Obama’s Sister Souljah

Before we move on to this campaign’s next contretemps, it’s worth considering the substance beyond the snickers over Jesse Jackson’s candid, if unplanned, appraisal of Sen. Barack Obama.

Jackson was a guest on a Fox News show Sunday and, while off camera, didn’t realize that his microphone was on. The network made a recording of the longtime civil rights leader expressing a vulgar wish to castrate the putative Democratic presidential nominee over remarks he had made concerning the need for some young black fathers to behave more responsibly toward their families.

Now, nobody much past the age of reason actually expects many of the public men and women on those shows to say what they really think. (Doing that makes you a “character� or a “curmudgeon,� which is a whole other niche.) Still, the gap between Jackson’s on-camera comments and his unguarded remarks was pretty sobering -- not simply for their crudity but also for the depth of hostility they betrayed toward a candidate he claims to support.

What to make of the decision to air them is another issue. Suffice it to say that given the way professional talking heads such as Jackson show up on one of these pestilentially numerous cable news chat shows after another, it’s a wonder things like this don’t happen more often. Moreover, if you’re a liberal Democrat and you willingly go on Fox News ... well, when you lay down with dogs, you get up with fleas -- if you’re lucky.

Jackson subsequently has fallen on his rhetorical sword, apologizing profusely and unreservedly, and it’s likely that the whole incident has been a net plus for Obama -- a kind of indirect and genteel Sister Souljah moment. The reference, of course, is to Bill Clinton’s denunciation of certain intemperate comments the rap singer by that name made during the 1992 presidential campaign. It’s widely believe that Clinton’s “courage� in that instance helped him with blue-collar white voters by showing he was not “pandering� to African American voters, who are such an essential part of the Democratic Party’s electoral base. Jackson’s intemperance simply draws attention to Obama’s positions that are likely to strike a similar chord with swing voters.

The onetime presidential candidate particularly objected to the personal-responsibility component in Obama’s version of a faith-based initiative, arguing that it amounted to “talking down to black people.� He also objected to the senator’s Father’s Day address, when he said some young African American fathers needed “to realize that what makes you a man is not the ability to have a child; it’s the courage to raise one.�

In the current electoral context, those positions are likely to resonate with three crucial groups of voters who still appear to be in play: independents, white blue-collar Catholics in the Rust Belt states and the legions of new Latino voters who are registering for the first time. These are socially conservative but politically and economically liberal voters likely to regard Jackson’s antipathy as a plus.

How important is that?

Well, here are a few numbers: Since the Democratic Party embraced civil rights in 1964, not one of its presidential candidates has carried an absolute majority of white voters. In each of the last seven presidential elections, the winner of the popular vote has carried Catholics. Historically unprecedented numbers of immigrant Latinos, overwhelmingly Catholic and socially conservative, are attaining citizenship and registering to vote in this presidential election. According to a nonpartisan Pew survey, “nearly half of independents (47%) are undecided or may change their minds, far more than the 28% still on the fence in June 2004.�

In addition to the overtly Oedipal implications of Jackson’s chosen metaphor, this whole incident is striking as another reminder of the generational shift taking place among African Americans. It’s been obvious for some time that Jackson feels the Obama camp isn’t quite giving him his due as a political and civil rights pioneer. When he ran for the presidential nomination against Michael Dukakis in 1988, he did win 11 primaries, including those in Michigan, Georgia and Virginia. But it’s deeper than that.

Obama, 46, understands that there are now two black communities -- one is the group of achievers to which he belongs, the other is a remnant urban underclass afflicted with all the pathologies that suggests. Jackson’s generation believes that admitting there is such a division risks leaving deprived African Americans behind. Obama’s generation believes that ignoring it guarantees the problem will never end.

Who’s winning? Obama. He is sure to hold his black base. And no matter how irritating it is to the old guard, his candor may be the key to the all-important independents.

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