Tornado Alley (PROG)

[SiouxPal]

O Brother, Where Art Thou?
By MAUREEN DOWD
Published: December 2, 2007

Customarily in presidential races, Americans seek a patriarchal figure, a strong parent to protect the house from invaders and financial turbulence.

He seems more like a child prodigy. Those enraptured with his gifts urge him on, like anxious parents, trying to pull that sustained, dazzling performance out of him that they believe he’s capable of; they are willing to put up with the prodigy’s occasional listlessness and crabbiness, his flights of self-regard and self-righteousness. Despite his uneven efforts and distaste for the claws of competition, they can see he is a golden child, one who moves, speaks, smiles and thinks with amazing grace.

His advisers and fund-raisers have pressed him to go fortissimo. Many voters with great expectations are hovering, hoping for a crescendo.

Except for panicked Clintonistas, everyone seems eager to see if the young pol can live up to his potential. Responding to his more combative style, the press has relaunched him, giving him a second chance to shine, on this week’s cover of Time, in the pages of The New Yorker, in the up arrow of Newsweek, which now declares him “poised to be the comeback kid,” and at The Times, where young female assistants lined the halls on Wednesday to watch him glide into a second meeting with editorial board writers and editors.

In The Atlantic, Andrew Sullivan lays out what he sees as Obama’s “indispensable” capacity to move the country past baby-boom feuds and the world past sectarian and racial divides. “It’s November 2008,” he imagines. “A young Pakistani Muslim is watching television and sees that this man — Barack Hussein Obama — is the new face of America. In one simple image, America’s soft power has been ratcheted up not a notch, but a logarithm.”

In Time, Shelby Steele agrees that a President Obama could show “that race is but a negligible human difference.”

But he notes that Obama’s abandonment by his African father at the age of 2 marked him. “Much of the excitement that surrounds him comes from the perception that he is only lightly tethered to race,” Steele writes. “Yet the very arc of his life — from Hawaii to the South Side of Chicago — has been shaped by an often conscious resolve to ‘belong’ irrefutably to the black identity.” (Obama wrote that he dropped a white girlfriend partly because of her race.)

Jesse Jackson has chastised Obama for not focusing enough on black voters or fussing more about the Jena Six. But Obama wrote that he grew up knowing how to disarm whites worried about angry black men.

The senator says that not all blacks have to support him any more than all women have to support Hillary. But so far Hillary has the advantage with women and blacks.

Obama came to the Apollo Theater in Harlem Thursday night — down the block from Bill Clinton’s office — to try to wrest some support back from the first black president and his wife. Some young Obama fans wore yellow tees reading, “Who decided Hillary is best for the black community?”

Charlie Rangel; John Lewis; Quincy Jones; Essence Communications’ chairman, Edward Lewis; and other celebrated Hillary supporters were not there.

But Obama did get to sup at Sylvia’s soul-food restaurant — the place where Bill O’Reilly was shocked to find such genteel black folk — with the still-up-for-grabs Al Sharpton. The only endorsement Sharpton offered afterward was: “A man that likes chicken and corn bread can’t be that bad.”

Obama got an introduction from Chris Rock, who warned the audience that “you’d be real embarrassed if he won and you wasn’t down with it. You’d say, ‘Aw, man, I can’t call him now. I had that white lady. What was I thinking?’”

And he got a benediction from Cornel West, the Princeton professor who took Obama to task earlier this year for not attending a national gathering of black scholars and civil rights leaders.

West tried to help Obama in his uneasy quest to claim his place in the black community, calling him “my brother,” “an eloquent brother,” “a good brother” and “a decent brother.” He urged the audience to put Obama in a historical continuum with the spirituals on the plantation and Apollo stars like James Brown and Billie Holiday. Black, he said, has variations. “We don’t expect Alicia Keys to be Aretha,” he said.

Obama threw in some lines meant to show his black fire, even if it’s a cool fire.

“I’m in this race because I’m tired of reading about Jena,” he said. “I’m tired of reading about nooses. I’m tired of hearing about a Justice Department that doesn’t understand justice. ... I don’t want to wake up four years from now and discover that we still have more young black men in prison than in college.”

He said he’s running because of what Martin Luther King Jr. called “the fierce urgency of now.” Now can the prodigy muster that fierce urgency?

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/02/opinion/02dowd.html?_r=1&ref=opinion&oref=slogin