A New Role For Obama

On several different occasions during the past presidential campaign I made the following observation:

What a fascinating show future president Obama is putting on! It will be even more fascinating to discover whether he is:

a) Jimmy Stewart, in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington;

b) Robert Redford, in The Candidate;

c) Peter Sellers (Chauncey Gardiner), in Being There; or

d) Laurence Harvey, in The Manchurian Candidate.

Now comes Shelby Steele with a new nomination:

Where race is concerned, I sometimes think of the president as the Peter Sellers character in “Dr. Strangelove.” Sellers plays a closet Nazi whose left arm—quite involuntarily—keeps springing up into the Heil Hitler salute. We see him in his wheelchair, his right arm—the good and decent arm—struggling to keep the Nazi arm down so that no one will know the truth of his inner life. These wrestling matches between the good and bad arms were hysterically funny.

When I saw Mr. Obama—with every escape route available to him—wade right into the Gates affair at the end of his health-care news conference, I knew that his demon arm had momentarily won out over his good arm. It broke completely free—into full salute—in the “acted stupidly” comment that he made in reference to the Cambridge police’s handling of the matter. Here was the implication that whites were such clumsy and incorrigible racists that even the most highly achieved blacks lived in constant peril of racial humiliation. This was a cultural narrative, a politics, and in the end it was a bigotry. It let white Americans see a president who doubted them.

Mr. Obama’s “post-racialism” was a promise to operate outside of tired cultural narratives. But he has a demon arm of reflexive racialism—identity politics, Rev. Jeremiah Wright, and now Skip Gates. You can only put a demon like this to death by finding out what you really believe. We should hold Mr. Obama to his post-racialism, and he should get to know himself well enough to tell us what he really means by it. As for the odd triad of Messrs. Gates, Crowley and Obama, only Mr. Crowley seems to have functioned outside his cultural narrative.

Steele should not have jumped so quickly from Wright to Gates. By doing so he omitted Obama’s nomination of the “wise Latina” Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court, someone best known for her identity politics. (Sotomayor was not even the most distinguished sitting Hispanic federal circuit court judge or even the most distinguished sitting Hispanic judge on the Second Circuit, but unlike the other Hispanic circuit court judges her record is littered with examples of and paens to the very identity politics that candidate Obama promised, or seemed to promise, to move beyond.)

Actually Steele left out several other Obama “Dr. Strangelove” moments: there was, for one example, Obama’s description of the grandmother who raised him as a “typical white person,” or, for another, his reference, when he thought only friends and contributors could hear him, of rural Pennsylvanians bitterly and xenophobically clinging to their guns and religion.

Obama may not be Mr. Smith or The Candidate or Chauncey Gardner or The Manchurian Candidate or Dr. Strangelove, but like them all he usually reads from a carefully crafted script. It is only when he slips and goes off script that his real thoughts momentarily emerge.