THE FIVE FACES OF BARACK OBAMA
By David Von Drehle
TIME
Aug 21 2008
If Barack Obama had not chosen a life in politics, he might have
made a fine psychotherapist. He is a master at taking what you’ve
told him and feeding it right back. What I hear you saying is …
Open his book The Audacity of Hope to almost any page and listen. On
immigration, for example, Obama first mirrors "the faces of this
new America" he has met in the ethnic stew pot of Chicago: "in the
Indian markets along Devon Avenue, in the sparkling new mosque in the
southwestern suburbs, in an Armenian wedding and a Filipino ball." Then
he pivots to give voice to the "anxieties" of "many blacks" and "as
many whites about the wave of illegal immigration," adding: "Not all of
these fears are irrational." He admits that he knows the "frustration"
of needing an interpreter to speak to one’s auto mechanic and in the
next breath cherishes the innocent dreams of an immigrant child.
In other words, he hears America singing — and griping, fretting,
seething, conniving, hoping, despairing. He can deliver a pitch-perfect
expression of the racial anger of many American blacks — as he did
in his much discussed speech on race relations earlier this year —
and, just as smoothly, unpack the racial irritations gnawing at many
whites. To what extent does he share any of those emotions? The doctor
never exactly says.
Consciously or unconsciously, Obama has been honing this technique
for years. During his time at Harvard Law School in the 1980s,
the student body was deeply divided. In one heated debate, Obama so
adroitly summarized the various positions without tipping his own
hand that by the end of the meeting, as Professor Charles Ogletree
told one newspaper, "everyone was nodding, Oh, he agrees with me."
He has been called a window into the American psyche. Or you might
say he’s a mirror — what you see depends on who you are and where
you stand. Obama puts it this way: "I serve as a blank screen on
which people of vastly different political stripes project their
own views." But those metaphors all suggest that he is some sort of
passive instrument, when in fact his elusive quality is an active
part of his personality. It’s how you square the fact that Obama once
wrote the most intimate memoir ever published by a future nominee
yet still manages to avoid definition. At his core, this is a deeply
reserved and emotionally reticent man. Consider this anecdote from
Dreams from My Father: as a young man in New York City, he lived next
door to an elderly recluse "who seemed to share my disposition." When
he happened to meet his neighbor returning from the store, Obama
would offer to carry the old man’s groceries. Together, the two of
them would slowly climb the stairs, never speaking, and at the top,
the man would nod silently "before shuffling inside and closing the
latch … I thought him a kindred spirit," Obama concludes.
Both his rhetorical style and his ingrained disposition tend to obscure
rather than reveal. This is how Obama remains enigmatic no matter
how much we see of him. As the campaign enters its last chapter, it
may not be enough for him to say, as he often does, "This election is
not about me … this campaign is about you." Supporters and opponents
alike want a clearer picture of Obama, and they are selecting elements
of his words, policies, public record and biography to shape their
clashing interpretations. Those pieces of Obama are also open to
interpretation, because so few of them are stamped from any familiar
presidential mold: the polygamous father, the globe-traveling single
mother, the web of roots spreading from Kansas to Kenya, friends
and relatives from African slums to Washington and Wall Street, and
intellectual influences ranging from Alexander Hamilton to Malcolm
X. Four of the faces of Obama pose various threats to his hopes for
victory. The fifth is the one his campaign intends to drive home,
from the convention in Denver right to Election Day.
1. The Black Man Henry Louis Gates Jr. once wrote an essay on the life
of writer Anatole Broyard, the light-complexioned son of two black
parents who lived his life passing as a white man. "He wanted to be a
writer," Gates explained, but "he did not want to be a Negro writer. It
is a crass disjunction, but it is not his crassness or his disjunction
… We give lip service to the idea of the writer who happens to be
black, but had anyone, in the postwar era, ever seen such a thing?"
