POLITICS: Barack Obama and our problem with race

COMMENTARY | BY WILLIAM A. JOHNSON, JR.

For months, Americans have been witnessing history in the making: the major-party campaign of an African-American for president. In winning the Democratic Party's nomination, Barack Obama whipped one of the most potent political machines of all time. But as he is discovering, winning the primaries does not necessarily equip you to win the election. Beating the Clintons is the minor leagues compared to beating a Republican juggernaut geared to win at all costs, by any means necessary.

In spite of Depression-level conditions that threaten our economic security, the general weariness with the Iraqi war, and the unpopularity of the incumbent president, there is great uneasiness that Obama might lose.

Two factors are contributing to this condition: the reluctance of a large number of people to vote for a black man and the determination of powerful interest groups to maintain their control over the government. These factors are converging to further change the course of history.

There is more at stake than is obvious. For the Republicans, this election is about protecting the entitlements of the super-rich and ultra-powerful elites who have controlled the White House, and the national dialogue, for most of the past quarter century. These people comprise the most powerful special-interest group in America, whom David Cay Johnston and other policy analysts have begun referring to as "the political donor class," people who use their vast wealth to accumulate and maintain power.

Conservative Republicans are legendary for bashing big-spending and welfare-producing government while benefiting from government and welfare in immense and perverse ways. Companies like Blackwater USA, Halliburton, and DynCorp have raked in many billions of dollars in no-bid contracts for work that could have been just as efficiently performed by government employees.

Patronage and career appointments of people whose politics and ideology outweigh professional credentials have become commonplace, to insure that the principles and policies of conservative government remain in place long after Bush has retired.

If the Democrats win the White House and substantial Congressional majorities, things like impeachment and criminal prosecutions as well as increased regulations may lie ahead. This is not the kind of Washington shake-up that John McCain and Sarah Palin envision, and the political donor class will do everything within its power and pocketbooks to prevent it.

With Barack Obama, these Republicans have found the ideal symbol to prevent their downfall: the candidacy of a black man who is attempting to rise to the pinnacle of world political, economic, and military power. This is a frightening image for too many people. A full-throated assault on Obama's character and qualifications was rolled out in St. Paul. His life's accomplishments were belittled and parodied. His patriotism, religion, and citizenship were mocked.

Even his right to run was vilified. Georgia Congressman Lynn Westmoreland called him "uppity," a reviled term from the Jim Crow-era South. Former New York State Senator Joe Bruno compared Obama to the disgraced Eliot Spitzer, calling him "fancy, dancy, prancy."

During the Indiana and Pennsylvania primaries, several campaign workers told the Washington Post they had encountered people who stated openly that they would never vote for a black person. Time magazine reported that during the West Virginia primary, one in four Clinton voters bragged that race was the determining factor in their choice of candidates. The Philadelphia Daily News reported that residents of a white ethnic neighborhood told Joe Biden that they would have real problems voting for Obama solely because of his race.

If significant numbers of white voters are willing to say these things openly, just imagine the numbers who are keeping their thoughts to themselves.

Just what makes Obama so frightening? Nothing in his record suggests that he is capable of evoking such raw emotions. He is biracial and speaks proudly of his upbringing by his white mother and grandparents. He is the epitome of the American dream. He has acquired impeccable Ivy League credentials, including Harvard Law School (and, most impressively, president of the Law Review). He has devoted his career to public service, stayed married to one woman, and has been a constant presence in the lives of his daughters. His brilliant primary campaign did not benefit in any fashion from preferential treatment.

While they would vehemently deny it, remarks of the type uttered by people like Westmoreland, Bruno, and others are subtly designed to elicit one reaction: racial fears, sometimes subliminal, sometimes very overt. These fears are found in people of all races and classes, but most of us are too embarrassed to admit it.

Several years ago, a powerful tool called the Implicit Association Test was developed to measure racial and gender bias that people believed they did not harbor. Even when people try to consciously resist conveying racist thoughts, the test detects them.

This test has been taken by more than 2 million people (myself included), with startling results. Among the findings, 88 percent of white people showed a pro-white or anti-black bias - and 48 percent of blacks showed a pro-white or anti-black bias. Even the most oppressed groups show similar trends: 38 percent of gays and lesbians showed a bias in favor of straight people, and 36 percent of Arab Muslims displayed anti-Muslim feelings.

