surrounds Barack Obama, go back to the 2004 Democratic Convention where wooden John Kerry, with his grey hair and stiff salute, was “reporting for duty” as the party’s presidential nominee.
They had picked what is known as a “resumé candidate” whose record in Vietnam and the Senate would, they thought, give them a chance of beating President Bush.
Then along came the skinny figure of Obama with his jazz-cool looks, exotic name and caramel skin. Though virtually unknown – not yet even elected to the Senate – his speech was, by all accounts, one of the best anyone had heard in years. As good as Bill Clinton, they said, but fresher.
“There is not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America – there’s the United States of America!” he said. Tears ran down faces, the hall was transformed into a rainbow of joy, the party was filled with the audacity of his hope, and a new brand was born.
Now fast-forward to today. Obama is running for president and has a credible chance of winning. But the crowds that appear wherever he goes don’t get quite the same emotional hit as they did three years ago in Boston. These days he adopts a calmer, more discursive, tone in most of his speeches and though the applause at the end is warm, it is sometimes shorter than it was when he entered the hall.
So why does this electrifying speaker feel the need to insulate his audience from the full force of his power? Obama said recently that while “I can gin up folks pretty well”, that is not his objective right now, explaining that “I want to give them a sense of my thought process”. An aide later told The Times that “everyone knows he can do a great speech”, before adding, with a knowing look, that “so could Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton”. The implication is that these black candidates for president never made it to the White House because they were seen as overemotional politicians who played into America’s deeply embedded stereotypes. Obama, by contrast, appeals to whites because he is “exciting”, not “excitable”.
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