After the race

"Thaht's kwoit ah hedd o' hairrr ya gat therrrre," at which, startled, I gave up the attempt at removing my underpants to address the wizened frame of the hulking Scot who towered over me (in the mens' change room at the Sea Point swimming pool). It was an unusually grey and rainy Cape Town summer's morning, which I found fit for a swim.

He was very friendly, this grey-bearded haggis eater, who - in an apparent bid to ant-dissapate the tension from his dreadful greeting offered "Sooow, arrr ye ahs huppy aboot thah eleyction ahs wee arrr?" And then, when my expected "absolutely" was met with awkward pause he coninued "wahll, ut least therrr'll be ahn ehnd ta tha worrrs."
"Well not if it's up to Obama, he favours an intensification in Afghanistan."
"Whall, at least tha parrrtie of warrr is ote."
"Not really. Vietnam was a Democratic initiative. The (uncapitalised) bay of pigs was Kennedy."
"Uhm ohld enuff ta rememberrrr thaht, yong mahn", he intoned serenely. And then, flashing youthful optimism in defiance of his years (and putative memory) he wrapped "whall, we'rrre just ohptimistic, though I cunn see yorrr skehptical". And then I swimmed.

So now, in the full comfort of my undergarments, allow me to share with you (a first, as this usually is a solo misery) the closing moments of my post-electoral gloom. What's now become a (probably permanent) four-yearly cycle of despair has been remarkably shorter this time around. The reasons are clear. There's no Ohio or Florida recount to prolong the hope. The alternative wasn't that alluring, and I'm a little more experienced.

So why this? Unlike the last two times, the despair requires a bit of explaining. My shower mate's presumption is in keeping with the standard distribution of assumptions. Instead of going through things repetitiously, I hope to refer those with a professed interest (you, probably) to this blog. This way I get to mope once, and live a little more.

My reservations about the Obama candidacy were threefold, and didn't change much over the latter course of the campaign:
1. The candidacy was based upon a cynical, unnecessary and harmful exploitation of race.
2. It was an empty candidacy, at its core an expression of style, with only a tactical reversion to substance.
3. It was a dishonest campaign.

The first point may need elaboration. Barack Obama was one of five people of colour on presidential tickets this season. Why were none of the others regarded as vectors to the "historic opportunity (to elect an unwhite President)" (brackets not mine.) In short, because none of them asked to be thus regarded. This in spite of the fact that one of them (Cynthia McKinney, the Green Party candidate) offered the astonishing double whammy of being a black woman candidate.

The major/minor party distinction only partly explains the difference, but while it could account for McKinney and Matt Gonzalez (Ralph Nader's running mate), it hardly explains Alan Keys (Republican) and Bill Richardson (Democrat). The reason Obama stood out, is that he asked to. I'd encourage readers to view this article from the LA Times' Shelby Steele:

Here's a snippet:

Obama's special charisma -- since his famous 2004 convention speech -- always came much more from the racial idealism he embodied than from his political ideas. In fact, this was his only true political originality. On the level of public policy, he was quite unremarkable. His economics were the redistributive axioms of old-fashioned Keynesianism; his social thought was recycled Great Society. But all this policy boilerplate was freshened up -- given an air of 'change' -- by the dreamy post-racial and post-ideological kitsch he dressed it in...

This was never lost on me, and as a lifelong (so far) pawn in the web of racial politics I found the use of blackness as a central bargaining chip to be particularly offensive. Steele's remarks on the deployment of the chip chime with what I've struggled to articulate in private conversation before. Steele continues:

Obama is what I have called a "bargainer" -- a black who says to whites, 'I will never presume that you are racist if you will not hold my race against me.' Whites become enthralled with bargainers out of gratitude for the presumption of innocence they offer.
Bargainers relieve their anxiety about being white and, for this gift of trust, bargainers are often rewarded with a kind of halo...
Obama's post-racial idealism told whites the one thing they most wanted to hear: America had essentially contained the evil of racism to the point at which it was no longer a serious barrier to black advancement. Thus, whites became enchanted enough with Obama to become his political base. It was Iowa -- 95% white -- that made him a contender. Blacks came his way only after he won enough white voters to be a plausible candidate...

I've seen (and continue to) the operation of this halo effect in South Africa. Nelson Mandela is, without question, regarded as "a great leader", with no reference to policy and implementation under his stewardship. There's a racial element to the attribution. Black south Africans remember and recognise him as a selfless, ultimately vindicated freedom fighter. White South Africans, who generally despise the violent guerrilla movement he began, and the crippling economic sanctions campaign he endorsed, limit their attribution to a localised equivalent of the redemption bargain.

