Obama Vs. Farrakhan

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What explains Obama's success? A new generation of Americans that was finally able to see a man as distinct from his race.

In a book for which I have only to write the last section, assessing all that has happened over these final months of a continually startling contest, I look into the deeper cultural underpinnings of Barack Obama's extraordinary appeal. The book begins with the great distraction that Obama has prevailed through and which, if the country was still as it used to be, would have made his run impossible. The event was the nadir of black nationalism put on nationwide display at the 1995 Million Man March in Washington, D.C. Many black men were gathered at the behest of Louis Farrakhan, the clown prince of despotism.

Farrakhan was and remains in a photo finish with David Duke and all other sanctimonious button-down primitives. They are part of our collective fate, there to prove to us that no group is invulnerable to the persuations paranoia, fake science, potted history, nor the megalomania of charismatic men. Thirty-two years after the March on Washington at which Martin Luther King expressed a timeless optimism about the human possibilities of our country, Farrakhan and his hundreds of thousands seemed proof that black America had completely torn its ass in public and set all thoughts of forward motion at a standstill. The civil rights establishment had finally submitted to—and been swallowed by—the dirty cartoon of demagoguery, which celebrated itself through Farrakhan with a loud belch.

By the time Obama ran, black Americans proved themselves what the Civil Rights Movement had always claimed: We can be just as good or just as bad as you. We are only human.

Faced with such a daunting spectacle, what did Barack Obama do? What made it possible for him to have shaken the nation awake to its actual transcendent identity when he won the Iowa Primary in January? So much focus on the range of black Americans, especially in our news media, has provided substantial proof that the black community is as susceptible to mediocrity as any other. Obama knew what to make of that. That is very important.

During the Civil Rights movement and in the writings of men like James Baldwin, there was the idea that the "black experience" bestowed something more soulful, earthy, and transcendent on that ethnic group and that was the thing that could save America. When one looks only at the violent decadence, mindless misogny and compulsive crude materialism of hip hop it is easy to see that no ethnic version of American culture is automatically able to sustain the sort of vitality necessary to replenish it. Right now the country has been forced to face something else about human behavior at least partially because of men like Farrakhan, the high profile fradulence of the Tawana Brawley hoax, Jesse Jackson's philandering and imprenating a mistress during the time that he prayed with Bill Clinton. We cannot forget the noxious behavior of certain black athletes and entertainers. In short, black Americans proved themselves what the clearest thinkers of the Civil Rights Movement had always claimed: We can be just as good or just as bad as you. We are only human.

With that wind of human reality strongly behind him, Obama suddenly appeared like a fresh light in the sky on a very dark night. With what some came to eventually dismiss as the technique of a masterful inspirational speaker, he used to captivate his audiences with the lyricism of his patriotic American feelings and his great theme that we are all in this together and will rise or fall as one people. He made it seem inarguable that every grand achievement in our nation is connected to every other one and they from a heritage in which we all share. That was the way that Obama renewed patriotism and took it from the jaws of the Republicans who dipped it in too much sentimentality. Patriotism in Obama's rhetoric ceased to seem corny because it embraced all of the social tragedies the country had overcome over two centuries. It opened the way to a vision of democracy in which no one, no group, no type was left out. This was imperative and he made it seem real. The people loved it and turned out in droves to hear him reiterate what they perhaps had not believed since childhood in public school.

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