Obama tells a parallel story in his memoir, the journey of a man
raised by his Caucasian mother and grandparents who seeks his identity
as an African American. Along the path, he was drawn to a number of
older black men who argued that America’s racial divide is absolute
and unbridgeable. Obama recalls a visit as a teenager to the home
of a black man his white grandfather considered a friend. To his
surprise, the man explained that it was hopeless to think any white
man could truly befriend someone black. "He can’t know me," the man
said of Obama’s grandfather. No matter how close they might seem,
"I still have to watch myself."
That is resolutely not the message communicated in Obama’s campaign,
however. "I reject a politics that is based solely on racial identity,
gender identity, sexual orientation or victimhood generally," he has
declared. He enjoys nearly unanimous support from African Americans in
polls; nevertheless, just as Broyard sought to avoid being labeled
a "Negro writer," Obama resists efforts to define him as a "black
candidate." And for some of the same reasons too. As soon as the
race label is added, some of the audience tunes out, others are
turned off and still others leap to conclusions about who you are
and how you think. Obama has written that race was his "obsession"
growing up but that he long ago left that burden behind. Now he lays
claim to the whole spectrum: "the son of a black man from Kenya and
a white woman from Kansas" with "brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews,
uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across
three continents."
The question, to borrow from Gates, is whether enough people in
2008 are ready to imagine such a thing. There’s an interesting
scene in Dreams in which Obama meets for the first time another of
those influential elders — the Rev. Jeremiah Wright. Earlier this
year, Wright’s comments about race led Obama to repudiate his former
pastor. In an uncanny way, this conversation from more than 20 years
ago goes directly to the heart of Obama’s current dilemma. The
eminent sociologist William Julius Wilson had published a book
arguing that the role of race in shaping society was giving way to
class. But for Wright, the concept of a postracial politics simply
didn’t compute. "These miseducated brothers," the pastor fumed to
the young Obama, "like that sociologist at the University of Chicago,
talking about ‘the declining significance of race.’ Now, what country
is he living in?"
If identity politics might gain some black votes for Obama, it can
also cost him votes elsewhere. So how many Americans will agree with
Wright that race is still front and center? The number is notoriously
slippery, because voters don’t always tell pollsters the truth. At
the Weekly Standard, a magazine with a neocon tilt, writer Stanley
Kurtz rejects Obama’s postracial message because he suspects it
isn’t sincere. Probing the coverage of Obama’s career as an Illinois
legislator in the black-oriented newspaper the Chicago Defender,
Kurtz concluded, "The politician chronicled here is profoundly
race-conscious." Though Kurtz’s message is aimed primarily at whites,
it’s not so different from one angrily whispered by Jesse Jackson. "I
want to cut his nuts off," Jackson fumed — because he believes that
Obama’s race ought to determine which issues the candidate raises
and how he discusses them. Either way, whether an opponent claims
that Obama remains race-conscious or a supporter says he ought to be,
both are rejecting the foundation of his campaign.
Figures like Jackson and Wright have invested a lifetime in the
politics of black identity. Obama’s success, whether it culminates in
the White House or not, signals the passing of their era. So it is no
wonder that younger voters have been key to his candidacy. Having grown
up in the era of Oprah Winfrey, Denzel Washington, Tiger Woods and,
yes, Henry Louis Gates Jr., they are better able to credit Obama’s
thesis that "there’s not a black America and white America and Latino
America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America."
2. The Healer Dreams from My Father is the story of a quest — not
for honor or fortune but for meaning. The book presents a wounded
young man who has never felt entirely at home — not among whites
or among blacks, neither in slums nor in student unions — and is
haunted by "the constant, crippling fear that I didn’t belong." He
wants to know how to feel rooted and purposeful. At the end of his
odyssey, he decides to take a leap of faith. For the young Obama,
"faith in other people" becomes his home.
