Obama the "Iconic Negro"

Rush Limbaugh may have to add another verse to Barack the Magic Negro after this David Broder column.

Barack Obama's rise in the top tier of the Democratic presidential race has been fueled by the voters' belief that he is a candid, forthright politician. "'Hard truths' could be the slogan for the restarted Obama campaign," says the current New Yorker magazine, in a laudatory article. In The Washington Post's poll last week of Iowa caucus voters, Obama's biggest lead over Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Bill Richardson came when voters were rating candidates as honest and trustworthy.

And now comes Shelby Steele, the Hoover Institution scholar and author of "The Content of Our Character," with a book-length essay arguing that Obama's public stance is essentially synthetic.

In "A Bound Man," Steele makes the case that Obama has adopted "a mask" familiar to many other African-Americans, designed to appease white America's fear of being thought racist by offering them the opportunity to embrace a nonthreatening black.

Steele writes that "the Sixties stigmatized white Americans with the racial sins of the past -- with the bigotry and hypocrisy that countenanced slavery, segregation and white supremacy. Now, to win back moral authority, whites -- and especially American institutions -- must prove the negative: that they are not racist. In other words, white America has become a keen market for racial innocence."

Steele likens Obama's success to the fame and fortune won by Oprah Winfrey, Bill Cosby, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. But the earliest of the crossover heroes he calls "Iconic Negroes" was Sidney Poitier.

And it reminded me that in his political biography of Obama, author David Mendell reported the reaction of a focus group of liberal, North Shore (Chicago area) female voters, middle-aged and elderly, when shown a videotape of Obama speaking in his 2004 Senate campaign. Asked who Obama reminded them of, the answer was "Sidney Poitier." No wonder Hillary Clinton's pollster, Mark Penn, is worried by the Post's report that Obama has tied Clinton among female voters in Iowa.

But while all of the others mentioned by Steele were entertainers of one kind or another, Obama is the first to carry the "masking" technique of the "Iconic Negro" into the realm of politics.

Steele contrasts Obama with "challenger" types such as Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson, whose appeal was strictly within the black community, and who were seen as threats to the Democratic establishment.

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While I am a Shelby Steele fan, I am not sure I agree with this picture of Obama. What Obama is doing is rising above the politics of victimization, which Steele describes as "challenger" politics of Sharpton and Jackson. He also does a disservice to Bill Cosby who is trying to get young blacks to abandon the Hip Hop culture and join the American mainstream. Blacks will have joined the mainstream when those like Obama and Cosby are no longer considered "Iconic," but representative.

But this is all about image and not about the substance of Obama's politics. While he deserves some credit for candor on the campaign trail, which contrast sharply with Sen. Clinton, he is still on the wrong side of issues like the war in Iraq and that is why he should lose the election.