Accidence
Matt Bai has a very interesting essay in next Sunday’s New York Times Magazine about black politics in America. On the unlikelihood of Obama’s success this past spring (emphasis mine):
Still, most in the caucus didn’t take Obama all that seriously as a potential nominee, and neither did the Clinton campaign. They calculated that he would need a huge share of black votes to wrest the nomination from Hillary, and her advisers, white and black, considered that a near impossibility. “There was an arrogance and a complete dismissiveness in our campaign against Obama, that he was a lightweight, that he couldn’t get black support,” one senior Clinton aide told me recently. “A lot of the black leaders didn’t know him, didn’t think he was black enough, didn’t think he was of the civil rights movement.” This point about whether Obama was “black enough,” a senseless distinction to most white voters, came up often in my discussions. It referred to the perception among some black leaders that not only had Obama not shared their generational experience, but also that he hadn’t shared the African-American experience, period. Obama’s father was a Kenyan academic; his family came to America on scholarship, not in chains.
I say that unease about Obama’s authenticity —cultural or otherwise— is shared by more than just Jesse Jackson. How is it possible that a person of such limited experience and ability could so easily take control of the Democratic Party? It must, indeed, be a very rickety old chewed-up thing to have been so abjectly appropriated.
