Razzle Dazzle
Obama Pulls Back Curtain

By RICHARD STEIER

I was not long out of college and semi-employed when I went to work as a volunteer in Mario Cuomo's 1977 mayoral campaign. Early that spring, the campaign's issues director asked me to write a speech for the candidate that he would deliver to an Irish-American audience that was protesting the treatment of Catholics in Northern Ireland by the British government and the ruling Protestant majority.

I obliged by drawing a parallel between the treatment of Catholics there and blacks in the United States 20 years earlier at the time that the civil rights movement took hold. The crucial difference, I wrote in the speech, was that, in contrast to the governing forces in Northern Ireland, the Federal Government, however slowly and at times grudgingly, had supported the push for equal rights for blacks and eventually enacted legislation to help ensure them.

'Not What They Want to Hear'

About 15 minutes after I handed him the speech, the issues director, who like me was Jewish, came to my desk and said, "Richard, it's very good, but we can't use it. These people don't want to be told they're like the blacks."

I  felt as if my idealism had been thrown under a cold shower. I had joined the Cuomo campaign - the only time I ever worked for a politician - because his work on behalf of homeowners in Corona who had faced uprooting to allow a school to be built, and in mediating the racially-charged battle over low-income housing in Forest Hills had impressed me as much as his speaking ability. Where Ed Koch, who would be elected Mayor later that year, seemed to have pitched his campaign to the fears of white voters with his call for restoration of the death penalty, Mr. Cuomo struck me as appealing to New Yorkers' better instincts.

BRINGING RACE INTO THE CONVERSATION: Sen. Barack Obama offered a well-crafted discourse on how race plays a role in Americans' lives and views while asserting his believe 'that working together we can move beyond some of our old racial wounds, and that in fact we have no choice if we are to continue on the path of a more-perfect union.'

But as I watched the campaign unfold, I became convinced that the issues director was not being presumptuous when he spiked a speech that reached across racial lines to claim common ground. I still believe Mr. Cuomo was a cut above the average politician, but as brave as he was in addressing matters like the death penalty and abortion during his tenure as Governor, he never really discussed the racial tensions that exist in America in a way that might begin to bridge the divide.

Barack Obama did that last week in Philadelphia. It was a speech born of political necessity, as increasing focus on some of the around-the-bend oratory of his longtime pastor, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, had begun to erode the Illinois Senator's support among white voters at a time when he desperately needed to make up ground on Hillary Clinton in the Pennsylvania primary or risk losing the Democratic nomination.

Given that context, those who compared it to Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech were being hyperbolic. As one person who was impressed but not won over put it, "King wasn't doing damage control; he was trying to unite people behind a message of racial justice."

Mayor: Should Have Spoken Earlier

Mayor Bloomberg also stopped short of swooning. At first apparently content to let a question about the speech the day after be responded to by Governor Paterson, he finally said, "I thought it was an issue he had to address. I think he should have addressed it earlier."

Valid as that argument was, Senator Obama's speech was a remarkable presentation nonetheless, a personal discourse that, rather than relying on soaring oratory, used candor and a willingness to see the issues from all perspectives to persuade.

It is not clear whether the speech was enough to undo the political damage caused Senator Obama by Reverend Wright, who was his church's pastor for 20 years until retiring last month. His campaign was already faltering a bit before the videotape of the fiery preacher echoing Malcolm X after John Kennedy's assassination in declaring that 9/11 showed that "America's chickens are coming home to roost;" saying "God damn America" was more appropriate than "God bless America," and accusing the Federal Government of having a hand in the spread of crack and AIDS in the black community.

Mr. Obama called such comments "not only wrong but divisive," and said they "expressed a profoundly distorted view of this country - a view that sees white racism as endemic, and that elevates what is wrong with America above all that we know is right with America ..."

