This New York Times article on Barack Obama's failed primary campaign against incumbent congressman and former SNCC member and Black Panther Bobby Rush is pretty interesting. Rush's "stronghold on the South Side of Chicago was overwhelmingly black, Democratic and working class." Obama "lived in its most rarefied neighborhood, Hyde Park." He was a law professor at one elite university (University of Chicago) with a degree from another (Harvard). Media consultant Eric Adelstein described the race as "the Black Panther against the professor."
Obama said Rush represented “a politics that is rooted in the past, a reactive politics that isn’t good at coming up with concrete solutions.” He ran on a platform of reform. But as Abner Mikva -- an Obama supporter -- said, "Reform is not the most compelling issue to people who don’t have a job.” So Rush knowingly ran a populist campaign against Obama's cultural class:
Mr. Obama’s Ivy League education and his white liberal-establishment connections also became an issue. Mr. Rush told The Chicago Reader, “He went to Harvard and became an educated fool. We’re not impressed with these folks with these Eastern elite degrees.”
Mr. Rush and his supporters faulted him for having missed experiences that more directly defined the previous generation of black people. “Barack is a person who read about the civil-rights protests and thinks he knows all about it,” Mr. Rush told The Reader.
Mr. Obama was seen as an intellectual, “not from us, not from the ’hood,” said Jerry Morrison, a consultant on the Rush campaign. Asked recently about that line of attack, Mr. Rush minimized it as “chest beating, signifying.”
Not that he wasn't black enough, but that he was too elite, too upper-crust, too...Hyde Park: “It was much more a function of class, not race," Adelstein said. Of course, the two are intimately and intricately interwoven, but Obama's multiracial background and skin color lead most discussion to focus on race at the expense of class.
Ironically, the loss may have helped him:
“Certain Democrats in Chicago say it’s the best thing that ever happened to him, not winning that race — that he couldn’t have been positioned to run for the U.S. Senate from that district,” Mr. Adelstein said. “In that district, you get pigeonholed pretty quickly as ‘an African-American congressman,’ not as a more transcendent congressman.”
Which wouldn't make for a good presidential run premised on the audacity of hope, not the persistence of oppression. And today, Congressman Rush backs Obama -- at least on that presidential level:
Today, Mr. Rush, a practicing Baptist minister in his eighth term in Congress who is backing Mr. Obama’s presidential candidacy, still seems to be ruminating about the Obama phenomenon with grievance and wonder. Mr. Obama’s ambition has found its audience, he said. In a Congressional race, your neighbors “hold you to a different standard.”
“For what he’s doing now, he didn’t need to march against police brutality,” Mr. Rush said, invoking his own record. “He didn’t need to demonstrate against poor meat in substandard grocery stores. He didn’t need that kind of stuff because obviously his audience was at a different level.”
Social class and Obama is a weird thing. It's complicated, because Obama is certainly an upper class guy with an upper class background. He also did community organizing in the poorest areas of Chicago. But understanding how that fits into the broader Obama narrative is complicated. It's certainly different than when someone grows up in a poor area and then returns. Obama was privileged but gave of himself freely, sort of in tha vain of the liberal arts college, well, liberal. In a race against a long-time civil rights activist and working-class hero, that's just sort of lame. But as Rush's endorsement exemplifies, it's not bad for a presidential candidate.