This is what he preaches: the seemingly unlimited power of people
who are willing to trust, cooperate and compromise. Bringing people
together for action, what he calls "organizing," holds "the promise of
redemption." And without exactly saying it, Obama offers himself as the
embodiment of his own message, the one-man rainbow coalition. You don’t
believe white and black can peacefully, productively coexist? Think
the gulf between Chicago’s South Side and the Harvard Law Review
can never be bridged? Do you fear that the Muslim masses of Africa
and Asia are incompatible with the modernity of the West or that
cosmopolitan America and Christian America will never see eye to
eye? Just look at me! It’s not unusual to meet Obama supporters who
say the simple fact of electing him would move mountains, changing
the way the world looks at America, turning the page on the nation’s
racial history and so on. He is the change they seek.
The message doesn’t work for everyone: so far, Obama’s numbers in the
national polls average below 50%. But his enormous and enthusiastic
audiences are evidence that many people are intrigued, if not
deeply moved. "Yes, we can!" turns out to be a powerful trademark
at a time when 3 out of 4 Americans believe the country is on the
wrong track. Many Democrats placed their political bets on anger
in recent years: anger at the war, anger over the disputed election
in 2000, anger at Bush Administration policies. Obama doubled down
on optimism, beginning with his careermaking speech at the 2004
Democratic Convention: "Hope in the face of difficulty, hope in the
face of uncertainty, the audacity of hope. In the end, that is God’s
greatest gift to us, the bedrock of this nation, a belief in things
not seen, a belief that there are better days ahead."
If you click deeply enough into Obama’s website, you can find position
papers covering enough issues to fill Congressional Quarterly. He has
a specific strategy to refocus the military on Afghanistan. He backs
a single-payer health-care system. But it wasn’t some 10-point plan
that turned Obama into a politician who fills arenas while others
speak in school cafeterias. He knows that detailed policies tend to
drive people apart rather than bring them together. People arrived
to hear him out of fervor or mere curiosity, and they stayed for
the sense of possibility. They heard rhetoric like this, from his
speech claiming victory after his epic nomination battle: "If we are
willing to work for it and fight for it and believe in it, then I am
absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look
back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began
to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was
the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet
began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured
our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on Earth."
That’s a pretty quick step from an election to nirvana, and Obama’s
opponents would like to turn such oratory against him. No one does it
more effectively than radio host Rush Limbaugh, with his judo-master
sense for his foes’ vulnerabilities. Limbaugh rarely refers to Obama
by his name. Instead, he drops his baritone half an octave and calls
him "the messiah."
3. The Novice Obama’s critics tend to paint him two ways — related
portraits but subtly different. The first is a picture of an empty
suit, a man who reads pretty speeches full of gossamer rhetoric. "Just
words," as Senator Hillary Clinton put it.
And it’s true that Obama doesn’t have a thick record of businesses
he has built or governments he has run. For one thing, he has moved
around too much. The restlessness in his résumé is striking:
two years at Occidental College, two years at Columbia University,
a year in business, three years as a community organizer and then
law school. Obama’s four two-year terms in the Illinois state senate
are his version of permanence, but in two of those terms, he was busy
running for higher office.
Voters accustomed to evaluating governors and generals may have a hard
time deciding what value to place on a stint of "organizing." But
it was surely real work. Reading Obama’s account of his efforts to
organize the residents in a single Chicago neighborhood, with weeks
of toil going into staging a single meeting, is like watching a man
dig the Panama Canal with a Swiss Army knife.
As for his conventional training, friends of Obama’s like to point
out that 12 years as a lawmaker is more experience than Abraham
Lincoln, the original beanpole from Illinois, had in 1860. They
note that the issues Obama is most drawn to — health-care reform,
juvenile justice, poverty — aren’t the easiest. They tell the story
of his artful arm-twisting and cajolery in the Illinois senate on
behalf of bills to reform campaign-finance laws and require police to
videotape interrogations. Obama worked his colleagues one by one, on
the floor, on the basketball court, at the poker table, and managed
to pass some difficult legislation. "He’s unique in his ability to
deal with extremely complex issues, to reach across the aisle and to
deal with diverse people" one Republican colleague, McCain supporter
Kirk Dillard, told the Wall Street Journal.
