The rise of Obama; A response to white liberal guilt?

Byline: Steve Sailer, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES

One Democratic presidential contender has an inherently fascinating family history: Not only does our largest minority group furnish most of his ancestry, but he was also raised in the capital of a foreign country of enormous importance to America.

And yet, little attention is paid to the stalled campaign of Bill Richardson, even though the governor of New Mexico is three-fourths Hispanic and grew up in Mexico City. Instead, Barack Obama, who, as he made sure to tell us in the opening words of his famous keynote address at the 2004 Democratic Convention, is half-Kenyan and half-white, has cornered the market on Ethnic Electricity.

Whether pro or con, white Americans are simply more interested in blacks than in Latinos. And, over the decades, white sentiment has grown increasingly favorable. Indeed, Mr. Obama has a plausible shot at riding strong early showings in virtually all-white Iowa and New Hampshire to the nomination.

Of course, Mr. Obama is also a more intriguing personality than the mundane Mr. Richardson. The senator's 1995 autobiography, "Dreams from my Father," displays more artistic merit than perhaps any other book written by a recent presidential hopeful.

Thus, the timing is perfect for Hoover Institution literary critic Shelby Steele's terse but remarkably insightful "A Bound Man."

The horse-race forecast in the subtitle isn't what's important. Instead, the former English professor, who, like Mr. Obama, has a black father and a white mother, delivers an intimate and authoritative analysis of how the polite Mr. Obama appeals to white Democrats in the same fashion as Sidney Poitier, the gentlemanly 1960s movie star, and why black voters are less enthusiastic.

Many whites assume that the mixed-race and Hawaiian-born Mr. Obama is, in Mr. Steele's words, "indifferent to the whole business of race and identity." According to Mr. Steele, the author of 1990s acclaimed "The Content of Our Character," they see voting for Mr. Obama as proving that they personally aren't guilty of racism.

Mr. Steele suggests that many whites hope electing Mr. Obama president will show blacks that white racism isn't what's holding them back anymore. Numerous white Democrats, I would add, view backing Mr. Obama as confirming their moral and cultural superiority over other whites (those redneck racists). Whites strive for status mostly against other whites, and conceive of minorities primarily as handy props in these intra-racial struggles.

While some whites envisage Mr. Obama as the Cure for White Guilt, blacks are in no hurry to grant the white race absolution for slavery and Jim Crow, since they benefit from compensatory programs like affirmative action.

All the media excitement over how Mr. Obama "transcends race" reveals that most pundits have barely glanced at the candidate's ethnicity-obsessed first memoir, which he aptly subtitled "A Story of Race and Inheritance." Mr. Obama's book, Mr. Steele demonstrates, reveals "a man nothing less than driven by a determination to be black." Many have bought "Dreams," but, despite Mr. Obama's graceful prose style, few have finished it because the Preppie from Paradise's lifelong fixation with proving himself "black enough" makes his tale tediously self-obsessed.

After slogging through "Dreams," Kevin Drum, blogger for the liberal Washington Monthly, complained, "Obama routinely describes himself feeling the deepest, most painful emotions imaginable . . . but these feelings seem to be all out of proportion to the actual events of his life, which are generally pretty pedestrian." Mr. Steele observes, "Obama's racial quest springs from a personal angst, not from an oppression in society."

Although Mr. Obama's mild manner was shaped by his Midwestern mother and grandmother, and by his racially tolerant Honolulu environment, his aspiration was always to be authentically black, and thus liberal. "For Obama, liberalism is blackness," notes Mr. Steele.

That's why Mr. Obama's spiritual mentor for the last two decades has been the Afrocentric and politically radical Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr. The night before Mr. Obama's nationally televised campaign kickoff rally in February, the candidate disinvited his pastor from giving the invocation. The New York Times got an explanation from the loose-cannon minister: " 'When [Mr. Obama's] enemies find out that in 1984 I went to Tripoli to visit Col. Muammar el-Qaddafi, Mr. Wright recalled, 'with Farrakhan, a lot of his Jewish support will dry up quicker than a snowball in hell.' "

If Mr. Obama does win the nomination, the Republicans are likely to make the Rev. Wright as famous as Willie Horton was in 1988.