Commentary: Barack Obama, Too Nice? John Edwards’ New Tactic Underscores the Ever-Present Double Standard
Date: Tuesday, January 01, 2008
By: Tonyaa Weathersbee, BlackAmericaWeb.com
At first, it was the rock star thing -- a media-manufactured label that made people look at Barack Obama, but gave some an excuse to not see him beyond the shallowness that it implied.
Now it’s the nice guy thing.
As the Iowa caucuses draw near and the three Democratic presidential contenders remain locked in a dead heat, John Edwards made a remark that is sure to cause any remaining doubts that a largely white electorate would have about a black candidate like Obama to bubble to the surface.
The former U.S. senator from North Carolina didn’t talk about Obama’s lack of experience -- a claim that has long since been debunked by the facts; he served for seven years as an Illinois state senator before being elected to the U.S. Senate by a landslide in 2004. Nor did Edwards try to exploit the public’s post-Sept. 11 paranoia by implying that Obama is a closeted Muslim terrorist, or by delving into Fox News-inspired manipulation by mispronouncing his name as Osama.
What Edwards did was deliver an insult wrapped in pretty packaging. Obama, he says, is too nice to be president.
"Barack is not angry or confrontational enough to get it done," he told a crowd at a campaign stop in Vinton, Iowa last week. "He's too nice a guy; he's too conciliatory. He can't bring change about.”
Now, I know that such attacks are typical during campaign season. That’s the way the political game is played. But at the same time, it’s hard to ignore how the missives against Obama tend to highlight the black condition; how they point up the double standards that make him damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t.
Let’s just think, for a minute, on how far Obama would have gone if he had decided to be the angry candidate. What if he had decided to become the H. Rap Brown of the Democratic party, or for that matter, the Howard Dean of the party? What if he had gone around railing against corporate greed and oppression, about the inefficiencies of government and the need for change?
A safe bet is that unlike Edwards, Obama wouldn’t be viewed as a working class hero. He’d be viewed as a radical or a kook; an angry black man looking for payback and waiting to grab the power to give black people more government entitlements rather than force them into more individual responsibility.
An angry Obama wouldn’t inspire folks. He’d scare them.
So knowing that, Obama talks reasonably. He talks about rethinking approaches to foreign policy, like how the United States’ penchant for preconditions often leads to paralysis when it comes to foreign policy.
“We have refused to talk to Iran until they meet preconditions,” Obama said back in August during a meeting with the Trotter Group, an organization of black columnists. “Of course, Iran refuses, and the world sees us as intransigent because the terms of talking is that you agree to everything we want before we start talking ... What I've been doing is challenging some conventional wisdom. And the purveyors of conventional wisdom have gotten uncomfortable.”
Reconciliation is the theme that runs through most of Obama’s domestic platform as well. Although that’s an Oprah-esque kind of approach, it’s a reasonable one. It’s smart, at least as a first step, because it strives to make both sides realize the benefit in meeting the other side halfway. It’s particularly smart for a black candidate, because being in-your-face only feeds stereotypes rather than debunks them.
Now Edwards comes along and implies that Obama’s willingness to seek common ground between adversaries is a sign of weakness; that his reconciliatory approach means he isn’t hard enough to handle the grown folks’ business of running the country.
That’s unfair. But it’s not unexpected.
I’m sure that right about now, Obama ought to be feeling angry about a lot of things. I mean, he’s a black candidate who first had to prove that he was black enough, then that he was Christian enough, and now that he isn’t furious enough. He’s crash-landed in a political parallel universe; a universe in which he doesn’t, even if he wanted to, have the freedom to be as confrontational as a white candidate like Edwards, lest he be labeled as militant. The tightrope that Obama’s race, Harvard pedigree and Muslim family ties are forcing him to walk is threatening to morph into a straitjacket.
I just hope that he will refuse to wear it -- and prove that nice guys don’t always have to finish last.
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