Senator Obama, finally, coyly, has suggested that anyone who opposes him - and whoever runs against him - is a racist.  In doing so, he has opened a Pandora’s box of evils for his campaign.  As we’ve already seen in the past few days, Obama has released the pygmy energies of his cultured defenders, who have amplified, trivialized, and thus unintentionally satirized Obama’s ploy.

Last fall if you held out your palm you could feel an occasional raindrop - we were instructed that  calling Obama “articulate” suggests that most non-Obama African Americans are inarticulate.  But now we are in a drenching storm.  At The New Republic, bloggers engage in Talmudic argument about how observing that Obama is skinny is a racist trope.  On TV, a commentator denounces a McCain ad for showing Obama standing in front of a tall column, before which he indeed stood (200,000 Germans saw him do it).  At The HuffingtonPost (I believe), you can read a complaint that showing a picture of Obama next to pictures of two white women (white, yes, but one of them is awfullly skinny) is racist.  Ralph Nader complains that Obama looks like a black man, but doesn’t think like a black man ought to think.  Back at The New Republic, Marty Peretz defends Obama from the young Talmudists at his magazine - but does his candidate even more harm with his prose: “The burdens of slavery mutilated minds and  spirits from one generation to the next, as the slowly eroding memories of white supremacy maintained the law and lore of dominance.  Obama’s campaign brings this to a close, even if in some small circles it may linger, even fester on. This is already a grand accomplishment. His victory would consummate the long delayed pledge:  a black president. Free at last from our past. Free at last.”
The ultimate effect of all this Ivy-league sophistication about the hidden racism of ordinary Americans?  It strips Senator Obama of every argument he could make for his election save the one:  his race.  Obama is black - and that is the only reason to vote for him.  The corollary to this disastrous argument is even more stupid:  He is black - and that is the only reason to think that anyone will vote against him.
In fact, only a tiny minority of those who vote for Obama or McCain will do so because of the Democratic nominee’s race. In our political system, candidates have to embody in themselves the sometimes contradictory, but more often fruitful coalitions among different groups.   He or she who can best put together the fullest shopping cart of voter groups not only wins elections, but manages best to govern once elected.  Obama’s friends - and one must say here, particularly his white, intellectually hoity-toity friends - are set on making the election a referendum on racial loyalty and racial guilt.  There are certainly a lot of people who feel as Peretz does - that “white America” corporately owes something to “black America,” and the enormous unpaid debt can be cancelled only - and yet completely and forever - by the simple act of pulling the lever for the first black candidate who happens to have been nominated by a major party.  But the number of people who feel this way, added to the black vote, hardly constitute a majority.

The rest of us must be persuaded that Obama has talents and qualities other than the color of his skin (inherited, curiously, from a father who, as an African not an American, from Nyangoma-Kogelo not Kansas City, never himself suffered from the sins for which Padre Peretz promises us absolution if we vote correctly).  And here is where the blunder really tells.  The racism charge, Obama will discover can only reduce his stature, and make him a candidate of dwindling appeal.  Not because of the racism of white America, not because of the mysterious operation of a Wilder/Bradley factor (in which white voters may have overstated their support for a black candidate because of their wish to appear liberal to a pollster), but because running on a platform consisting only of his race turns a man of great charm and with an intriguingly complex personality and history into a bore.

John Kerry made a similar mistake four summers ago, deciding to run as a maligned Vietnam vet - and nothing else.  But Kerry engineered his whole career around his Vietnam credentials, calculating every move toward and away from his Vietnam service with a micrometer, and thus deserved not to escape it.  Obama, with far more intelligence and depth, but with a career devoid of accomplishment, needs badly to show that he is a big man who can grow even more in the future.  Instead he is making himself small, reducing himself to a single quality - hardly “free at last.”   I don’t like or trust Obama, but I am beginning to feel sorry for him.

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