African American Leaders Weigh in on Role of Race in Campaign
WASHINGTON _ Even as Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton were trying to de-escalate a controversy over race in the presidential nominating contest, one of Congress’s foremost black powerbrokers came out to fire one more shot, leveling it right at the African-American candidate who might break racial barriers to the White House.
Rep. Charles Rangel, D-N.Y., the baron who chairs the House Ways and Means Committee, told New York 1 cable news Monday evening that Obama was “absolutely stupid” in his part of an exchange over the relative influence of Rev. Martin Luther King and President Lyndon Johnson in passing civil rights legislation.
Those comments tracked the remarks of Black Entertainment Television’s billionaire founder Robert Johnson, another reigning figure in the black political establishment, who rushed to the defense of the campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton, with a racially tinged counter-punch to Obama, comparing him to Sidney Poitier.
In some ways, the contest over the presidential nomination is playing out among African-American political leaders as a debate with generational overtones.
At Clinton’s side have not only been Rangel and Johnson but civil rights hero Rep. John Lewis, D-Ga., and former United Nations Ambassador Andrew Young, who in videotaped remarks to black Atlanta residents suggested Bill Clinton was “every bit as black as Barack.”
Other established black political leaders whose careers have been steeped in the traditions of the civil rights movement and protest politics have been notably cool to Obama. Though the Rev. Jesse Jackson officially has endorsed Obama, for example, Rev. Al Sharpton has stayed neutral.
Obama, meanwhile has drawn especially strong support from a new generation of rising black political stars such as Massachusetts Gov. Deval Patrick, Newark mayor Corey Booker and Rep. Artur Davis, D-Ala..
Of course, the generational split is not complete. Joseph Lowry, one of the civil rights movement’s most prominent leaders, is an enthusiastic Obama supporter. And in Congress, the longest-serving African-American, House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers, D-Mich., is supporting Obama; the most recently elected, Rep. Laura Richardson, D-Calif., who took office last September after a special election, has endorsed Clinton.
But Obama himself appears cognizant of an uneasy relationship with the old guard civil rights leadership.
When he spoke at an anniversary of the Selma voting rights march last spring, he made the theme of his speech “the Joshua Generation,” using the Biblical story of the successor to the prophet Moses to highlight a role for a new generation of black political leadership to continue the journey begun by Civil Rights-era leaders.
Among the nation’s black population overall, support for Obama surged after he demonstrated viability with white voters through his victory in the Iowa caucuses and strong second-place finish in the New Hampshire primary.
A USA Today/Gallup poll released Tuesday showed Obama leading Clinton among African-Americans by a staggering 25-point margin in a poll conducted Jan. 10-13. In the same poll only a month earlier, Clinton led Obama among blacks by a healthy 14-point margin, and she had led among African-Americans by substantial margins all of last year.
Despite the shared bond of race, the African-American leaders who emerged from the civil rights movement and the ensuing struggles for a fair share of political power were shaped by starkly different life and career experiences than Obama.
He, after all, grew up in the comfortable atmosphere of Hawaii, raised by a white mother and white grandparents and educated at an elite prep school and Ivy League universities. He did go from college to work as a community organizer on Chicago’s depressed South Side, though in his case he had the option of a lucrative professional career.
As a U.S. senator and now a presidential candidate, Obama has faced an electorate that is mostly white and for which race-based appeals would be highly risky. That places him in a radically different political position from most African-American political leaders, who whether they hold elective office or not are typically accountable to a primarily black constituency.
Those differences in life and political touchstones contributed to questions early in the presidential race about whether Obama was “black enough.”
Over the weekend, Johnson seemed to refer to Obama’s admission of teenage drug use as he defended Clinton from criticism of a comment she made that some black activists interpreted as diminishing King’s influence in securing civil rights for black Americans. Obama had called the remark “ill-advised.”
Johnson said Hillary and Bill Clinton “have been deeply involved in black issues when Barack Obama was doing something in the neighborhood _ I won’t say what he was doing, but he said it in his book.”
Obama wrote about his youthful use of marijuana and sometimes cocaine in his memoir, “Dreams from My Father.” Johnson later said in a statement released by the Clinton campaign that his comments referred to Obama’s work as a community organizer.
Johnson also described Obama as acting like “a guy who says, `I want to be a reasonable, likable Sidney Poitier in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.’”
One of the first black officials to step out in support of Obama was Davis, a 40-year-old black Democrat who over the opposition of some Alabama civil rights leaders unseated an established black congressman there six years ago, aided by substantial support from white voters.
“I think there is a real yearning, not just in the south but all over the country, for someone who can get us away from so many of the old debates that have paralyzed this country,” Davis said. “We’ve made fitful strides over the years, and now there is a yearning to come into this new century freed from the baggage of racism.”
Though Obama would be aided by strong African-American support in his presidential bid, particularly in the upcoming primary in heavily black South Carolina, his success ultimately depends on broader support that could be hindered by heated debate on racial issues.
House Democratic Whip Jim Clyburn, the highest-ranking black member of Congress and a political powerbroker in South Carolina who so far has remained neutral in the presidential race, moved to tamp down the rancor between the campaigns over racial issues.
“I am hopeful that these candidates will be allowed to lay out their vision for our country… and that can’t be done if all the focus is on distinguishing factors like race and gender rather than on shared and individual visions” for the country, Clyburn said.
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