The Black Presidency

by Michael Eric Dyson

  That last line showed Obama’s determination not to repeat the mistakes of the John Kerry presidential campaign in 2004 and remain silent or defenseless in the face of being “swift boated” through baseless attacks on his patriotism and character. It was Kerry who had helped Obama become a national political phenomenon by offering him the keynote speech at the 2004 Democratic National Convention in Boston. Obama learned from Kerry’s experience while ratifying Kerry’s belief in him as the party’s next superstar.

  Obama’s foes tried to demonize him as a threat to the American way of life. He was bitterly denounced, sometimes serially, sometimes simultaneously, as a communist, socialist, Marxist, terrorist, traitor, and an un-American subversive. Obama frustrated his critics by becoming even more American. He spoke of hope; he chastised bitter partisanship; he said his biracial roots gave him an understanding of all races; and he claimed that his meteoric rise was possible only in America. Even as reports of foiled assassination plots surfaced, Obama continued to walk steadily toward the Oval Office with a steely resolve. In those moments he seemed to combine the swagger of John Wayne and the fearlessness of Martin Luther King.

  Made in America

  Few candidates of any race have run as effective a presidential campaign as Obama did in 2008. He was an extremely disciplined candidate whose focus got sharper as the campaign wore on. There were few signs of internal dissension in the ranks. Little of the inevitable jousting and wrangling that goes on in any camp made it into the press. If Hillary Clinton had had half the zip and drive of Obama’s political machinery, she might well have become the nation’s forty-fourth—and first female—president. Clinton began the race as the Democratic favorite, but Obama’s relentless grassroots organizing, Internet campaigning, and aggressive fund-raising eventually did her in. He had taken Chris Rock’s words about knocking out his opponent to heart. When Obama became the Democratic Party nominee, he stayed on message and outdid Republican Party opponent John McCain in debates, fund-raising, organizational focus, and mastery of the details. His stirring triumph over McCain suggests that the nation ignored the unfair characterizations of Obama by his opponents and saw in him the best hope for the political and moral restoration of America.

  Obama’s belief in America was, and remains, undeniably contagious. He proclaims our nation a land of hope awash in moral excellence and political reinvention, a place where people may dream out loud about impossible ventures and turn them into fact. He is fueled by his own improbable transformation from insecure kid to indomitable political force. Obama greatly admires Abraham Lincoln,23 and he identifies with Lincoln’s will to remake himself, and his surroundings, through imagination and hard work, summed up in a couple of simple dictums: one does not have to be trapped by a past that could be reshaped in the mirror of pitiless self-reflection; and one can take destiny into one’s own hands—for Lincoln, by splitting rails, and for Obama, by toiling in communities—and then transform one’s labor into constructive policies through law and politics. Obama’s restless self-reinventions from community organizer to state senator, from law professor to president of the United States, make him the very image of American social possibility.

  At first blush, all that Obama was not—a rich white man, the son of social royalty, a well-established Washington insider—made him a counterintuitive choice to take the helm of a political vessel that by 2008 was threatening to capsize under the weight of economic hardship, financial crisis, and the rising tide of racial chaos. Yet on closer inspection, it is precisely his mix of gifts that made him the kind of man who might right the ship of American political destiny: a remarkably sober and cool demeanor, a keen intelligence and political maturity far beyond his years, an eloquence drawn from fighting injustice, and a sensitivity to all sides of a debate born of his biracial heritage. Barack Obama’s journey as a black man has not precluded his claim to national identity despite the concerted efforts of conservative opponents. Instead, it has helped to certify his standing as quintessentially American.

  More than half a century ago, Langston Hughes captured the debilitating divide in the destinies of white and black children in his poem “Children’s Rhymes”: “I know I can’t / Be President.” Forty-six years after Hughes, rapper Tupac echoed that declaration: “And although it seems heaven sent, / We ain’t ready to see a black president.” Little more than a decade after Tupac’s lament, we proved ready for a black president, and if the idea was not quite divinely inspired, though millions claim it was, the grief of dreams deferred was nonetheless lifted.

