No Bama Becomes Yes It's in the Can

"If he were white, this would be a blowout," says former Jesse Jackson presidential campaign adviser Harold Ickes in today's Times. The story rightly points out that race remains an ostensible elephant in the room, with neither McCain nor Obama bringing it up overtly. Still, many of McCain's recent smears of Obama have racial elements embedded in them. From the fear-mongering "Obama-is-both-a-black-and-Arab-with-ties-to-terrorism" drivel pushed by various websites and Fox News-legitimized extremists to the above-ground association-game tying Obama to Bill Ayres, the subprime mortgage crisis and Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and the more recent phony Acorn voter fraud charges, the American voter is being bombarded with a chronic "othering" of the Democratic presidential nominee. 

         But the strange thing is, the race is becoming a blowout. If so, then a variety of factors is helping to nullify the perception of Obama as black. The economic collapse, while ineluctably tarring McCain with a conservative Republican free market brush, is apparently the biggest reason for Obama's ascension. Obama appears to be the calmer, more intelligent mind in the face of crisis, with more articulately crafted solutions. While this may seem like a simple case of one candidate rising to the occasion and outclassing another, it may be an indication of the moment that Obama has passed into the realm of the "accepted" black man.

               In his Huffpost column, Eric Deggans interestingly cites a line of dialog from Spike Lee's classic film Do the Right Thing. When Lee's character asks John Torturro's Pino Frangione why he hates his Brooklyn neighborhood's black people while at the same time accept celebrities like Eddie Murphy and Magic Johnson, Pino responds:

"Magic, Eddie, Prince are not niggers...They're not really black. They're more than black. To me it's different."

                Could it be that Obama's explicitly stated colorblind strategy has worked? Or does all of this prove that race prejudice is intrinsically tied to class prejudice, and once you transcend class, race doesn't matter? Can Obama get a taxi to stop for him in Manhattan? 

           No matter what outrage you may have over his campaign workers combing states like Montana and highlighting the fact that he is half-white, the Senator from Illinois now seems, barring a national-security-level October surprise, a lock to become the first black President. Ever. Probably because he's "more than black." 

Or maybe, as Chocolate News insists, something else entirely.

Latino Auto-critique department:

I got an e-mail from NALIP today about WETA, the Washington-area PBS Channel, failing to air a documentary "Latinos '08" last week. While I'm willing to express my outrage that this station is turning its back on a program that offers a Latino perspective on national politics, of which there are precious few, I can't say I'm impressed by this particular one. Distorted to the point of absurdity with an overload of Republican-friendly talking heads, this doc reduces the "Latino" perspective to the Mexican-American one in a way that is almost insulting to the rest of us Latinos. Not to mention that the lavishing of praise on McCain (followed by faint cries of disappointment over his recent reversals) and barrage of attacks on Obama were right out of Karl Rove's playbook.

        From the beginning, the talking heads talk about "Latinos" when they should really be talking about "Mexican-Americans." A detailed history of the UFW and Chicano movement segued into the Reagan Hispanic era and beyond, and you would never know that Puerto Rico is a colony of the U.S. and that there was a Cuban Revolution, or that these Caribbean folks are represented by several elected officials (in the U.S. House of Representatives).  As the "favorable" New York Times review suggests: "Even after suggesting that Latino voters are a varied lot, some of these experts go right on referring to 'the Latino community' as if it were a monolithic entity." Any serious documentary on Latino politics must begin and end with an analysis that identifies three major constituencies: Mexican Americans in the West, Puerto Ricans in the Northeast, and Cubans in Florida, then touch on the mixed communities of Chicago and the Midwest and the new immigrant areas in the South.