The Obama Phenomenon: Toward a Multiracial Democracy

15. President Obama: Freedom Democrat or Neoliberal?

FIFTEEN President Obama Freedom Democrat or Neoliberal? RObiN D. g. KELLEy Will Obama, the first black President in the history of the United States, realize Martin Luther King’s dream or Condoleezza rice’s nightmare? The White house, which is now his house, was built by black slaves. I hope he won’t forget it, ever. —eduardo Galeano, “Ojalá,” Página 12 (november 6, 2008) As the world savored Barack Obama’s ascent to the highest post in the United States, the same political pundits who impatiently insisted that we transcend race by not talking about it made race the issue du jour. We’ve all heard the jubilant claims that Obama’s victory marks the final nail in the coffin of racism. USA Today asked if we still need a Voting Rights Act “now that a black man has won the presidency,” and columnist Jim Wooten of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution argued that Obama’s victory proved that “the political system that discriminated and the people who designed it are dead and gone.”1 Obama himself suggested that his multiracial heritage placed him in a unique position to unite the country and provide special insight into our country’s diverse constituency. While heritage matters, Barack and Michelle’s politics of hope—their vision of uniting the nation around the creation of a caring, compassionate culture built from the “bottom up”—is rooted not in bloodlines but in a distinctive political heritage. Unlike any other U.S. president, Barack Obama comes directly out of a political tradition that believes in the power of ordi- 254 . RObiN D. g. KELLEy nary people to make decisions, to participate in the democratic process, and to formulate policies and agendas that grow immediately out of their daily struggles. He learned his politics from the residents he had organized in Chicago’s Altgeld Gardens housing project in the mid-1980s, those beautiful older black women who taught our forty-fourth president about the capacity of poor people to make demands and fight back. And he learned that black workers were hit harder by the flight of manufacturing jobs from the urban core to industrial suburbs and overseas. He knew then that the policies leading to disproportionately high unemployment rates, deteriorating housing stock, crumbling urban hospitals, and rising crime rates were anything but color-blind. President Obama is also a political descendant of the first generation of black lawmakers elected during Reconstruction, when ex-slaves won the right to vote, held offices in the statehouses and assemblies and Congress, and helped draft the most democratic state constitutions in the history of the country—providing free universal public education, funds for roads and infrastructure , services for the poor and physically disabled, ending imprisonment for debt, and abolishing public whipping. These men, many of whom bore the marks of the slaver’s lash, preferred expanding democracy to punishing whites, and some even supported women’s suffrage. A quarter-century later, African Americans were effectively disfranchised through force and intimidation. Not until the mid-1960s, thanks to black struggles for the franchise, did we see any significant national black participation in electoral politics. So when Shirley Chisholm became the first African American to seek the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972, many black voters had only recently had their rights restored. Indeed, Obama himself was the third African American elected to the Senate since Reconstruction. With the restoration of the black franchise came the resurrection of the radical Republican vision of ex-slaves, now seeking a home in the Democratic Party. Black folks down in Mississippi called themselves “freedom Democrats” and opened their doors to all Mississippians during the early 1960s when the traditional state party fought violently to keep blacks voteless. A few years later, the first black political convention in Gary, Indiana, in 1972, cast their role as “the vanguard in the struggle for a new society.” Jesse Jackson’s presidential bids of 1984 and 1988 embodied this vision. His “Rainbow Coalition” built alliances with Latinos and Asian Americans, supported Native American rights, opposed plant closings, supported a singlepayer health plan, called for federal assistance to struggling farmers, promised to cut military expenditures by at least 20 percent, and proposed expanding affirmative action for women, among other things. Like Obama now and Chisholm before him, Jackson was a marginal figure in mainstream African fREEDOM DEMOCRAT OR NEOLibERAL . 255 American political circles, and yet his campaign mobilized...