Professor analyzes Obama: ‘So far I would give him a B’

So what should we make of Barack Obama’s rise to the presidency? And what does his journey tell us about the United States and how the country’s attitudes about race have evolved?

Since Obama’s candidacy began, a barrage of writers and pundits have been trying to answer those questions. Now author William Jelani Cobb, an associate professor and chair of the history department at Spelman College, tries to tackle them in his new book, “The Substance of Hope: Barack Obama and the Paradox of Progress.”

Surprisingly, the book does not dwell on the president’s first year in office to provide clues. Instead it looks at candidate Obama’s peculiar relationship with the old guard of the civil rights movement and, among other things, the carefully scripted language he used about race during the campaign. In an edited conversation, Cobb, who just returned from a Fulbright teaching fellowship in Russia, talked about politics, paradoxes and possibilities.

Q: What did the students in Moscow think of your take on the 2008 election?

A: I was teaching African-American history at Moscow State University. At the beginning of the semester I took a picture of a group of slaves on a plantation and a picture of Barack Obama being sworn in as president and I said over the course of the semester we will explain how we went from the picture [of slaves] on the left to the picture on the right. They were skeptically curious. They were not the biggest fans of his like in some other places I’ve gone.

Q: Your book is written from the point of view of someone who is, if not enchanted by Obama, certainly supportive of the relentless campaign message of hope and change. But now that you’ve seen him govern, has your enthusiasm dampened?

A: Not long after the inauguration, I took all my campaign T-shirts, my Obama buttons, all those things, and I put them in a box and I said it’s now important to me to understand him in the context of my own interests, to treat him as I would any other politician, not as this cultural phenomenon. So far I would give him a B.

Q: Why a B?

A: I think he’s done some really good things, shown more skill and dexterity than he was given credit for in getting health care passed. Also I think he did some good things on the Lilly Ledbetter Act addressing equal work for equal pay. On the other hand, there is a kind of curious lethargy about him. What we took as his calm and unflappable nature on the campaign trail can now look lethargic and remote. His handling of the Gulf [oil spill] leaves something to be desired.

Q: What about how he’s handling the Israeli commando attack on the flotilla trying to reach the Gaza Strip?

A: He is in a very delicate position there. What happened with this flotilla was indefensible; by the same token, the U.S. has been at least tacitly supportive of anything that would make Hamas less powerful in the region, which is essentially what that blockade was attempting to do.

The U.S. is looking at this through the lens of Iran. If Iran has nuclear weapons, we will very likely not be the people that take military action against them. Israel might be. So it’s more complicated than has generally been discussed. People have been saying [Obama] has been tepid in his denunciation [of the attack] but I think there are a lot of issues that make this a situation where you really want to tread lightly.

Q: Your book focuses a lot on how this election played out against the backdrop of the black community. But did anybody really think that by electing an African-American president that issues of particular interest to the black community would be addressed?

A: I don’t think people had hallucinatory expectations where all of a sudden we’d wake up and everything would be perfect. But I do think people expected him to work hard for the right causes. It’s incumbent upon us to hold him accountable to what he said that he believed in, what he said that he would do, not what we wanted to believe he would do.

Q: So do you still believe in the message he conveyed during the campaign?

A: I do, but I never thought of it as an antidote. I thought of it as an agenda.

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