The Age of Entitlement by Christopher Caldwell

Author:Christopher Caldwell
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2020-01-20T16:00:00+00:00

Civil rights as a ruling-class cause

Barack Obama was the president the finance crisis called forth. Its timing, in September 2008, favored his electoral fortunes. Had the crash come two months later, after the general election, the economic ignorance of Obama’s Republican opponent, Arizona senator John McCain, might have bothered voters less on Election Day. That is to say nothing of his running mate, Alaska governor Sarah Palin, who, measured against the gravity of the emergency, became a figure of ridicule. On the other hand, had the crash come a few months earlier, before the primaries, Obama’s own thin résumé might have bothered voters more.

McCain’s strength was his heroism as a Navy pilot and prisoner of war in Vietnam. Obama’s was his opposition to the losing war that George W. Bush had chosen to fight in Iraq. Almost all nationally prominent Democrats had bet that backing the war would seem the more patriotic option. Now that Bush had added the near-destruction of the world economy to his trophy case alongside his two lost wars, any Republican nominee would probably have been sunk. Since Democrats were still the party of bureaucratic expertise and bold government action, Obama was well positioned to address the finance crisis. But because his political career had been built at the intersection of billionaire finance and community-based race activism, the very place where the crisis had occurred, he was also well positioned to symbolize it.

Obama was a black candidate with a difference. He had been raised in Hawaii, his father a Kenyan scholarship student he never really knew and his Kansan mother an activist scholar of international development. By his own account he was an “eighth or ninth cousin” of Confederate president Jefferson Davis. On a state visit to Ireland, Obama visited his Irish cousins in County Offaly. African half siblings turned up all over the world in the course of Obama’s campaign and presidency, not all of them previously known to Obama himself, and many of them quite accomplished: Auma the scholar at Heidelberg; Abongo the estranged right-winger; Mark the Jewish concert pianist in Shenzhen, China; George the mechanic in Nairobi. But Obama had no black American cousins. He was the descendant of American slave owners but not of American slaves.

He was not even descended from the same people as most American blacks. The vastness and diversity of Africa, so loudly insisted on in other contexts, is something people ignored when they spoke of Obama’s ancestry. When Obama and his wife visited the eighteenth-century House of Slaves in the onetime slave port of Gorée in Senegal in 2013, she was presumably standing near her ancestral homeland, but he was not. Gorée, in fact, is closer to New York (3,820 miles away) than to Nairobi (3,865 miles away), the Kenyan capital from which his father had emigrated. Until he went to college, Obama had had less direct contact with black American culture than almost any of his white Senate colleagues. His yearning toward blackness, his training himself in

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