Obama: Too Wimpy To Be President?

The way things are going, you have to ask yourself if Barack Obama really wants to be President. Coming off a triumphant and nearly flawless convention, three to six points ahead in the opinion polls, facing an apparently weak opponent who wasn't particularly loved even by his own party, Obama was blindsided when McCain, who turned out to be far less moribund or dull-witted than he'd appeared, completely outmaneuvered him with his wily pick of the Alaskan pit bull for VP.

Since then the tables have turned completely, and it's Obama who looks like he's sleepwalking into oblivion. Oh sure, he's still putting forth solid, sensible proposals couched in crystal-clear and at times downright elegant language, but suddenly nobody is listening. They're too busy watching Obama get pummeled and pushed and bullied every which way from Sunday by a doddering old wreck and his strident female sidekick.

When it comes to making a scripted presentation to a stadium or lecture hall full of adoring followers, there's no one in the business who comes close to Obama (though Palin shows signs of giving him a run for his money). But in the rough and tumble cut and thrust of everyday politicking, Obama is like a deer caught in the headlights, the skinny kid on the playground who bullies naturally gravitate to, and who tries, usually with humiliating results, to reason his his way out of his predicament.

Americans like a little testosterone in their Presidents, and Obama is showing none. Joe Sixpack can be forgiven for asking how a President Obama would stand up to the Russians or Islamic terrorism if he turns to jelly in the face of insults from an inarticulate old man and a glib but ultimately silly woman. Even I, though I still want Obama to win, can't help wondering if he's up to the job.

This whole ridiculous lipstick-on-a-pig business (a phrase, by the way, that McCain used himself last year, and that Vice-President Cheney used at least three times during the 2004 campaign), for example: it's the perfect opportunity for Obama to stand up tall, and with an appropriate measure of disgust, say to the American people, "They (McCain and Palin) must think you're really stupid." He used that phrase once in reference to McCain's newfound strategy of selling himself as an agent of change, but he should make it his mantra, repeating it every time some Republican operative or talk show host tries to hijack the discussion into the realm of preposterous namecalling and accusations, every time McCain or his minions trot out yet another lie about taxes or national defense or "change."

Instead he staggers from one onslaught to the next, barely able to mount a credible defense, let alone the sort of scorched-earth offense he needs to lay on the bald-faced liars running the Republican campaign. Why isn't he? Either he's being very badly advised or he simply lacks the character.

Obviously I'm hoping for the former but fearing the latter. Could it be that Obama so resolutely plays Mr. Nicey-Nice-Above-The-Fray because he's wary of coming across to his white supporters as an Angry Black Man? Possibly, but if so he's already taken it way too far. Or maybe his mother taught him never to pick on girls, which might explain why he circles warily but speechlessly around The Palin while she's busily running off with his female voters. Or - and here's a touchy subject - could it be his experience with affirmative action, and its implicit lesson that adequate is a reasonable substitute for excellent?

Obama has refused to discuss whether he was a beneficiary of affirmative action, but given the period when he went to college and the college he attended (Harvard has been especially assiduous in its pursuit of minority students, perhaps in hopes of defusing its longstanding reputation as a bastion of white male elitism) make it fairly likely. The bitter irony is that, as demonstrated daily by his obvious erudition, he had no need of affirmative action programs, but that doesn't mean he couldn't have been part of one, nor that he didn't absorb one of affirmative action's most pernicious lessons: that second or third best is more than good enough when combined with the "right" skin color.

I'd hate for any of this to be true, and love for Obama to prove me wrong by coming out kicking and screaming and cussing and punching on tomorrow morning's news. But I hope for the best while fearing the worst: that once again the Democrats will hand the country over to the radical right not through a paucity of ideas but from a failure of nerve. If nothing else - if Obama just can't bring himself to say something mean about his opponents - get Hillary Clinton on the case. Promise her Secretary of State or whatever else her little heart desires, but turn her loose on McCain and Palin and I guarantee you'll see some results. You might also get people wondering, "Tell me again why we nominated him instead of her," but that's the chance the Democrats have got to take. Unless of course they - and you - are quite happy with the way things are.

Professor Of Affirmative Action

The day I was admitted to Berkeley, I excitedly shared the news with an acquaintance who'd graduated from Harvard. His reaction: "Big deal, it's just public school."

Since then I've met a number of Harvard men and women and realized that his snobbery/jerkdom was the exception rather than the rule, but for a few years it did color my view of what I think most people would agree is America's most prestigious institution of higher learning.

I paid a visit to Harvard sometime in the early to mid-90s and hung out for a while at the campus radio station, the only jarring note being when I walked into someone's dorm room to find half a dozen of America's future best and brightest slumped over in varying states of heroin intoxication. But I guess you find that sort of thing anywhere pampered young people with large allowances are gathered together.

