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Sunday, March 4, 2007
To be young, gifted, and Barack Obama
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
When he sizes up Sen. Barack Obama - something a lot of African-American Democrats are doing these days - state Rep. Bob Holmes thinks of that T-Mobile commercial featuring Charles Barkley and Dwyane Wade.
“You’re hot right now, but I’m a legend. I’m an icon. Everybody knows me,” Barkley, the former NBA great, tells the young Miami Heat star. Then a waitress walks over and gushes over Wade, asking as an afterthought if Barkley is his dad.
Obama, who will make his first post-announcement appearance in Atlanta at a March 26 fundraiser, is hot right now, Holmes reasons. There’s evidence of that from the Strategic Vision Georgia poll, which had Obama trailing Sen. Hillary Clinton by 15 points last November. In a poll conducted toward the end of February, he’d cut her lead to three points.
But Holmes views presidential politics, unlike the NBA, as a game in which the advantage goes to icons. He likes what he sees in Obama, but he wants to see more, and notes that even Obama’s past colleagues in the Illinois legislature aren’t sure they know where he stands on everything they care about. Clinton, on the other hand, is a known quantity, and the wife of a president who connected with African-Americans like no one since Roosevelt.
The Atlanta legislator’s analogy seems especially apt because Obama’s candidacy has put many black politicians of his age in a new territory. His appeal is as much generational as racial, and one in which the old color distinctions have been blurred.
State Sen. David Adelman, a white supporter, recently referred to Obama as “post-race.” Probably not, literally. But you can catch what he means. This is the first major African-American candidate who’s had to deal with a story about his white ancestors who owned slaves. (The prevailing color in the email list of those alerted to the upcoming fundraiser, incidentally, is green: there’s a lot of money in that group.)
“People in my age group are definitely much more excited about him than about Hillary,” said state Rep. Alisha Thomas Morgan, who is reading Obama’s book, “The Audacity of Hope.”
But, she insisted, “It’s not just an age thing. It’s old versus new.” She likes what she describes as an ability to analyze both sides of an issue without always ending up in the middle.
State Rep. Calvin Smyre, recuperating from back surgery at his home in Columbus, watched CSPAN Sunday when Obama and Clinton made their appearances in Selma, Ala. Like Holmes, he remains noncommittal, and mentions Sen. John Edwards as another contender who could win black votes. But he found Obama’s message in Selma, with its homage to the civil rights generation, reassuring.
“Today I think he wanted to articulate who he was and what he was about, and I think he did that,” Smyre said.
Speaking of Selma, one stray note: Has anyone done a candidate a greater favor than conservative commentator Ann Coulter did Edwards last Friday afternoon?
Until Coulter took a gratuitous swipe at Edwards at the Conservative Political Action Committee Conference, referring to him as a “faggot,” the weekend belonged to Obama and Clinton. But by Saturday morning the blogs were afire and Edwards’ campaign was launched on an effort to raise $100,000 in “Coulter cash.” There could be many an unexpected twist in this campaign.
