Obama's candidacy: A test of American imagination

I have to admit that Obama's loss in Pennsylvania by 10 points to Hillary Clinton has really worried me. It would still take math worthy of a zen master for Hillary to beat him to the nomination (unless the DNC takes it away from him at the end of the primary season, causing a civil war within the Democratic Party), the polls from Pennsylvania are extremely concerning. His apparent lack of appeal among blue collar white workers is striking in that the polls show that 10% of Democrats would stay away from the polls if Obama is the nominee and 15% said they would vote for McCain. If the election in November is as tight as it seems it might be, and 25% of the core of the Democratic constituency fails Obama in Pennsylvania without him picking up any traditional Republican states (and this also is an open question) he will lose. What is surprising that many of these voters told pollsters that race was an issue for them! This honesty is shocking (and revealing) considering that in many public polls people are likely to hide their race attitudes. Then consider how many voters are not being candid so add several more percentage points to the number of voters Obama might not get just because the color of his skin. And this brings me to my point.

Obama's candidacy speaks more about America than it does about Obama. Here is a man whose multicultural upbringing, his brilliant speaking skills, and his honesty are promising to usher America into a new era of race relations. Here is a man who, being outside of the civil rights generation as well as from a mixed racial/cultural background, can really inspire and unite. And yet, there are many people out there who will never vote for him, not because they disagree with his policies, not because they seem him as elitist (polls show no movement away from Obama after his "bitter" remarks), but simply because they see him as a "black man." While watching those results come in early Wednesday morning, I thought of Obama as a young boy going through that magazine in an embassy office in Indonesia and being aghast at a picture of a formerly black man who had paid for chemical treatment just to pass as a white man: "He must be terribly sick, I thought. A radiation victim, maybe, or an albino--I had seen one of those on the street a few days before, and my mother had explained about such things. Except when I read the words that went with the picture, that wasn't it at all. The man had received a chemical treatment, the article explained, to lighten his complexion. He had paid for it with his own money...There were thousands of people like him, black men and women back in America who'd undergone the same treatment in response to advertisements that promised happiness as a white person...I felt my face and neck get hot. My stomach knotted." (Dreams from My Father, p. 30). I wonder if he remembers that moment every time pundits on CNN remind us (and Wolf Blitzer never tires of repeating!) that "he has a big problem with white voters."

I am still optimistic in that I think that the racial problem is a bit overblown. Many of these blue collar workers are not voting against Obama but for Clinton. My parents are very nostalgic for Clinton years (despite of this, both of them are Obama supporters) when they had 15 hours of overtime every week at their factory. And they compare that with the barely 40 hours they get now, the freezing of their wage, layoffs that are becoming commonplace, and the shrinking number of sick days they can take. I think that many workers in Pennsylvania voted with Clinton nostalgia on their mind. Secondly, the poll numbers showing they will not vote for Obama might also echo the hostile and polarized atmosphere of the exhausting Obama-Clinton fight and might just be a temporary annoyance. In other words, once the party coalesces around him, voters will follow come November.

But then again, this is an extremely optimistic view of America, a country that is so hard to describe through sound-bites. America is tolerant, it is bigoted, it is open minded as well as narrow-minded, it is culturally diverse and homogenous, it is kind, but also unbearably cruel. Obama brilliantly captures the multi-facetedness and ambivalence of American identity which characterized the men of his maternal grandfather's generation: "His was an American character, one typical of men of his generation, men who embraced the notion of freedom and individualism and the open road without always knowing its price, and whose enthusiasms could as easily lead to the cowardice of McCarthyism as to the heroics of World War II. Men who were both dangerous and promising precisely because of their fundamental innocence..." (p.16)

I think the resonance of Obama among these white voters will show which America prevails on that November day. Talking about his struggle with his racial identity in college, Obama writes of the overwhelming force of racist thinking, which often made him feel as if he had to choose between his white and black grandmothers: "Only a lack of imagination, a failure of nerve, had made me think that I had to choose between them. They all asked the same thing of me, these grandmothers of mine. My identity might begin with the fact of my race, but it didn't, couldn't, end there." (p.111) Will America show its own burst of imagination this November? I have to believe that it will.