  By any measure Obama’s first election was a monumental day in our nation’s history. African Americans were, and still are, rightly proud. The brutal facts of black existence—slavery, segregation, and the stunting of social and political ambition—have dashed the hopes of black progress time and again. The election of Barack Obama symbolized the resurrection of hope and the restoration of belief in a country that has often failed to treat its black citizens as kin. Obama’s words and vision have built a bridge back into the American family for millions of blacks abandoned to social neglect and cultural isolation. Obama’s historic win was the triumphant closing of a circle of possibility begun when former slaves boldly imagined that one of their kin would one day lead the nation that enslaved their ancestors. In 1968 the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. met a bullet in resistance to his dream of equality; forty years later, Americans cast their ballots to make Obama president. Obama’s election was a benchmark that helped to fulfill—and rescue—America’s democratic reputation. The Oval Office is the ultimate symbol of national access to power. If the levers of influence are weighted with bias or unjust privilege, they swing away from the promise of democracy, which is America’s greatest legacy. Americans of all stripes can be proud that the ideals of the founders, though trumped over the centuries by grievous instances of racism and sexism, have finally, in some profound measure, found them.

  It is striking enough that a black man skirted the irritating limits of race to become the nation’s advocate before the world. It is even more striking that in so doing, Obama has not interrupted but rather extended the democratic ideals of the Founding Fathers. When he took the oath of office to uphold the Constitution and to defend the nation from its enemies, Obama joined a precious short list of men who have shaped the nation’s future and direction for good or ill. Obama’s efforts have not solved the riddle of race in America. We are not a post-racial land, and we have hardly vanquished racism from our midst. But Barack Obama’s election as president promised to bring us closer to the day when a man can be considered an American even when it is recognized that he is also black. Yet we have by no means cleared all the hurdles that litter the path of progress.

  Father Knows Best?

  When he was first elected president, it seemed that Obama had integrated the pantheon of figures who have inherited from George Washington the symbolic role of the nation’s father. The group of men who birthed the nation without a woman’s womb—a reversal of the divine miracle of the Christian God getting his son to earth without male intervention—is known by the fortifying term Founding Fathers. These figures have also cast either a bright light or a negative shadow over the nation’s political landscape. Obama’s interpretation of America’s ideals and destiny promised to enliven the creeds that have shaped the nation’s self-image. Obama loomed over the national landscape as a re-Founding Father of sorts, a symbolic patriarch who guards the American way of life and redefines American moral ambition through his speech and action. Barack Obama’s virtues and strengths as a father are regularly celebrated. The Obama clan offers the nation an inspiring portrait of the American family at its finest. The image of a black man openly loving his remarkable wife and adorable daughters combats entrenched stereotypes of the dysfunctional black family.

  Obama has not been shy about taking to the bully pulpit to champion black fatherhood. As a presidential candidate in 2008, he spoke on Father’s Day to a black church where he
urged black men to stop acting like “boys” in forsaking their paternal responsibilities. Obama repeated the diatribe in his widely discussed Morehouse College commencement address in 2013 as he implored his young listeners to make no excuses and to step up responsibly to the plate of manhood. These speeches go over well in quarters of black America hungry for moral reproof as a sign of tough love. White Americans and others who are grateful to him for saying what they would like to say in public without sounding heartless or racist hail Obama’s words as examples of racial and moral courage.

  Obama is undoubtedly cheered as black America’s father in chief, but he has faced brutal barriers in garnering respect as what might be termed our pater politicus, a symbolic role of national political father that came naturally to his predecessors. Some presidents have been comforting patriarchs, like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who gathered his fretful brood around their radios in war and domestic crisis for encouraging fireside chats to remind them that fear was not their master. Other presidents were abusive fathers, like Richard Nixon, whose paranoia and insecurity drove him to belittle the nation as his petulant offspring. There were smart but bigoted political pops like Woodrow Wilson, and magical and mysterious father figures like Abraham Lincoln, who worked feverishly to keep his national family together despite looming political divorce.