Race has played a significant factor in several political elections involving black candidates. Most notably, in the 1982 California governor's election, Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley lost a close race, although all of the major polls showed him substantially ahead heading toward election day. Other notable races experiencing the so-called Bradley effect include Harvey Gantt's race against Jesse Helms in North Carolina in 1986 and former Dallas Mayor Ron Kirk's race for the US Senate in 2002.

In this election year, many people have been looking for ways to rationalize a vote against Obama without making it appear that they are succumbing to racial fears. So they stretch the truth, expressing concerns about fallacious issues like his Muslim-sounding name, his religious affiliations, his wife's lack of patriotism, and his elitist arrogance. Whatever cannot be substantiated is readily made up.

I have personal experience with this phenomenon. In 1993, as a political newcomer, I was elected mayor of Rochester, which was still majority white, according to the 1990 census. After two re-election campaigns -unopposed in 1997 and winning with over 72 percent of the vote in 2001 - I was urged to run for county executive in 2003 in a county whose white population accounted for 80 percent of the total. Long before my decision to enter that race, I had many discussions with respected colleagues and confidants about whether voters were ready for a black man to assume the region's most powerful political office. I then met with the leaders of the Democratic Party, who would ultimately decide if I were the right person to run.

I cautioned them that the campaign would be extremely difficult. First, I had taken controversial stands on issues like regionalism and school and city-county consolidation, and I had no intention of reversing or disavowing these positions. Second, I had taken tough stands against other Democrats - most notably on the City School Board and the County Legislature - that would not be forgotten or forgiven. Third, and foremost, was the racial factor. At that point, few of these advisers saw a problem in any of these areas. In fact, they felt consolidation would be a minor issue, since we intended to base our campaign on the county's deteriorating finances.

More important, they believed that the people of Monroe County were too enlightened and too sophisticated to succumb to racial fears.

The local embodiment of Lee Atwater-Karl Rove politics, Steve Minarik, decided to keep the focus off of his party's deplorable financial stewardship, and instead used consolidation as the wedge issue that could keep his party in power. First, he recruited Maggie Brooks, whose campaign skills were greatly underestimated by many. She was positioned as a logical alternative to the reviled incumbent from her own party, not as his successor. She promised new strategies and made no effort to defend Jack Doyle and his job performance. She was different, and she had a different approach to governance. More important, she was a minority in her own right, a woman seeking this office for the first time.

Apparently uncertain whether his candidate could sell that position, Minarik executed a successful, but unscrupulous, media campaign that exploited the worst fears of suburbanites: Their schools and neighborhoods were going to be endangered if the city's mayor was elected; they were going to be annexed into a crime-ridden municipality with high poverty and bad schools. The problems that many had sought refuge from in the suburbs were about to be revisited, in frightening dimensions. To drive this message, Republicans ran ads proclaiming Rochester "the murder capital." A clever take-off on the popular Pac-Man game showed a bloated figure feasting off of symbolic towns, villages, and school districts. The imagery of a black man preying on innocent school children and hard-working families was impossible to overcome.

For seven months, I went into places of worship, schools, businesses, homes, and senior-citizen facilities, in each of the 19 towns and 10 villages, so that suburbanites could see for themselves that I was not a person to be feared. I talked candidly about the issues, including where I stood on consolidation.

I explained the multiple and cumbersome steps that would be required before any consolidation could ever take place. I stressed to them that if I were elected, a Republican-controlled County Legislature would restrict any attempt at consolidation, even if I wanted it. I explained my solutions to the most urgent problem facing Monroe County, one that exists to this day: the need to restore financial stability.

Even though I encountered hardly any face-to-face racial hostility, no amount of door-to-door campaigning could overcome the powerful subliminal message of race. I lost the election badly, and not all of that can be attributed to poor strategy or ineptness.

One further indication of this fear was the question that was constantly put to me: If I won, who would replace me as mayor? That matter had never been officially decided, but many people assumed that my successor would be Wade Norwood. I observed many furrowed brows as the question was contemplated: Is this community ready to have two black men lead them?