I don't wish to be drawn on a debate around the timing of Iowa. What resonates is Steele's characterisation of Obama's allure: The illusion of a quick-fix, in lieu of a programme of substance-driven change. The danger of this offer is evident. To the extent that it succeeds, the quick-fix tells the previously anxious "you have nothing left to regret, and by implication nothing left to attend to." And so, the first two issues defining my reservation morph. I've previously referred to this as the delegitimisation of radical politics; an immediate consequence of the substanceless bargain.

In this regard, I was struck by John McCain's acceptance speech. There were only two moments of sustained clapping; the second when he thanked Sara Palin, and the first when he declared

"Let there be no reason now for any American to fail to cherish their citizenship in this, the greatest nation on Earth."

Put differently, "Now that (the presidential) race is behind us, race is behind us."

Without a laboured elaboration of the third reason, I recall the extent of Obama's flip-flopping. His pacifist preening to Democratic primarygoers, contrasted starkly with the later sabre rattling about Pakistan, guns, FISA and Jerusalem. The turnaround on campaign finance was clear deceit. This, in an ordinary candidate, would've skotched his credibility. How it sustained his transformative claim is beyond me.

Indeed, the cracks in the transformative facade were immediately available on election night. Even as they said "yes we can", the voters of ultra-blue California passed a ban on same-sex marriage, by the same margin as Obama's national popular vote. This mirrored the cunning of the change agent, who during the campaign endorsed the bigotry of the ban, objecting only to the effort to centralise the decision-making around the ban (i.e he wanted states, not the federal congress to decide.)

Returning to my shower mate, something else is striking. There is a racial determination of the expected response involved in all of this. Black people are expected to shirk from McCain, and embrace Obama. Anyone who looks like doing contrariwise on either count is, however tacitly, required to explain. Which can lead to rambling blogging.

Again Steele's remarks are pertinent:

But there is an inherent contradiction in all this. When whites -- especially today's younger generation -- proudly support Obama for his post-racialism, they unwittingly embrace race as their primary motivation. They think and act racially, not post-racially. The point is that a post-racial society is a bargainer's ploy: It seduces whites with a vision of their racial innocence precisely to coerce them into acting out of a racial motivation. A real post-racialist could not be bargained with and would not care about displaying or documenting his racial innocence. Such a person would evaluate Obama politically rather than culturally.

This last line invokes something else that's weighed on me. Obama continues to benefit from what George Bush (or his speechwriter) poetically dubbed "the soft bigotry of reduced expectations". Ironically, it is Bush himself who dropped the bar for Obama, by providing as benchmkark his disastrous administration. This has allowed Obama to escape comparison with the more substantive people he actually was running against.

So much for my initial concerns. Given that Obama is president, what now? There's something like a more constructive reason for writing this blog: Sometimes I hope to be refuted. Refutation is easier when one is upfront with one's reservation. Otherwise, there is the temptation to continually change the gripe in response to parts of it being undone. Obama has the potential to come up with new ways to disappoint me. But barring that, I don't wish to add to the current crop. The onus is on him to trim it.

In the spirit of bipartisanship (and in defiance of your the temptation to forget George Bush too soon), allow me to channel Karl Rove:

What Mr. Obama and his team achieved was impressive. But in 75 days comes the hard part. We saw a glimpse of the challenge Tuesday night. The president-elect's speech, while graceful and at times uplifting, was light when it comes to an agenda. That may have been appropriate, but it also continued a pattern.
Many Americans were drawn to Mr. Obama because they saw in him what they wanted to see. He became a large vessel into which voters placed their hopes. This can lead to disappointment and regret. What of the woman who, in the closing days of the campaign, rejoiced that Mr. Obama would pay for her gas and take care of her mortgage, tasks that no president can shoulder?

Very much good will come from the Obama presidency. As they accrue, his accomplishments must be recognised and praised without reservation. The misgivings described here can be addressed by engaging his administration on specifics, as I have no doubt sections of civil society will.

Four years from now, Black America will continue to be as much of a relatively impoverished, undereducated and overimprisoned place as it is now. In fact it's likely to get worse. This is not due to Obama at all; inequality so deeply entrenched takes a long concerted effort to undo. Even if you really want to. The only way out is to define programmes of improvement. They need to betoken a radical break from the present. There's a myriad of ways that this can happen, which implies a host of possibilities for Obama. By establishing credible institutions for the improvement of Black America, he will have vindicated the claim that his was but a tactical - and pardonable - bargain.