Making history
March 19th, 2008Over at the Corner, Marc Hemingway discovers Google and feigns intrigue:
In fact, there’s only 563 mentions of the phrase “make history” on barackobama.com and another 1,750 mentions of “making history” on the candidate’s website alone. How on earth could anyone have gotten the idea that Barack Obama was suggesting that a spectrographic analysis of his skin color proves that his mere election as president would be a positive historical event? In fact, one might say that “making history” was a successful campaign theme for Obama precisely because it used race to his advantage, making the subtle suggestion that electing a black man would make Americans feel better about the state of race relations. And isn’t this exactly what Geraldine Ferraro was eviscerated for pointing out?
Since Marc’s asking questions, here’s some answers for him.
- If you click through the Google links that Hemingway provides, 99% of them are posts on blogs for BarackObama.com users. Not necessarily the most eloquent, post-racial, on-message people in the world. Another 0.9% are fundraising pitches; again user-generated pages (you can make your own fundraising page with whatever message you want to share with your family). Another 0.09% are official pages & posts from the campaign, which highlight the history-making aspect of any number of events in Obama’s run: the amount of money he’s raised each quarter, the number of donors he’s had, the record turnout levels in every primary and caucus held so far, the low average dollar amount for his donors, etc etc etc. And, yeah, there’s the debate transcripts that Hemingway points to. Clearly though, every reference to “making history” is coded language to appeal to the AA-loving instincts in Democrats that make us all want to elect unqualified Black men to be President.
- Ferraro was eviscerated for saying something that was not only unartful but manifestly retarded. She made the argument that Obama, who’s gone to lengths to distance himself from race as long as I’ve seen him in politics, would’ve inevitably taken longer to get where he is if he weren’t Black, and even longer if he’d been a woman. Anyone who says that it utterly unfamiliar with the dynamics of the Senate primary contest in Illinois that was a critical springboard in Obama’s trajectory to where he’s at today. Obama was up against a well-funded opponent as well as a Democratic establishment opponent, and he was neither. You’d think, given his Blackness and his opponents’ pastiness, he’d turn out Chicago hard, maybe try to appeal to other Illinois minorities, etc… nope. Instead, he barnstormed downstate Illinois (I was in school at the time, annoyed by Blair Hull commercials on TV, and initially confused as to why this also-ran guy with the silly name had signs up all over town) and pushed hard to get his opponents to take a firm position on Iraq (this is 2004, when nearly everyone with a (D) after their name was hedging madly on the issue–especially those facing strong Republican challengers in the general election). Down in Champaign, we didn’t have many people protesting against Afghanistan or Iraq, but when they’d show up every Sunday they’d be greeted by a pro-war counterprotest that featured the biggest flags I’ve ever seen lofted up with cherry pickers over someone’s car dealership. Downstate Illinois remains, regrettably, one of the more racist parts of the country along with similar midwestern areas (rural MO, OH, IN). There’s a legacy of hate there that’s more contemporary, less ingrained/normalized like you see in the South, and, I think, a lot more poisonous. Want to exploit your race to gin up White-guilt votes? This is not the place for a Black Harvard man from Chicago with an angry Black pastor to try it. He didn’t get the downstate vote by pointing out the embarrassingly low number of Black, post-reconstruction Senators, he got it by meeting with people, addressing their concerns, and possibly getting them to recognize to look beyond race.
I’d bet that if you’d ask Obama how his election would “make history” he’d tell you that it’s not because we’d have a Black man in the White House, but because after his Presidency, no one would care about the color of the next person elected.