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Jewish World Review July 14, 2008 / 11 Tamuz 5768 Jackson's ‘Obama trauma’ By Clarence Page
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
What did the Rev. Jesse Jackson mean when he accused Barack Obama of "talking down to black people"?
That was the second question on my mind in a telephone interview with Jackson. My first was something like this: "Did you really say you wanted to castrate Obama?"
As the world knows by now, Jackson says he didn't know he was wearing a "hot mic," a turned-on microphone, on the set of a Fox News program when he made what one newspaper headline called, his "cutting remark."
Remember the old saying about how character is what you do when nobody's looking? Jackson's inflammatory whispers suggest a new twist: Character is what you do when you don't know everybody is listening.
Jackson's comments showed the influential civil rights leader at his worst: frustrated and marginalized.
Jackson was smarting over Obama's recent call to expand President Bush's faith-based initiatives. Twice Jackson snapped that Obama has been "talking down to black people." That was in reference, Jackson says, to Obama's Father's Day address at the predominantly black Apostolic Church of God on the South Side. It was a speech in which Obama revealed his inner Bill Cosby, calling for more parental responsibility, whether assisted by government help or not.
"Any fool can have a child," Obama said. "That doesn't make you a father. It's the courage to raise a child that makes you a father."
Jackson, too, has called for parental responsibility. I was part of the national media that gave glowing coverage to his PUSH for Excellence drive in the 1970s. Across the country he preached to black youths that: "You are not a man because you can make a baby. You're only a man if you can raise a baby, protect a baby and provide for a baby."
One can only imagine how Jackson must feel seeing Obama — or Cosby — receive national applause for saying what Jackson has been saying for decades.
The difference between his approach and Obama's, Jackson said, is that Obama was not saying enough about government and private-sector obligations to help the poor, besides self-help. That's a worthwhile debate. In fact, the self-help versus outside-help argument has been going on inside black America for decades.
The enthusiastic response Obama has received from black audiences belies the notion that he is condescending to them. And Jackson had to twist himself into rhetorical knots to explain how that nuance of difference between his rhetoric and Obama's called for Jackson's shocking response. After all, he insisted, his support for Obama's candidacy is "unequivocal," partly because Obama has addressed so many of the issues about which Jackson cares about on other occasions.
No, I suspect Jackson's objection is less to what Obama said than to who was saying it. Jackson misses that national spotlight that he has not held in recent years. Deep down, his anger suggests that Jackson wanted the world — and Obama — to know the depth of his anger.
His objections sent a message that sounds more personal than political: He will not be ignored. He got his wish, although not with the sort of publicity he would like to have had. Even his son Rep. Jesse Jackson Jr., an Obama campaign co-chair, instantly issued a statement that scolded his father with the strongest rebuke that a loving son could give.
Politically, the elder Jackson's scorn comes as an odd gift to Obama. Working-class white voters and others who were put off by video clips of Obama's former minister, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright Jr., may well be oddly reassured that Obama has upset Jackson.
For African-Americans, Jackson exposed to the world a barber-shop and beauty-salon conversation that has been going on for decades among black folks. Rev. Jackson's presidential runs prepared the way for Obama, but so did Bill Cosby. Black folks used to hesitate to be too self-critical in public, for fear of "airing dirty laundry" and the like. But, despite criticisms from some black intellectuals, Cosby's popularity has hardly suffered. Neither, it appears, has Obama's.
That's because they don't talk down to their audiences
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Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
