July 5, 2008
Perhaps seventeen years in New York -- including eight in publishing and three in law school -- has immunized me from the infectious charms of Michele and Barack. Sen. Obama's demeanor recalls the dean of academic affairs in law school. A man who had been the bright young law student and, for better and worse, made a career of it by salt 'n peppa middle age. There's one in every class, I suppose. In mine, it was kid named Rose whose sticky poetry memorialized historic injustice with a better ear for professorial approval than for meter or rhyme. The nineties and another decade, another cause encased in the syrupy amber of unerring political instincts and sentimentality that defy event or sense. Nothing seethes like success in the middle class coalition of the oppressed.
Barack Obama was that bright kid at Harvard Law. The Harvard Law Review may even approach Detroit hockey as an example of an undiminished meritocracy. And, as a subsidized social activist and political beneficiary of a Chicago heiress, his schoolyard careerism has found a home in the adult world. Yet he and his wife seethe in the face of success -- a kind of autonomic disatisfaction that is not unique to the left, but has certainly found a permanent home there.
Still, nobody can say he ain't smart.
But, his charms pall on the involuntarily initiated. With a few literal-minded exceptions, the left will not carp on his tango to the right. The moves are smooth -- too smooth -- but they may just entrance enough middle of the road voters to think what the senator from Illinois wants them to think. That he will finish the mission in Iraq and Afghanistan. That he will continue to fund a robust military. That he won't raise taxes. That he won't impoverish millions of working people by slamming the breaks on energy exploration in the name of green virtue.
The senator as president would be the last stone in place for a construction project that rivals in time and persistance the building of the great cathedrals of Britain and Europe. The culture of death will be cemented into place with abortion in all its forms and stages and in the use of the newly-conceived to advance "medical science." Marriage will be "redefined." Liberty will continue its decline into institutionalized license. The speculative intrusions of Homeland Security will become the daily hostilities of school marms, librarians, human resource VPs, and the pitiless bureaucracy of Canadianesque human rights big brotherism. Real privacy will be a memory and the intellectual and religious dimensions of the First Amendment will be criminalized. The four "Archbishops" on the Supreme Court will find themselves surrounded by elevated members of the Ninth Circuit Court or judges of equal or lesser jurisprudence.
But Sen. Obama and his lovely wife with the piercing Hillary eyes, confront an unspoken, perhaps unspeakable, obstruction to this too likely scenario. The shameful death spiral of too many of America's center cities. I have been challenged in recent months for over-reacting to Detroit's politically and economically inflicted sorrows. But as outrage follows scandal follows disbelief, it can no longer be said, "things can't possibly get worse." A death spiral by any other name... Here on the blue Woodward corridor we are bookended by Detroit and another collapsing city. Detroit is the seat of Wayne County, Pontiac is the seat of (formerly) prosperous Oakland County. Like Detroit, Pontiac is a predominately black city surrounded by more diverse suburbs. That's right, more diverse -- Indian, hispanic, Chinese, Korean, Bengali, Arab, Iraqi, Sikh, Japanese, Vietnamese, Jewish, Afican (as in from Afica and its many tribes and imaginary countries). There is also the wholesale transplantation of Detroit and Pontiac's black middle and upper middle class to Southfield and other territories leafy and manicured. Not to mention the latest wave from Britain and Germany's brain drain. We even have a new parish church built by the disapora from India's 2000 year old Christian communities. There are shopping centers devoted to Indian, Arab, and Asian merchants.
The cultures of Detroit and Pontiac, like those of Compton and Oakland in California, or Philadelphia and Baltimore, have become monochromatic.
But that is merely a surface impression. What Detroit or New Orleans represent is a permanent under class that happens to be black. A mono-culture of despair, anger, ignorance, and misplaced pride -- the Future without a future. Yet this is not the majority of Black Americans. Detroit proves that ethnic solidarity can be a myth. And, although mostly black, this underclass is becoming a melting pot of black, white and hispanic -- a group that if it doesn't make America its home will never have one.
But what do people see? They see dysfunctional cities with black mayors. They see personal corruption in Kwame Kilpatrick and the former D.C. mayor Marion Barry. They see black parents desperate to get their kids out of black-run school districts. They see cities where you have a 50/50 chance to getting away from murder. In Detroit the murder clearance rate is fifty percent. The city council sweat under FBI investigation and possible federal indictment. And the Detroit police department is under what seems a permanent state of FBI supervision. And eight to nine thousand children flee the schools every year.
Seeing all this -- an almost daily live feed of violence, corruption, and dysfunction worthy of a third world oligarchy -- Americans look at Senator Obama and wonder. Barack Obama's personal history is not urban America. It is more than a matter of biracial heritage. It is his personal heritage. A mother who woke him at 4:30AM every school day to give him American grammar and other lessons before he went off to an Indonesian school. He was loved and cared for and disciplined and given the hope of a middle class future. A more tender version of Justice Clarence Thomas's southern father/grandfather. Obama's "blackness" -- professional blackness Jim Sleeper once called it -- is acquired like an American expatriate with a phony British accent.
He is smart and he is accomplished. So is his co-candidate, Michelle. But he has nearly forty years of urban history against him. Coleman Young, Wilson Goode, Marion Barry, Kwame Kilpatrick, almost every mayor of Oakland (including the very white Jerry Brown), Willie Brown, Ray Nagy...
Senator McCaine welcomes President Bush with the Lake Woebegon hug -- the extended arms with the fingers barely touching the shoulders and then whipped back in retreat from any appearance of intimacy. And Bush has made his mistakes, but he has also, at least on the Iraq front of the war, listened and acted on better advice. While his people were suffering and self-helpless, Mayor Nagy of New Orleans sobbed on a local radio show that he didn't know what to do. Winston Churchill once wept in private during the Blitz and wondered if he could carried on, but he never showed defeatism or blamed others for his mistakes.
So the question again, will Obama be different? There is another irony here. The New South, with its modern legacy of thousands of black elected officials -- mayors, sheriffs, judges, police chiefs, state legislators, govenors and lieutenant governors, and even a congressperson or two (some from majority white districts). The current dysfunction appears to be a western and north and northeastern disease. Justice Thomas has said that there is no reason why an all-black school cannot be a good school. History has shown us as much at Tuskegee, Howard, Spellman -- in spite of black poverty and lack of political power. After all, many whites came out of similar poor Southern schools.
Will Senator Obama follow the prosperous South? That would require more than cosmetic "centrism" or moderation of his extreme world view. Because it is precisely his ghost-shirt foreign policy with its toothless warnings and negotiations and his Santa Claus federalism that parallel urban lawlessness and sense of entitlement that has made so many American cities the inevitable destinations of good intentions -- Hell on Earth.
Sen. Obama sits on a knife edge -- will he be tainted by significant urban failure or will enough babyboomers make one last dash for History.
Sam Macomb
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