For candidates, a tough crowd

Arguably, there have not been elections in recent memory as closely watched, debated or parsed as the 2008 presidential primaries. The recent string of Obama triumphs and the straits the Clinton campaign finds itself in are reported incessantly on the news, blogged ad nauseam on the Internet, mulled over at the local Starbucks. Pundicrats chew over the candidates’ every utterance like sharks over chum. And whether you support Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama or hope Republican John McCain trounces the Democratic nominee in the general election, the twists and turns have attracted more attention than presidential primary politics usually does.

And with good reason. These are serious times, and primaries -- aside from the entertainment value of watching how they’re spun to a nation occupied by sporting events, “American Idol” and YouTube -- are supposed to guide us to a sober decision. And if, as Plato said, a good decision is based on knowledge and not numbers, how do we sift through the hype and hyperbole of campaign ads and sound bites for insight into the candidates’ positions and policies?

I was hoping that two recent books could provide answers, at least for the Democratic side of the equation. Shelby Steele’s “A Bound Man: Why We Are Excited About Obama and Why He Can’t Win” seemed intriguing in that it is one of the few current books about Obama not written by the Illinois senator himself. A black conservative and fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, Steele spends almost a third of the book advancing his assertion that Obama is beholden to a ‘60s-style black nationalist identity that gives him a sense of belonging and compensates for the absence of his father, who abandoned Obama and his mother when he was 2.

And though Steele extensively references the 1995 memoir “Dreams From My Father” written when Obama was 34, his real authority seems to come more from the fact that he, like Obama, is the offspring of a white mother and black father and that he too flirted with black nationalism as a young man. Steele writes at length and sometimes poignantly of being trapped as both races “squeeze us in a blueslike double bind where the absurdity is as comic as it is tragic: we dismiss you for not being authentically black, yet we will never accept you as authentically black.” But it is a mighty leap from the black nationalism of Steele’s youth in the segregated ‘60s to the one he ascribes to Obama, writing of himself in the ‘80s, or to equate either to the man Obama is today.

Identity clash

Although none of Steele’s three degrees are in psychology, his armchair analysis deconstructs Obama as a man “who truly wants to be black, a man who is determined to resolve the ambiguity he was born into.” Such a desire, Steele argues, may in and of itself disqualify him for the presidency because the demands of the black identity Steele constructs require that Obama be a confronter of whites, a la Al Sharpton or Jesse Jackson. These modern confronters gain their authority, Steele argues, from blaming and obligating white power for black problems. He even ascribes these tactics to Obama’s wife, Michelle, in a misinterpretation of her remarks on “60 Minutes” that neatly supports Steele’s complaint that blacks tend to view themselves as victims and casts her as a facilitator of “her race’s manipulation of the American mainstream.”

Yet Steele also argues that Obama, by virtue of his charisma and his biracial heritage, has adopted the mask of the “iconic Negro,” a bargainer who restores whites’ innocence by making race irrelevant: “I will not use America’s horrible history of white racism against you, if you will promise not to use my race against me,” Steele has the bargainer arguing. As Steele’s logic goes, “iconic Negroes” such as Oprah Winfrey and Sidney Poitier embody the highest longings of both races, even if they must struggle with accusations from confronter blacks that they are sellouts. It is this presumed dichotomy -- the challenger black identity Steele ascribes to Obama versus the bargaining mask he wears and that voters respond to so enthusiastically -- that troubles Steele and makes the Obama of his critique iconic yet bound, seduced away from the character and conviction Steele urges him to espouse.

Somewhere along the way in Steele’s rhetoric, full of psychobabble and conflation of his and Obama’s lives, the candidate starts coming off as a schemer, a media manipulator and poseur without “a compelling vision for the nation.”

Looking at Clinton

If Obama gets short shrift in “A Bound Man,” Clinton is forced to an interminable penance in Susan Morrison’s “Thirty Ways of Looking at Hillary: Reflections by Women Writers.” A collection of essays by mostly East Coast writers (Morrison is the articles editor for the New Yorker), the book’s title riffs on Wallace Stevens’ poem “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird.”

But instead of a baker’s dozen of succinct images or viewpoints, too much of “Thirty Ways” is a critique of: a) Clinton’s appearance (as if the color or cut of her hair, blouses and pantsuits are markers of character or ability to govern); b) Clinton’s personality (boring, stiff); and c) her relationship with her husband (and less here on the former president’s brokering of relationships among business and political leaders and more on his doings with Monica, Gennifer, et al.). As near as I can figure, more than half of the contributors are angry at Hillary Clinton for somehow letting them down, or for not being tough enough, friendly enough, female enough, fill-in-the-blank enough. “Thirty Ways” is Shelby Steele cubed, and Clinton the candidate is no more understood for the effort.

That’s not to say that some of the writing isn’t worthwhile. Among the perceptive essays are those by feminist Letty Cottin Pogrebin, writer Katha Pollitt and Deborah Tannen, a noted linguistics professor at Georgetown University and author of several books on male-female communications.

Tannen makes a convincing case in her essay “The Double Bind” that the characteristics associated with authority are the same ones associated with men, while for women the extent to which they fulfill the expectations associated with being good leaders violates those associated with being good women. “That is the vise that has Hillary Clinton -- and potential voters -- in its grip.”

Tannen gives numerous examples to support her thesis, from the assumptions about Clinton’s “make-overs” to the assumption that she shows weakness when expressing emotion. And Tannen’s critique of the negative attributes widely ascribed to Clinton by the pundits -- cold, bossy, stern, ambitious -- is right on point. Joseph R. Biden Jr. was excoriated for calling Obama “articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy” but equally loaded language about Clinton raises nary an eyebrow and is used by several of the essayists as reasons they can’t vote for her or will do so while holding their noses.

The collection’s infatuation with hurling a cutting phrase adds little to our understanding of how Clinton’s voting record or pronouncements may be indications of her ability to lead but add a lot to understanding how supposedly sophisticated women can transfer their insecurities and anger onto a female candidate, with withering results.

In Stevens’ poem, he confesses, “I do not know which to prefer, / The beauty of inflections / Or the beauty of innuendoes, / The blackbird whistling / Or just after.” “A Bound Man” and “Thirty Ways” may provide ammunition for bloggers or smear campaigns, but their lack of insight makes Stevens’ observation that much more poignant as we strain to discern who these candidates are and what their presidency might mean for America.

--

Paula L. Woods is the editor of several anthologies and the author of the Charlotte Justice mystery novels.