114 Barack H. Obama: The Unauthorized Biographywho had happened to be black. Obama droned on mercilessly, reading the words off his trusty glass
plates.
At the end, it turned out that the country needed a new dialogue about race. Not about
foreclosures that were hitting the black community harder than any other sector of the population.
Not about mass layoffs, that were hitting blacks hardest, since they were the last hired and the first
fired in such industries as remained. Not about food price inflation, which was undermining the
living standards of blacks along with everyone else. Not about the black high school dropout rate,
nor the incarceration rate of young black men. Not about banking panic. Not even about soaring
college tuition costs. Just about race, understood as an attitude, as an autonomous force in history,
divorced from its material basis, and divorced from any class analysis that might account for social
tensions in some other way.
OBAMA: NO SPECIFIC PROPOSALS TO HELP THE BLACK UNDERCLASS
It was worth noting that Obama labored very hard to create the appearance of a campaign that
studiously avoided all racial issues, at least as far as the candidate himself was concerned. He had
not proposed anything to help Harlem, Anacostia, Watts-South Central, or the Cabrini Greens. Up
to this point, Obama had made zero proposals specifically designed to help poor inner city blacks,
nor did he make any such proposals now. The Obama campaign ethos was on the surface post-
racial, trans-racial, globalized. But beneath the surface, the Obama campaign was a brutal racist
slander machine, capable of generating the absurd myth that Bill Clinton was a racist (a myth which
Sean Wilentz has dismantled and exposed). This was a trick which the political thug David Axelrod
had learned in Chicago, where he had sometimes managed the campaigns of black candidates who
wanted to attract the votes of upper-middle class white voters. The trick was to project an image of
trans-racial and post-racial beatitude on the part of the candidate, but to have surrogates and
campaign spokespersons ruthlessly slime the opponent as a racist any time he dared to raise the
most minute criticism. The classic stance of the Obama campaign was, in a nutshell, that if you dare
criticize our man, you are revealing yourself as a racist. It was a masterpiece of self-righteous
duplicity.
Needless to say, the controlled corporate media and their media whores swooned in ecstasy.
Obama’s speech joined the Declaration of Independence and the Gettysburg Address among the
foundational documents of the United States, raved quite a few. It should be printed by the million
and made required reading in every school, raved others. For the left liberals, the speech had the
unique merit of expressing their own class-based race-dominated world view through the mouth of
someone who claimed to be black, but using the jargon of the academic oligarch. The left liberals
crowed that Obama had turned the tables on his critics and opponents, and that the Reverend Wright
issue had now been successfully neutralized; no longer would the South Side Savonarola be a mill-
stone around the neck of the Perfect Master as he strove towards the seizure of power.
Ordinary working people, American voters, had other ideas. The racist provocations of Wright
were a permanent guarantee that Obama could not be elected president in the normal way, that is,
without the destruction of his competition by Gestapo methods through the FBI and Department of
Justice, in the way that Governor Spitzer had been taken down. The danger was that Obama had so
many ogres and monsters in his left CIA-Ford Foundation base of support and in his past in general
that, if he were at the top of the Democratic ticket, he would drag the entire party down to defeat
with him. Obama had no coat-tails. He had reverse coat-tails; he was a burden for Democratic
candidates down the ticket. The burden was composed of Jeremiah Wright the racist provocateur,