But he refused to condemn Reverend Wright or apologize for having been a member of his church for two decades, described him as "a man who served his country as a U.S. Marine; who ... for over 30 years led a church that serves the community by doing God's work here on Earth - by housing the homeless, ministering to the needy, providing day-care services and scholarships and prison ministries, and reaching out to those suffering from HIV/AIDS."

George Arzt, a political consultant who served as Press Secretary to Mr. Koch during the last of his three terms as Mayor, said, "Any defense [of Reverend Wright] I don't think would staunch the bleeding [in the Obama campaign]. There's a feeling of uncertainty more than ever - now people are unsure about what change he would bring. There's a feeling that he hasn't been vetted enough, and momentum is not on his side."

'He Stepped Up'

Bill Lynch, who first as his campaign manager and later as a Deputy Mayor was David Dinkins's most-trusted political adviser, said of the speech, "How it plays outside of [Senator Obama's] immediate coalition, I can't tell you - it's too early."

But Mr. Lynch, a Hillary Clinton supporter who has also had a key role advising Governor Paterson over the past couple of weeks, praised the speech on substance, saying, "I thought he stepped up on it. He did not throw Reverend Wright under the bus, and I particularly liked what he said about his grandmother," alluding to Mr. Obama's remarks about his white grandmother's uneasiness when encountering black men on the street and his continued love for her despite her utterance of "racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe."

Noting that Reverend Wright had presided over his wedding and baptized his children, Senator Obama said, "I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother" for her dubious comments.

Disowning, however, is quite different from taking issue with someone who had gone as far over the line as Reverend Wright did on more than one occasion. As recently as last November, when Mr. Obama's campaign was in full swing, the pastor honored Louis Farrakhan despite his own history of divisive and anti-Semitic comments. Was Mr. Obama suggesting that if his grandmother had indulged in crude stereotypes in front of his children, he wouldn't have protested rather than just letting her spread such poison?

'One Speech Won't Heal It'

Mr. Lynch, who came of age during the civil rights movement, was less inclined than Mr. Bloomberg to focus on what took Mr. Obama so long to address Reverend Wright's past sermons. "He gave it some context and balance," Mr. Lynch said of Mr. Obama's remarks about lingering resentments on both sides of the racial fence. "[But] this has been a deep-seated problem in America, and one speech will not heal it."

One reason it won't could be seen in the following day's papers. The two city tabloids that are said to speak most directly to average people - the Post and the Daily News - gave their front pages to splashy headlines about Governor Paterson's admission that he had been unfaithful to his wife with "a number of women" during a rocky stretch of their marriage. The News devoted four pages to the Paterson revelations and two to the speech; the Post was more balanced, giving two pages of coverage to each story and devoting its entire op-ed page to excerpts of Mr. Obama's remarks.

Tabloid and TV coverage of politics is built around sound bites and caricatures rather than careful exploration of the candidates and their positions on the issues - as one of my old colleagues at the Post once put it, "We don't do nuance."

Senator Obama tried to break through that wall of noise. "We can tackle race only as spectacle - as we did in the OJ trial - or in the wake of tragedy, as we did in the aftermath of Katrina, or as fodder for the nightly news ... But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And nothing will change."

'A Legacy of Defeat'

He contended that "so many of the disparities that exist in the African-American community today can be directly traced to inequalities passed on from an earlier generation that suffered under the brutal legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. Segregated schools were, and are, inferior schools; we still haven't fixed them, fifty years after Brown v. Board of Education, and the inferior education they provided, then and now, helps explain the pervasive achievement gap between today's black and white students."

He continued, "A lack of economic opportunity among black men, and the shame and frustration that came from not being able to provide for one's family, contributed to the erosion of black families - a problem that welfare policies for many years may have worsened. And the lack of basic services in so many urban black neighborhoods - parks for kids to play in, police walking the beat, regular garbage pick-up and building code enforcement - all helped create a cycle of violence, blight and neglect that continue to haunt us."

