Foreshadowed
by his roots and bottle-rocket-like rise, Barack Obama’s legacy is
one of betrayal and what might have been,… From the outset, he
courted and was courted by the pillars of counter-revolution, his
very blackness a cloak for his Manchurian mission.
by
Jon Jeter
Part
6 - Obama and the new breed of foundation-hatched black voices
The
political scientist Adolph Reed met Obama shortly after his election
to the Illinois Senate and he was no more impressed than was Lu
Palmer. He wrote in a 1996 article: “In Chicago, for instance,
we’ve gotten a foretaste of the new breed of foundation-hatched
black communitarian voices; one of them, a smooth Harvard lawyer with
impeccable do-good credentials and vacuous-to-repressive neoliberal
politics, has won a state senate seat on a base mainly in the liberal
foundation and development worlds. His fundamentally bootstrap line
was softened by a patina of the rhetoric of authentic community, talk
about meeting in kitchens, small-scale solutions to social problems,
and the predictable elevation of process over program — the point
where identity politics converges with old-fashioned middle-class
reform in favoring form over substance. I suspect that his ilk is the
wave of the future in U.S. black politics, as in Haiti and wherever
else the International Monetary Fund has sway. So far the black
activist response hasn’t been up to the challenge. We have to do
better.”
Three
years later, Obama challenged Bobby Rush for his congressional seat,
and the battle lines were sharply drawn much as they were in
Reynolds’ congressional campaigns.
“A
dozen years after the death of Harold Washington, there is a
generational shift in the leadership of the black community,”
Chicago Sun-Times columnist Steve Neal wrote in late 1999, as the
campaign season was just gearing up in Chicago.
Chicago’s
black community was less impressed, however.
“Barack
is viewed in part to be the white man in Black face in our
community,” said Donne Trotter, an Illinois state legislator
who was also challenging Rush for the 1st Congressional District.
“Who pushed him to get where he is so fast? It’s these
individuals in Hyde Park who don’t always have the best interests
of our community in mind.”
And
while Washington auditioned for his job with Palmer and a ragtag
group of grassroots organizers in a southside Chicago community
center, Obama’s close-up moment was at a 2003 fundraiser at the
home of Democratic fixer and Bill Clinton BFF Vernon Jordan —
getting face-time with such Democratic establishment fixtures as
former White House Counsel Greg Craig; Mike Williams, a lobbyist for
a Bondholders’ Association; and Tom Quinn and Robert Harmala,
partners at one of DC’s most connected firms, Venable LLP.
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