OBAMA NEEDS TO PUT HIS EMPHASIS ON THE STRUGGLING MIDDLE CLASS AND THE GROWTH OF POVERTY

The nomination of Barack Obama as president of the United States by the Democratic Party holds the promise of the breakthrough we need in this country to finally get over our long history of Jim Crow policies and attitudes. The problem for Barack Obama and for his running mate Joe Biden in the two months ahead before the election is that they probably can’t make too big a deal out of this fact, that is, if they want to win the election.

Yes, the nomination of Barack Obama is history making. The policies and attitudes of Jim Crow, that is, the portrayal of African Americans as inferior to whites and the corresponding practices focused on putting them down and keeping them down date back to the earliest days of slavery in this country.

Had Lincoln Not Been Assassinated

I often wonder if Abraham Lincoln had not been assassinated, that is, with the termination of the Civil War he had been alive to manage the initial phase of Reconstruction, if the outcome might have been different. I would like to think so. Instead the effects of Jim Crow including defacto Jim Crow in the North got steadily worse, that is, until the famous Brown Versus Board of Education case in 1954 that put an end to the notion of separate but equal in education. Then Martin Luther King and others who fought for equality and justice for all citizens in all phases of American life came to prominence.

African Americans have repeatedly made a name for themselves in sports and entertainment since the 1960s, and the hope is that as their visibility at the highest level of politics and other leadership positions becomes routine that racism, covert or overt, will no longer be a significant phenomenon of American life. The attitudes of the current generation of young people, that is, people under 40, point us in that direction.

Hillary Clinton: “Awfully Hard To Win”

Meanwhile it is Barack Obama and his wife Michele who are leading the way. That said, to truly make a difference Barack Obama has to get himself elected. Otherwise as a defeated nominee he’ll be a sentence or two in some future American history books and the promise will not be fulfilled. We’ll remember him as we remember Bob Dole or George Dukakis or Walter Mondale or John Kerry except with a tad more awe and a tad more regret as we think about what might have been—the first African American to have received a major party nomination, but, we’ll have to add, he couldn’t pull it off. He lost!

And let’s not forget what Hillary Clinton has been telling us throughout her run for the presidency. “It is awfully hard to win a general election,” she has said. Any notion that Obama will have an easy time achieving victory has to be put out of mind immediately.

Shift Focus To The Poor, White or Black

How does he avoid that fate? How does he go from nominee to the next president of the United States? How does he get himself elected? Peter Beinart, senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, as published in a recent issue of The Washington Post (The Washington Post National Weekly Edition, August 18-24, 2008, page 30) makes the point that if race becomes too strong an issue in the Obama-McCain campaign—and that is already threatening to happen--it will not work in Obama’s favor.

On the other hand, he says, too much has already been made of race in this campaign for Obama to pretend that it is playing no role in voters’ decisions. Rather Beinart argues that Obama “needs to control the race debate instead.”

Take On Sensitive Affirmative Action Issue

How does he do that? By switching the debate from race to class, that’s how, says Peter Beinart. By taking on the sensitive issue of affirmative action and even acknowledging that the benefits of affirmative action are no longer necessary for upper middle class and upper class blacks—at the same time, by switching the focus to the poor, and I need to add, by putting the spotlight on the struggling middle class.

This is how Beinart puts it. “Over the decades, racial preferences have played a vital role in creating a black middle class, but that middle class is now large and self-perpetuating. It is the multi-generational poor---whether urban and black or Appalachian and white—who truly need a boost today. And that’s what Obama himself seems to believe.”

Too Much Poverty

The immense challenge, however, is whether Obama and Biden can get this point across to working class or blue color white families in the key border states of Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia, Kentucky, Tennessee and parts of western Virginia so that they’ll overlook the race issue and other negative attitudes long entrenched in some of their communities and cast their vote for him? If he can’t get enough of their votes, he is not likely to win. That’s what John Kerry found out in 2004.

There is no doubt that right now we are watching history being made in this country, but Obama and Biden can’t spend too much time talking about it. They’ll have to leave that job to the commentators from our ubiquitous media and to the historians in their books. The job of Obama and Biden is winning an election. The middle class of all races and ethnic backgrounds in this country are struggling right now. The income spread between rich and poor is widening at an enormous rate, and we have far too much poverty for a nation that is supposed to be rich. That’s where the emphasis has got to be.

Thanks for tuning into Mind Check. For a look at my other writing, see the website http://www.sasaftwrites.com. Please note that my latest book, Murdoch McLoon And His Windmill Boat, is now available. You’ll learn more about it at the sasaftwrites website.

Copyright © 2008 by Stephen Alan Saft