Since Richard Nixon's 1968 and 1972 campaigns, with appeals to Law and Order, the Silent Majority, and the Southern Strategy, Republicans have depended heavily upon subtle racial code words and symbols. Even so, they have been quick to deny any racist motivations.

Atwater popularized these tactics with his infamous Willie Horton ad in 1988. Operatives like Karl Rove have refined these types of nefarious tactics and exploited them for maximum benefit. The record is clear and irrefutable: despite the protestations, they keep using the tactics, and they keep winning.

Just a few days ago, a Stanford University poll conducted for the AP and Yahoo News found that 40 percent of all white Americans "hold at least a partly negative view towards blacks." Thirty percent of Democrats said that they cannot support Obama solely because of his race, and a substantial portion of that group (30 percent) said they will vote for McCain. These findings mirror a Washington Post-ABC poll conducted in June. If the election remains close, this factor may be enough to elect McCain.

We must consider the profound question posed by Harvard law professor Randall Kennedy: If the outcome of this election is determined more by race than by issues of substance, what message will we be sending, to ourselves and to the rest of the world? Will we be able to face the fact that we have not made the progress on issues of social equity that so many whites would like to believe, that the notion of a colorblind society is more illusion than fact?

It is time to come to grip with some hard realities. We still have much work to do.

During and after the 2003 Monroe county-executive campaign, few people challenged Steve Minarik for his despicable campaign tactics. This silence was most obvious from the press and the people who kept pouring money into subsequent Minarik-led campaigns. The community-wide acquiescence had the practical effect of shifting the debate away from real issues to manufactured ones. It also allowed people to avoid the question, "What kind of community are we, to be so badly manipulated?" It was much easier to conclude that Bill Johnson just ran a bad campaign. I had a good working relationship with Maggie Brooks for two years, but even though she never personally succumbed to racism, she benefited from her leader's practices. And she tolerated them for five more years until firing Minarik this summer.

It is time for Rochesterians, and all Americans, to repudiate this blatant racism. Many are reluctant to challenge racism when they see it and hear it, but until more people take a hard line against these kinds of destructive acts, they will continue unabated.

Edmund Burke has reminded us that "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing." Obama himself appears reluctant to take on this issue, for fear of further exacerbating racial hostilities by appearing to be the prototypical "angry black man." He should not be left with the burden of resolving this. It is society's problem, and good people are going to have to deal with it, forcefully and unequivocally.

Barack Obama has executed a masterful campaign that enabled him to win more than 60 percent of the primaries and caucuses, many in places where few black people live. He has not used his racial identity to either create sympathy or support. He has mastered and articulated the issues in a way that has ignited and mobilized the passion and civic spirit of millions of people - people who long ago gave up on government as a meaningful force. He has campaigned as one who can be the leader of all people and races.

He has withstood agonizing, invasive scrutiny of his words, deeds, and associations. He has raised record amounts of money, and inspired huge numbers of volunteers to his cause. Despite efforts to caricature him, he has exuded both competence and confidence that reflect a maturity and wisdom beyond his age and life experience.

Will he be good for the country? Only time and opportunity will provide the answer to that question. He deserves as much chance to demonstrate his skills on the national stage as George W. Bush did. With the nation on the brink of economic catastrophe, it is time for a new style of leadership. The current generation of leaders has made quite a mess of things, and Obama has demonstrated that he and his team are up to the task of taking us in a different and progressive direction.

Many Democrats, Republicans, and independents have concluded that Obama is the right person to lead us, to "renew America's promise." He needs the opportunity to make his case, in a face-to-face dialogue with the American people, in the absence of subliminal messages and nefarious fear tactics. He needs to be able to campaign, without fear of the Bradley effect.

The first presidential debate gave us a glimpse into the mind and mettle of the two major-party candidates. Obama took his shots from McCain and gave as good as he got. This is how the race should be decided, on substance and the merits of the candidates' positions.

Let the candidates debate the real issues that challenge the prosperity and security of our nation. Let them offer substantive solutions. Then let the voters decide. On this level playing ground, I am confident that the best man will win.

Johnson is the former mayor of Rochester and is Distinguished Professor of Public Policy at the Rochester Institute of Technology.