  Lyndon Baines Johnson was a Big Daddy who commanded southern colloquialism and backroom dealing to keep one side of the family from running roughshod over others by offering the vulnerable a vote of confidence. Bill Clinton was a bright but mischievous rolling stone papa whose appetite for winning caused him to embrace triangulation and to welcome relations outside his political tribe. Ronald Reagan was a grandfatherly sage piloting us through social turbulence while insisting to the nation’s darker peoples and regions that it was morning in America. John F. Kennedy was the nation’s eternally youthful dad brimming with ideas for new frontiers, a father figure frozen in memory by murder.

  Obama, too, has many of the better traits of the nation’s former fathers. He cares for ordinary citizens by offering Obamacare the same way Franklin Roosevelt looked out for Americans with the New Deal. Like Lincoln, Obama seeks to rival his onetime campaign opponents by employing their ideas and, in some cases, the figures themselves, from Hillary Clinton to Chuck Hagel. And like Kennedy, Obama oozes charisma, or, more to the point, as one of my students put it, Kennedy had charm but Obama has swag.24 And therein lies the rub: the way Obama walks and talks shouts blackness in spades, a blackness that taps ugly veins of racial discomfort and, at times, unguarded animus. Obama has been rejected as the nation’s father by millions who refuse to recognize his paternity for no other reason than his race. Truman’s fatherly responsibility was summed up in the motto that crowned his desk: “The buck stops here.” The motto of bigots out to foil Obama’s symbolic fatherhood seems to be: The buck must be stopped.

  The rejection of Obama as political father began nearly as soon as he took office. Heated intolerance toward Obama’s presidency poured from the spouts of the Tea Party. It often tasted like a bitter brew of bigotry that was barely sweetened by claims that their opposition was strictly political and had nothing to do with color. That is hard to swallow, since one of the Tea Party’s biggest tiffs with Obama is over the swelling government and its reckless entitlement spending; yet none of that inflamed the Tea Party into action when George W. Bush had control of the nation’s political and financial reins. With Bush in charge, Medicare got a $1 trillion windfall, federal education spending shot up by 18 percent, domestic discretionary spending rose more between 2001 and 2006 than during Bill Clinton’s entire two terms, and Wall Street and the automobile industry got bailed out, long before Obama darkened the door to the Oval Office.

  Obama’s efforts to care for the uninsured were tagged as politically blasphemous, while placards at Tea Party rallies framed him as an African witch doctor. The not-so-subtle message was clear: Obama is not one of us; he is something dark and different. Obama’s African paternal roots were often evoked to suggest his utter otherness, his fatal foreignness, and his essential and fundamental un-Americanness. Conservative critic Dinesh D’Souza committed a treacherous act of literary interpolation and racial legerdemain to discern in Obama’s hunger for his African father’s memory a dark and despotic desire to unmake America and dismantle the nation.25 The birthers cut straight to the chase and argued that Obama’s birth certificate was phony and that he was not born in America, a claim amplified by billionaire political huckster and 2016 Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump. The moral sickness of such claims was not quarantined to the loony right-wing margins but bled into the rhetoric of the conservative mainstream. Former New Hampshire governor John Sununu wished that Obama “would learn how to be an American,”26 while former House Speaker Newt Gingrich labeled Obama the “most dangerous president in modern American history.”27

  The claims of the Tea Party, birthers, right-wingers, and conservative politicians, which I will discuss at greater length shortly, rested on the vicious premise that Obama was not authentically American, and led to the conclusion that he could not be a bona fide president. If Obama is not one of America’s beloved sons, he surely cannot be the nation’s symbolic father. The efforts to unbirth Obama were an attempt to unfather him as well. The conservative politicians and media figures who disrespected Obama with their intemperate fits of hubris and their uncontrolled anger—Charleston, South Carolina, congressman Joe Wilson’s infamous “You lie” ejaculation at the president’s speech on health care before a 2009 joint session of Congress; Arizona governor Jan Brewer’s condescending finger-pointing at Obama’s face on the tarmac at the Phoenix airport after he descended the stairs of Air Force One in 2012; and Daily Caller reporter Neil Munro’s rude interruption of Obama as he made a statement on immigration in 2012 from the Rose Garden—embody the rebellion against Obama as the nation’s legitimate political father.