That wasn’t enough to impress Clinton in the primaries. She enjoyed
noting that Obama was chairman of a Senate subcommittee yet had never
convened a substantive hearing. John McCain’s campaign will not be
any more dazzled. In a sense, the question of Obama’s preparation
hinges on data that are still being gathered, because his greatest
accomplishment is this unfolding campaign. For a man given to Zen-like
circularities — "We are the change we seek" — the best proof that
he can unite people to solve problems might be his ability to unite
them to win an election.
4. The Radical Others believe Obama is like the clever wooden offering
of the Greeks to Trojans: something that appears to be a gift on the
outside but is cunningly dangerous within. They find in his background
and in what he leaves unsaid telltale signs of a radical. Obama has
worked on education issues in Chicago with William Ayers and has
visited the home of Ayers and his wife Bernadette Dohrn. Both were
leaders of the violent, leftist Weather Underground. But the indictment
of Obama framed by his opponents starts years earlier in Hawaii,
with the black man who told Obama that a true friendship with his
white grandfather wasn’t possible. The man’s name was Frank Marshall
Davis, and in the 1930s, ’40s and early ’50s he was a well-known poet,
journalist and civil rights and labor activist. Like his friend Paul
Robeson and others, Davis perceived the Soviet Union as a "staunch
foe of racism" (as he later put it in his memoirs), and at one point
he joined the Communist Party. "I worked with all kinds of groups,"
Davis explained. "My sole criterion was this: Are you with me in my
determination to wipe out white supremacy?"
The conservative group Accuracy in Media (AIM) is eager to paint the
radical picture. In press releases and website articles, AIM calls
Davis "Obama’s Communist Mentor," although by the time they met, Davis
had been out of politics for decades, and "mentor" may exaggerate his
role in the young man’s life. Still, it’s clear that Obama did seek
advice from the old man and that what he got was undiluted. "You’re
not going to college to get educated. You’re going there to get
trained," Davis once warned Obama. "They’ll train you so good, you’ll
start believing what they tell you about equal opportunity and the
American way and all that s___." Did the future candidate take this
to heart? Not according to him. "It made me smile," Obama recalls,
"thinking back on Frank and his old Black Power dashiki self. In
some ways he was as incurable as my mother, as certain in his faith,
living in the same ’60s time warp."
Obama’s memoir displays more familiarity with the ideas of the far left
than most American politicians would advertise. His interest in African
independence movements led him to the seminal work of Frantz Fanon, a
Marxist sociologist, and he speaks in passing of attending "socialist
conferences" at the Cooper Union in New York City. But as Obama told
TIME, this was in the Reagan years, and he was also reading works
by conservative giants like Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek. He
browsed among the ideologues but never bought in, he said. "I was
always suspicious of dogma and the excesses of the left and the right."
Not all Obama critics see red, of course. Some merely believe he is
more liberal than he claims to be. They cite a National Journal study,
which Obama disputes, that rated him the most liberal member of the
U.S. Senate, and they aren’t dissuaded by the candidate’s recent
positions in favor of gun owners and an electronic-surveillance bill
loathed by civil libertarians.
There is another Trojan-horse interpretation just below the radar. It
is the idea that a man named Barack Hussein Obama might be hiding a
Muslim identity. Obama has tackled this dozens of times. His Kenyan
grandfather was indeed a Muslim; his father espoused no faith;
Obama attended a Muslim school in Indonesia for a time as a boy
because that’s where he lived — Indonesia is a Muslim country. He
believed in no religion until he moved to Chicago as a grown man and
was baptized Christian by Wright. As campaign spokesman Robert Gibbs
puts it, "His Christian pastor and this Muslim thing — how can he
have problems with both at the same time? Pick one."