But apart from that episode, my admiration for Harvard remained largely unsullied until I started noticing some of the professors they were hiring in the name of "diversity," "Rappin'" Cornel West being the first to catch my eye. I'd heard West on several talk shows before he decided to turn his African-American Studies lectures into one of the most embarrassing hip hop albums ever made (those of you even vaguely familiar with the genre will know there's some stiff competition in that department). He's not a stupid man, and only a little foolish (hey, I've made embarrassing records, too), but nor is he Harvard professor material. Community college, maybe, but even there, his occasionally ponderous academic vocabulary can't obscure the fact that his main qualifications for the job were his racial ideology and his skin color.

West left for Princeton several years ago when in his view Harvard president Larry Summers failed to show sufficient respect for the affirmative action programs that were responsible for his having a job, but apparently Harvard has continued fishing in similarly shallow waters, at least if Monday's New York Times op-ed piece by Orlando Patterson is any indication. Patterson, a professor of sociology, using the tortured logic most often encountered in Rhetoric 101 undergrads, sets out to demonstrate that Hillary Clinton's silly "red phone" ad is actually a blatantly racist appeal on a par with D.W. Griffith's Birth Of A Nation.

His evidence for this: the sleeping children portrayed in the ad's opening scene are white. That's it. Clinton's operatives could have removed the racist subtext, he says, if they'd used black children or parents as models, but since they didn't, it's obviously an attack on Barack Obama as a dangerous "dark" outsider. Never mind that a virtually identical ad was used by Walter Mondale against a decidedly non-black Gary Hart, or that LBJ had pulled something similar against the even whiter Barry Goldwater.

Is it the most farfetched idea in the world? No, I suppose not; I've heard Al Sharpton come up with goofier notions, and a quick perusal of some political punk rock lyrics will turn up notions far more bizarre. But once again, we're not talking about professional race demagogues or teenage anarchists here; we're dealing with a distinguished Harvard professor churning out drivel that shouldn't get past a competent composition or logic instructor, let alone the editorial board of the New York Times. If there's racism here, it's in a system that promotes clowns to the highest echelons of our educational establishment based - it would seem clear in this case - largely on the color of a man's skin. Content of character - or at least of intellect - seems to have scarcely entered into the matter.

Can't Pass That Test? It Must Be Racist!

I don't know which annoys me more: this lawsuit alleging that New York City is systematically excluding blacks and Hispanics from becoming firefighters by requiring them to pass a written exam that, apparently, most of them can't pass, or the fact that the media and the federal government are taking such a spurious case so seriously.

Essentially, minority (actually, that's a misnomer; in New York City, whites are in the minority) candidates have been doing considerably worse on the exam than whites. Ergo, in the minds of race-obsessed attorneys and activists, the test must be racist. Well, how about this: when as a teenager I was rejected by the college I most wanted to attend, I didn't call a lawyer and demand that he file suit on grounds that the University of Michigan systematically discriminated against white working class youth from downriver Detroit. I accepted (albeit reluctantly) that I had spent too much of my high school years goofing off instead of studying.

Similarly, if large numbers of black candidates are failing to do well on the firefighters exam, why does this prove something is wrong with the system? Wouldn't it be more helpful to look at what it is about the black community that continues to produce inordinate numbers of young people who can't or won't acquire the basic level of education necessary to function well and prosper in society?

The argument being made is that the skills being tested by the exam are "not relevant" to what a good firefighter needs to know. This may or may not be true. But all things being equal, when the fire department shows up at your house, would you prefer that the firemen (or women) be the smartest men and women or available? Or would you prefer to have a number of them be dumber as long as they make a good poster for racial and cultural diversity?

Yes, I agree it's unfortunate that in a city more than half black and brown, the fire department is overwhelmingly white. But there's a solution that doesn't involve lawsuits and dumbing down of standards: it entails parents in minority communities making sure their kids get to school and do their homework, which is exactly how every other minority community in the past has advanced itself. While we're at it, I note that whites are greatly overrepresented in the fields of medicine and aviation. Would you like the doctor who operates on you or the pilot who flies you on your next journey to be awarded his or her accreditation based on skin color rather than on being the best qualified for the job?

Perhaps we should turn things around and look at fields in which black people are overrepresented. Take professional basketball, for instance: shouldn't more white players be encouraged to join the NBA even if they can't jump quite as high or run quite as fast as some black players? After all, it's only a game, right? Which is more important, winning, or reflecting America's multi-racial character on the basketball court? (P.S. South Africa and Zimbabwe have already instituted this kind of affirmative action to put an end to white dominance of their cricket teams.)

What about rap music? Is it fair that one of the most popular and lucrative music genres should be overwhelmingly dominated by members of one race? Nitpickers and quibblers might argue that most whites don't have the same feel for rhythm and rhyme that blacks do, but that's hardly an excuse for setting standards that systematically exclude a large portion of the population from the fun and profits of being a successful rap artist. Why, think what it does to a young white boy's self-esteem when he sees his African-American classmates welcomed into the hip hop fraternity while he remains cruelly excluded?

Hey, all I'm asking for here is a little consistency. If we're going to assign positions and honors based on skin color, then let's just say so and apply it across the board. But if we're supposed to be a true meritocracy, where everyone has an equal opportunity for success but no one has a guarantee of it, can we please put an end to this obsession with race that ends up being just another variant - and perhaps a more pernicious form at that - of racism?