By contrast, the baffling incoherency of McCain's campaign channeled images of former Kansas Senator Bob Dole's hapless Oval Office challenge: distracted, unsteady, unscripted, unsure, erratic, bumbling, clueless, unglued and senselessly inept.
This bold dissimilarity between the candidates and their campaigns is what renders so tremendously outlandish, an assertion that the practice of identity politics by African-Americans voters was a major factor in Obama's victory. Some McCain supporters (and even some perhaps bitterly misguided Democrats) have implied that blacks played the "race card" and that it trumped qualifications and experience as the sole rationale for Obama's African-American support.
Consider the source. The charge is ludicrously short-sighted, if not outright spurious on many levels not the least of which is that it comes from some of the same McCain supporters who had also expressed hope of their own that the Bradley Effect would tip the election in their candidate's favor. It's also preposterous in that technically, Obama isn't black -- he's half-white. Am I to presume that McCain supporters felt that African-American voters, including former Republican Secretary of State, Colin Powell, were only voting for the "black" part of Obama's genetic make-up?
This charge of poor judgment by African-Americans is further undermined when you consider that it comes from supporters of a campaign that judged a completely in-over-her-head Sarah Palin to be the person best qualified to become the GOP's first-ever choice for a female vice-president. As it turns out, the Palin choice was itself little more than a shamelessly transparent exercise of identity politics involving gender by the McCain campaign -- a crass gimmick nonetheless feverishly embraced by his supporters. But in doing so, they effectively render their complaints about racial politicking by African-Americans as little more than the "pot calling the kettle black."
But beyond being both spurious and preposterous, it's also a troublesomely challenging assertion. It conveys the notion that the motives of those blacks who do in fact engage in identity politics are less pragmatic or perhaps, when taken in context with the McCain campaign's Country First slogan, even sinister compared to those of whites who claim to be simply "voting their interests" when they choose white candidates over equally or better qualified blacks.
Lastly, their argument either overlooks, or fails to take into consideration that Obama, as pointed out in a Newsweek article titled How He Did It, had “moved beyond racial politics and narrowly-defined interest groups” since as far back as his days at Harvard. Indeed, it is exactly this aversion to racial politics by Obama that frustrated Rev. Jackson, -- arguably the premier icon of identity politics -- into delivering his embarrassing "hot mic" gaffe last summer during which, among other statements, Jackson complained that "Barack is talking down to black people."
In some respects, Jesse could have a point. As far as I know, the Obama campaign had made no direct appeals for the African-American vote through promises delivered either overtly or in “code.” For one thing, Obama's had to go out of his way to assuage the concerns some white voters have about supporting an African-American for a job extraordinary as that of Commander In Chief. You don't get that done by appealing for black votes.
In reality, if the "race card" was in fact played during this campaign, it was done so by those white McCain supporters who charged black voters with practicing identity politics. In fact, McCain supporters would find themselves hard-pressed to unearth any statement from the Obama campaign that promised specific attention by an Obama Administration to any plank in what might be construed as a pro-black “agenda.”
I happen to share the belief that anyone, be they black or white, who supports a candidate based simply on the candidate's race is a fool who may very likely be voting against their interests. Thus, when I voted for Obama on November 4, I did so for what I believe to be the most acceptable reason -- I thought he was the better candidate. However, on February 5, the date of this year’s Massachusetts primary, with the opportunity to vote for Obama staring me right in the face, and fully aware that another chance may never again present itself in my lifetime, I cast my vote for Sen. Hillary Clinton. I did so out of both a sense of loyalty (I had been a supporter prior to Barack's announcement) and because I felt at the time that between the two of them, she was the better candidate.
With that in mind, it is quite difficult to seriously contemplate shallow complaints about identity politics vis-à-vis African-American voters when such complaints emerge from a party that, rather than assiduously point out why blacks may find its economic policies more appealing, or why a McCain presidency is not basically a Bush third term, instead plays obfuscatory gutter ball by rolling out grotesque "guilt-by-association" innuendo regarding Obama's middle name; by name-dropping the likes of Bill Ayers and Rev. Jeremiah Wright; and by insulting voter intelligence by offering feckless political caricatures such as Palin and Joe the Plumber.
Unfortunately for McCain, whose understandably mirthless concession speech I nonetheless found both moving and magnanimous, neither Joe the Plumber, Tito the Builder, or even Cedric the Entertainer could obscure from voters the gimmicky, vacuous, divisive, erratic and insubstantial character of the self-professed “straight-talking maverick’s" long, strange trip down the presidential campaign trail.
Obama on the other hand, smartly avoided indulging in the "the silly season's," harvest of such political pitfalls, diversionary hijinks and "straight-talking" shenanigans. He instead submitted to voters a campaign that focused on specific issues and persuaded with cogent, well-formulated ideas. The result?
Black President!
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