Barack Obama's Race With Himself

It's not as if John McCain has become irrelevant, but in the main ring of the '08 electoral circus, all eyes are now on Barack Obama's solo high-wire act as he walks a racial, political and cultural tightrope toward the White House.

The questions are less about the two candidates' policies and personalities than about the larger meaning of it all: "Could an Obama Presidency Hurt Black Americans?" CNN asks while citing those "who warn that an Obama victory could cause white Americans to ignore entrenched racial divisions while claiming that America has reached the racial Promised Land."

Meanwhile, in the Wall Street Journal, the author of a book predicting that Obama can't win now says that he "has already won a cultural mandate to the American presidency. And politically, he is now essentially in a contest with himself" to persuade "even Middle America to feel comfortable as the mantle they bestow on him settles upon his shoulders."

This portentous pronouncement comes at the conclusion of a column titled "Why Jesse Jackson Hates Obama," which argues that Jackson and his peers presided over "an extortionist era of civil rights, in which they said to American institutions: Your shame must now become our advantage."

Obama, he claims, is moving beyond all that to become the anti-Jackson "to trade moral leverage for gratitude. Give up moral leverage over whites, refuse to shame them with America's racist past, and the gratitude they show you will constitute a new form of black power. They will love you for the faith you show in them."

All these exegeses are enough to make voters' heads spin as they watch a gifted political figure weaving his way this week through a Middle East minefield and heading toward what promises to be a tumultuous reception in Europe.

Whatever the subtexts of Barack Obama's American journey turn out to be, one conclusion is inescapable: Unlike the current occupant, if and when he moves into the Oval Office, a person of substance will be sitting there.

"Ike Liked Civil Rights"

Popular history puts labels on presidents, but life is usually more complicated.

Fifty years ago, Congress took its first small steps since the abolition of slavery to free African-Americans from segregated lives in the South by giving the Federal government powers to enforce voting rights and move against segregated schools.

American mythology credits Lyndon Johnson, then majority leader of the Senate, for passing the first civil rights law in 82 years over the opposition of southern Democrats and northern Republicans.

But last week in a New York Times OpEd titled “Ike Liked Civil Rights,” David A. Nichols showed that it was Dwight Eisenhower, regarded as a play-it-safe president, who fought for and pushed through the bill. LBJ did not take the lead until he was in the White House seven years later.

In today’s Times, I add a footnote to give Eisenhower his due:

“In 1964, during the struggle to pass Lyndon B. Johnson’s civil rights bill, Eisenhower told me about a visit from Barry Goldwater, who would be the Republican candidate for president that year.

“’He came to tell me,’ Ike said, ‘he was going to vote against the civil rights bill as a matter of conscience. I said I wouldn’t ask any man to go against his conscience, but that if I were a senator I’d vote for it. Even an imperfect bill would help balance 80 years of oppression. But what I couldn’t understand was his attempt to keep the bill from coming to a vote. If I were to comment, I’d crucify him for that.’

“As a former president who did not want to roil his party, Eisenhower never spoke out, but his passion for racial justice was clear.”

Presidents were less predictable back then.