But that’s the problem with having five faces. There’s more than one to
choose from. The "secret Muslim" rumors about Obama may be scurrilous,
but they survived the sudden fame of Obama’s card-carrying Christian
pastor. A recent poll found that 12% of Americans believe them.
5. The Future
Back up a few paragraphs and look again at something Obama wrote in
his memoir. It’s that passing reference to his mother living in a
"’60s time warp." No presidential nominee since John F. Kennedy has so
lightly dismissed those turbulent years. What could the Summer of Love
have meant to a 6-year-old in Hawaii, or Woodstock to an 8-year-old in
Indonesia? The Pill, Vietnam, race riots, prayer in school and campus
unrest — forces like these and the culture clashes they unleashed
have dominated American politics for more than 40 years. But Obama
approaches these forces historically, anthropologically — and in
his characteristic doctor-with-a-notepad style. In The Audacity of
Hope, he writes about the culture wars in the same faraway tone he
might use for the Peloponnesian Wars. ("By the time the ’60s rolled
around, many mainstream Protestant and Catholic leaders had concluded,"
etc.) These fights belong to that peculiar category of the past known
as stuff your parents cared about.
"I think that the ideological battles of the ’60s have continued to
shape our politics for too long," Obama told TIME. "The average baby
boomer, I think, has long gotten past some of these abstract arguments
about Are you left? Are you right? Are you Big Government? Small
government? You know, people are very practical. What they are
interested in is, Can you deliver schools that work?"
This aspect of Obama — the promise to "break out of some of those
old arguments" — speaks powerfully to many younger Americans, who
have turned out in record numbers to vote and canvass for him. Obama
is the first national politician to reflect their widespread feeling
that time is marching forward but politics is not, that the baby
boomers in the interest groups and the media are indeed trapped in a
time warp, replaying their stalemated arguments year after year. The
theme recurs in conversations with Obama supporters: He just feels
like something new.
Obama on the stump is constantly underlining this idea. As he
told a recent town-hall meeting in a New Mexico high school gym,
"We can’t keep doing the things we’ve been doing and expect
a different result." It’s a message his campaign organization
has taken to heart. Obama’s is the first truly wired campaign,
seamlessly integrating the networking power of technology with the
flesh-and-blood passion of a social movement. His people get the fact
that the Internet is more than television with a keyboard attached. It
is the greatest tool ever invented for connecting people to others who
share their interests. For decades, the Democratic Party has relied
on outside allies to deliver its votes — unions, black churches,
single-interest liberal groups. With some 2 million volunteers and
contributors in his online database, Obama is perhaps a bigger force
now than any of these. McCain may perceive Obama’s enormous celebrity
as a weakness — workhorse vs. show horse — but celebrity has its
benefits. Obama will accept the nomination in front of a crowd of
76,000 in Denver’s professional-football stadium, and the price of
a free ticket is to register as a campaign volunteer.
Each of the first four Obama faces presents risks for his campaign,
but the fifth prospect offers a way around many of them. If he can get
through a general-election campaign without enlisting in the culture
wars, he gains credibility as something new. That in turn might keep
him from becoming mired in the trap of identity politics. Branding
himself as the face of the future can neutralize the issue of
inexperience. And if he can build his own political network strong
enough to win a national election, he will lend credibility to his
almost mystical belief in the power of organizing.
Obama’s banners tout CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN, and this slogan cuts to
the heart of the task before him. The key word isn’t change, despite
what legions of commentators have been saying all year. The key is
believe. With gas prices up and home prices down; with Washington
impotent to tackle issues like health care, energy and Social Security;
with politics mired in a fifty-fifty standoff between two unpopular
parties — plenty of Americans are ready to try a new cure. But will
they come to believe that this new doctor, this charismatic mystery,
this puzzle, is the one they can trust to prescribe it?
–Boundary_(ID_9qIlYXx21gj8mUI+btvdJQ)–