Past discrimination, he said, produced a "legacy of defeat" that could still be seen in "those young men and increasingly young women who we see standing on street corners or languishing in our prisons, without hopes or prospects for the future." This created anger and frustration even among those who had succeeded, and "occasionally it finds voice in the church on Sunday morning, in the pulpit and in the pews."

'Whites Feel Anger, Too'

But, Senator Obama continued, "In fact, a similar anger exists within segments of the white community. Most working- and middle-class white Americans don't feel that they have been particularly privileged by their race. Their experience is the immigrant experience - as far as they're concerned, no one's handed them anything; they've built it from scratch. They've worked hard all their lives, many times only to see their jobs shipped overseas or their pension dumped after a lifetime of labor.

"So when they are told to bus their children to a school across town; when they hear that an African-American is getting an advantage in landing a good job or a spot in a good college because of an injustice that they themselves never committed; when they're told that their fears about crime in urban neighborhoods are somehow prejudiced, resentment builds over time.

"Like the anger within the black community," he continued, "these resentments aren't always expressed in polite company. But they have helped shape the political landscape for at least a generation. Anger over welfare and affirmative action helped forge the Reagan Coalition. Politicians routinely exploited fears of crime for their own electoral ends. Talk-show hosts and conservative commentators built entire careers unmasking bogus claims of racism while dismissing legitimate discussions of racial injustice and inequality as mere political correctness or reverse racism."

'Neighbor Not Your Worry'

He said that the racial resentments on both sides divert "attention from the real culprits of the middle-class squeeze - a corporate culture rife with inside dealing, questionable accounting practices, and short-term greed; a Washington dominated by lobbyists and special interests; economic policies that favor the few over the many ... This time, we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit."

Amid all his laments about the state of the nation and its race relations, however, Senator Obama insisted there was ample evidence for being optimistic about America's future: we simply had to look at how far we have come since many of his now-retired pastor's views took root.

"The profound mistake of Reverend Wright's sermons," he said, "is not that he spoke about racism in our society. It's that he spoke as if our society was static; as if no progress has been made; as if this country - a country that has made it possible for one of his own members to run for the highest office in the land and build a coalition of white and black, Latino and Asian, rich and poor, young and old - is still irrevocably bound to a tragic past. But what we know - what we have seen - is that America can change. That is the true genius of this nation."

May Not Help in Polls

It was not clear, despite the editorial praise the speech garnered across the political spectrum, whether it would be enough to reverse his slide in the polls, where he now trails Republican nominee John McCain in a hypothetical November match-up as well as Senator Clinton in their April 22 showdown in Pennsylvania. Polls taken prior to the speech showed Mr. Obama 3-to-7 points ahead of Ms. Clinton nationally, but a Gallup tracking poll completed the day after it gave her a 5-point lead. Two days later, Gallup had him leading by 3 points.

The controversy over Reverend Wright was a major distraction for Mr. Obama and trampled the brief furor that stemmed from Geraldine Ferraro's claim that if he weren't black, he never would have been in a position to capture the Democratic nomination.

Ms. Clinton had limited the fallout from that ill-considered remark - unlike Ms. Ferraro, who got the Democratic nod for Vice President because party leaders led by then-House Speaker Tip O'Neill thought having a woman on the ticket would help exploit President Reagan's gender gap, Mr. Obama has gotten to this point by convincing the voters - by ending her campaign's ties to the former Queens Congresswoman.

It may be more difficult for the Illinois Senator to cut loose from Reverend Wright, whose videotaped sermons represent too large a bonfire to be extinguished by one masterful speech.

Those who have backed Mr. Obama all along may be heartened that under pressure he showed the courage to tackle a subject most politicians are reluctant to address honestly. Those who were undecided about him even before the Wright controversy came to a head may not be persuaded to make that leap of faith now.

But however much it helps him, the Illinois Senator did this country a valuable service by bringing the issue into the political conversation so directly.

"I'm interested in hearing from Senator Clinton and Senator McCain what they would do about these things," Mr. Bloomberg said of the issues raised in Mr. Obama's speech.

The rest of us should be as well.

 

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