Clowns and Rats Scare Me by Cary Clack

Author:Cary Clack [Clack, Cary; Nye, Naomi Shihab]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781595341204
Publisher: Trinity University Press

2008 campaign will reveal America’s racial tolerance

11/16/2006

Should he run for president in 2008, Barack Obama will do what Colin Powell declined to and invite the nation to cross into unexplored territory of its racial landscape.

It’s either a mirage or a signpost of maturity, but in all of the talk about Obama running for president it’s remarkable how little race is mentioned.

It’s as if the question of whether America is ready for a black president has been dismissed and the national conversation is solely about the reasons to vote for Obama or the reasons to vote against Obama, none of which has anything to do with race.

But until that ground is crossed and broken, the question will remain unanswered.

Jesse Jackson’s 1984 and 1988 presidential runs were historic and revivalist affairs that were the most serious campaigns by a black candidate to date. For a fleeting moment in 1988, after he’d trounced Michael Dukakis and Al Gore in the Michigan Democratic caucuses, Jackson scared the Hades out of the Democratic Party graybeards with the possibility that he might actually win the nomination.

Jackson’s campaigns were heroic but never had a chance of propelling him to the White House. The only African American who ever loomed as a formidable frontrunner and a prospective presidential candidate was Powell, who decided not to seek the Republican nomination in 1996.

More so than Jackson, Powell would have made the nation ask if it was ready for a black president and, possibly, would have earned an affirmative answer.

Can an African American be elected president?

Call me an optimistic fool, but I believe the answer is yes.

True, Harold Ford Jr. may have lost his race for the U.S. Senate because of a racist campaign ad. Still, a 36-year-old black man nearly got elected to the Senate from Tennessee.

Ford and Michael Steele, the black Republican nominee in Maryland for the Senate, may have run the year’s two best Senate campaigns, and in a year when “R” wasn’t such a politically deadly scarlet letter, Steele probably would have won. What’s more, Massachusetts elected a black man, Deval Patrick, governor.

It says a lot about where we are as a nation that the frontrunner for the Democratic presidential nomination, Hillary Clinton, is a woman, and the potential candidate generating the most excitement, Obama, is a black man. Were she not tainted with the Iraqi war, Condoleezza Rice would be an ideal candidate for the Republicans.

New York Times columnist David Brooks, a conservative, has written, “The next Democratic nominee should either be Barack Obama or should have the stature that would come from defeating Barack Obama.”

In Tuesday’s column, I downplayed the criticism about Obama’s lack of experience because I believe that experience is an ambiguous commodity and that the quantity of years in elected office has never been an accurate barometer for the quality of a presidency.

If the biggest argument against an Obama presidency is his “inexperience” and not his race, that’s a measure of progress. A presidential campaign will magnify his gifts and flaws but shouldn’t highlight his race.

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