The challenge

Yesterday, TONE suggested that Barack Obama's speech on race in America asked whether the nation can move beyond the racial issues that have bedevilled us for the past half-century. Easy enough to pose the question, but how does it play out in real life?

Perhaps the key lies in this passage from Obama's speech:

Most working- and middle-class white Americans don’t feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience – as far as they’re concerned, no one’s handed them anything, they’ve built it from scratch. They’ve worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor. 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. So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they’re told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

If you call a man a racist, he'll deny it--vehemently (apart from the lunatic fringe that celebrates prejudice.) But if you can show him that he and black or Hispanic Americans have common interests, you might get him to concentrate on issues instead of racial identification. If you can get him active, you might get him to meet some people who are different from himself. And he might--just might--modify his feelings about such people. Does that sound like Pollyanna? Maybe. But on some level, that process explains the New Deal. The black vote was minor in most parts of the nation in the 1930's, but there was a marked shift of black voters from the GOP (the Party of Lincoln, remember), small businesspeople (especially Jews, who were also often Republicans--both because of its role as the party of business and as the party of the Great Emancipator) as well as traditionally conservative small farmers to the ranks of the Democratic Party.

FDR's secret was simple: concentrate on interest politics, not identity politics. Like many good ideas, however, easier to enunciate than to practice. Especially when the media spends so much energy on guilt-by-association between the candidate and his former preacher.

Nonetheless, that's the direction Obama should move, and boldly. He should go into Pennsylvania, North Carolina, Kentucky and Indiana and speak to the interests that black, white and Hispanic voters share. He should challenge the Republican mantra of lower taxes (for the wealthy), freedom from regulation (even for purveyors of mortgage fauds) and no-bid contracts for Halliburton and its ilk. He should speak out on how to protect the victims of mortgage scams and those without health insurance. He should show voters that they are better served by a president who serves their interests than by one who panders to their identity.