  The resistance to Obama as our patriarchal proxy among broad segments of the population is rife with irony. Obama has made a great deal of his search for his absent father’s meaning in his life in the luminous Dreams from My Father. It is a painful absence that Obama has since tried to redress in his determination to be a better father to his daughters. The enduring memory of a father’s abandonment has perhaps sparked Obama’s sometimes harsh rebuke of black fathers in his speeches to black audiences. It is bitterly ironic that large numbers of Americans hatefully reject a man who has struggled so publicly to forge a redemptive paternity. Longing desperately to be a better example than the father who cast him aside, Obama faces perhaps the ultimate, and most unforgiving, contradiction: as a child he was denied his father’s nurture and care, and now as the nation’s father, he seeks to care for millions who want nothing more than for him to disappear.

  If large portions of America have rejected Obama as father, they have also rejected his “family” members, former attorney general Eric Holder and former United Nations ambassador and later national security adviser Susan Rice. Beyond race, their kinship consists of serving in the same administration and enjoying access to elite education. Their bonds are tightened because all have endured questioning of their intelligence: Obama was painted as the unjust beneficiary of affirmative action when Donald Trump suggested that the president’s college grades were not good enough for him to have been admitted to Harvard Law School. Texas senator John Cornyn belittled Holder in 2012 when he said of the attorney general, “I have not been impressed with his intelligence.”28 And Senator John McCain, who graduated near the bottom of his Naval Academy class and put forth Sarah Palin as a vice presidential candidate, argued that Rhodes scholar Susan Rice was “not qualified” to be secretary of state.29

  Holder was from the start viewed suspiciously because he argued that the failure to engage one another fully outside our racial cubbyholes at work makes us a “nation of cowards.” The attacks on Holder were even more dramatically stepped up as he made aggressive efforts
to uphold the Voting Rights Act of 1965, especially when he assailed the legal basis of voter ID laws in states like Texas and Florida, declaring in 2012 that these laws were a “political pretext to disenfranchise American citizens of their most precious gift.”30 Rice’s major sin seems to be that she is Obama’s friend. In retribution for her political kinship, and to settle political scores with McCain, Rice’s informal bid to be secretary of state was torpedoed when she stood proxy for Obama’s and the State Department’s handling of the crisis in Benghazi, where, on September 11, 2012, Islamic militants laid siege to the American diplomatic compound in the Libyan city and killed U.S. ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and U.S. Foreign Service information management officer Sean Smith. The association of Rice, Holder, and Obama showed, ironically, how brains and swag often evoke suspicion of black intelligence and competence. If Obama’s success as the nation’s first black president has been hailed as a high-water mark in our country’s history, his tragic rejection as America’s father by large portions of the nation’s citizenry is a black mark of the worst kind.

  Tea Time and Birthers of a Nation

  Despite the incredible goodwill unleashed by Obama’s election and reelection, huge problems prevailed. Obama was accused during the 2008 campaign of letting down American troops, seeking to teach kindergartners about sex, promoting infanticide, being a pal of terrorists, and being a closet socialist. After his win, lingering skepticism about Obama’s character and American identity stalked in the form of Tea Party rallies and the birther movement. Soon after Obama took office, conservatives launched a series of national protests to highlight what they saw as the ills of the Obama presidency: expanded government and wasteful spending, symbolized by the stimulus package of bailouts for big businesses, increased taxes, and Obama’s proposed budget.