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Adam Serwer watched Michelle Obama's speech last night and found it a profoundly dispiriting spectacle. Not because Obama failed at her task of "humanizing" herself, but because she had to take on that burden at all:
It is infuriating that this Harvard and Princeton grad is forced to, in some sense, apologize for achieving what every family wants, what all parents work for their children to have, merely because her blackness causes anxiety in the same people who have claimed for years that all black folks need to do is "work hard" to succeed. When women like Michelle Obama do succeed, they're supposed to minimize their accomplishments so that certain people don't feel insulted. The talking heads never ask why, because white anxiety about black self-determination is self-justifying, even in 2008. Meanwhile, John McCain runs solely on his biography, as the press sits in a rapturous silence. "I used to be a POW" will not reverse the housing crisis, it will not bring health care to the uninsured, it will not regulate the credit card industry, it will not prevent the government from taking your laptop or tapping your phone with no evidence of wrongdoing. But you wouldn't know that from watching CNN.The Obamas are still fighting Jackie Robinson Syndrome, the reflexive double standards and often small, sometimes large, but always public humiliations that come from being the first black person to do something. This is what they've signed up for. Still, it would be nice if we could stop pretending that it wasn't happening, or if those so sensitive to Hillary's plight could look beyond their hero to see something else worth fighting for. Obama's electoral fate will be decided by his and Michelle's ability to caulk the fault lines of race and gender as best they can through both policy and language, while Republican Party does its best to keep these scars fresh. It is more than anyone should been asked to do.Beautifully put. But I think the strategy against Barack Obama is slightly different. There was a pivot point in the election, a moment when it could have explicitly racialized. It didn't. And I think that was a self-interested choice of the Republican Party. A racial strategy was too dangerous against Obama because it would've been too ineffective. It would've trapped them between Obama's obvious distance from racial stereotypes on the one hand and the press corps's politically correct liberalism -- the only type of liberalism they actually do exhibit -- on the other.Rather, the campaign against Obama has metastasized into a variant of class warfare. It's the resentment of the meritocracy. What the GOP realized was that Obama did come across different than the average American, but not so much because he was black as because he was effortless. The very set of supercharged talents and qualities that allowed Obama to levitate past the boundaries of race and class make him different than those who haven't rocketed upward on the strength of their intelligence and charisma and charm. After all, if you're a fumbling, struggling individual out in suburban Ohio, how can you believe that this guy who doesn't look to have struggled a day in his life cares about your pathetic problems? Obama, in other words, is elite. As in "A group or class of persons enjoying superior intellectual, social, or economic status." Obama isn't an economic elite, but he is a social and intellectual elite. And it's that creeping sense that he's different, that he's better and knows it, that McCain is trying to exploit. The Obama campaign, similarly, has realized that McCain is an elite, and that voters won't believe that a guy who has so many houses that he can't keep track of them will care if they lose the small condo they call home. This election, in other words, is becoming a contest to decide which type of elite voters hate -- r fear, or mistrust -- more: A social elite or an economic elite?
