A few weeks ago, in what was hailed as the most candid and insightful speech about race since the death of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Barack Obama observed that "most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. . . . They are anxious about their futures, and feel their dreams slipping away; in an era of stagnant wages and global competition, opportunity comes to be seen as a zero sum game, in which your dreams come at my expense. . . . to wish away the resentments of white Americans, to label them as misguided or even racist, without recognizing they are grounded in legitimate concerns—this too widens the racial divide, and blocks the path to understanding.”
Like many others, I praised Obama’s candid analysis of the way things look for a lot of whites these days, but I also remember thinking at the time that sometimes people who complain of being misunderstood are not particularly appreciative when someone appears to think they understand them better than they might understand themselves.
Now comes Obama last week explaining why he’s having a hard time connecting with blue-collar whites: "It's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.''
There’s a great deal of truth in what the Senator had to say, of course. The problem is that it also smacks just a bit of the same condescending rhetoric that could have been lifted from a speech by Al Gore or John Kerry. Regardless of Sen. Obama’s intention, his remarks recall a familiar Democratic liberal dichotomy wherein “we,” the educated and enlightened, are reminded why “they,” who enjoy neither of these advantages, behave so as to invite our contempt but really deserve our pity. Obama was trying to portray a people rendered bitter and dysfunctional by the failure of their government to meet their needs or listen to their concerns, but in listing the supposed results of their victimization, he also managed to make religious faith, gun ownership, and opposition to free trade seem as pathological as racism and nativism.
For all his soaring rhetorical transcendence of race, even sympathetic observers have noted that Obama, whose humble beginnings hardly qualify him for the Born on Third Base Club, seems almost palpably discomfited when he is required to interact personally with regular old white folk. Whoever arranged the bowling fiasco is surely manning the copier in the campaign’s Lubbock office by now, but what can you do with a candidate who goes to resolutely blue collar Hershey, Pennsylvania, and proclaims a Wilbur’s chocolate bud “quite tasty”?
The saving grace in this current flap is the icy and aloof Hillary Clinton’s laughably contrived effort to manufacture political capital out of it by reinventing her own Wellseley-Yalie, “ain’t bakin’ no cookies” self on the fly as a bible-thumping, gun-totin,’ beer-and-a-shot re-do of Rosie the Riveter who is personally offended by her opponent’s elitism. Hillary is already way into her characteristic overkill mode, and the media is flogging the story like a borrowed mule, but general reaction thus far doesn’t quite suggest the PR disaster that the talking heads have been talking up.
The possibility that he might emerge from this most recent dust-up relatively unscathed doesn’t mean Oby shouldn’t learn from it, however. The ability to convey empathy is the dominant component in the DNA of the successful politician. In head-to-head matchups, empathy trumps intelligence every time. If you doubt this, ask the aforementioned Messrs.Gore and Kerry. In his prime, Bill Clinton exhibited both these qualities, but stretching way back to Adlai Stevenson, a long line of failed Democratic candidates can lay their defeats at least in part to the gap between their prodigious abilities to stand back and explain what ails people and their utter incapacity to move in close and convince the same people that they truly understand how it is to live with those ailments.
At his best, Mr. Clinton brought to the hustings not only knowledge and smarts but an uncanny ability to sound absolutely convincing when he insisted, “I feel your pain!” The difference between Clinton and his would-be Democratic successors is the difference between the great many artists who can play and sing the blues and those few who can also seem to actually feel the blues. I’m not suggesting that Senator Obama’s ultimate success depends on turning himself into another Robert Johnson or Muddy Waters, but a little bit more B.B. King sure wouldn’t hurt.
