Obamabelonging

This piece by a British journalist strikes me as likely being close to the truth:

He started by insisting that America should take him for what he was as an individual - a talented, eloquent politician who would embody "the change" that the nation needed.

In the early months, when he was winning primaries in states with almost entirely white populations, he never used the "r" word. This was the man who was going to transcend racial politics once and for all.

The fact that he could not is his - and America's - tragedy...

Mr Obama has accepted the mantle of black resentment: the bitterness of slavery and segregation, the triumphs of the civil rights movement, the continuing struggle for equal opportunity and achievement. They are all his now, an intrinsic part of the package in which he offers himself to the electorate, even though, ironically, they have little to do with his own life experience.

He is not descended from slaves, nor was his childhood marked by poverty, segregated schooling or social deprivation. His father was not African-American but entirely African and his mother, as we all know, was white. He did not grow up in the midst of the ugly hatreds and divisions of the American South, or even with the more subtle, disguised discrimination of the North.

[...]

So what was it all about? It was part of a phenomenon that almost no one who was not born and raised in the United States seems to grasp: the desperate need that Americans feel to be part of a shared ethnic or cultural identity that will give them a sense of rootedness and belonging in the vast, endlessly shifting flux of a country that is a nation but not a people.

I would guess that Mr Obama, who had a personal genealogy even more dislocated and idiosyncratic than most, wanted to belong. He wanted a community that could enfold him and make him feel that he was part of something that was recognisable and self-affirming...

Mark C.

Update: Then there's Mark Steyn's view:

...in Philadelphia the senator attempted to universalize his peculiar judgment — to claim that, given America’s history, it would be unreasonable to expect black men of Jeremiah Wright’s generation not to peddle hateful and damaging lunacies. Isn’t that — what’s the word? — racist? So much for the post-racial candidate.

Upperdate: Plus the Hawaiian angle, which may help explain Mr Obama's need to find a mainland identity (via WSJ BEST OF THE WEB TODAY). And what about the Indonesian interlude (NBC Nightly News March 14)? At this point my head is spinning.

Posted by markc at March 24, 2008 05:29 PM