The Daily Voice Debate on Obama (Part I)

We've never tried this before, but we're always looking for new ways to discuss issues on the site. So when our political editor suggested a debate series, we jumped at the idea.

Today, Alvin Tillery, Jr., a political science professor at Rutgers University, begins a debate with Daily Voice political editor Dorian T. Warren, who teaches political science at Columbia University.

DORIAN WARREN: The speech that Senator Barack Obama delivered in Philadelphia last week helped him tamp down the controversy over his relationship with his pastor, Reverend Jeremiah Wright. Indeed, a recent poll by CBS News found that 63 percent of Americans agree with Senator Obama's view of race relations. At the same time, a few African-American intellectuals have raised concerns about the substance of Obama's remarks. To gain a window on some of these concerns, we are talking this week with Alvin B. Tillery, Jr., a political science professor at Rutgers University, who emerged as an early critic of Senator Obama's views on racial politics in posts at the PolySigh and NewsOne blogs. Professor Tillery, thanks for joining us and welcome to the Daily Voice. 

ALVIN TILLERY: Thanks for inviting me to talk about these important issues, Dorian. (Although, I suspect that you set this up because you got tired of me calling you all the time to talk about the campaign.) In all seriousness, though, I am a big fan of the work that Keith Boykin and you have been doing with the political content on The Daily Voice.

DORIAN WARREN: So, Al, enough with the niceties--let's get right to it: you've been very critical of Senator Barack Obama for years, but especially his current presidential campaign. I know your critique of him and his candidacy is embedded in your broader critique of other contemporary African-American political candidates (e.g., Cory Booker, Harold Ford, Jr.), much of which I share. But as a native and proud Chicagoan who is supportive yet also very critical of the senator, I have to ask you, why are you such a hater? Or put more politely, what are your major problems with the Obama perspective on race relations?

ALVIN TILLERY: Well, Dorian, as you know, I have a lot of problems with both the way that Senator Obama has conducted his campaign when dealing with racial issues and also what I see to be his core ideas about addressing racial inequality in America.

As I said in my post at PolySigh, I think that Obama has run, up until the controversy with the Reverend Wright forced him to talk about race relations last week, using a neo-southern strategy. In other words, the vast majority of the signals that Obama sends through his campaign rhetoric seem crafted to soothe the psychic angst of white voters while offering black voters very little.

DORIAN WARREN: Okay, but Obama is running for President of the "United States of America", not President of "Black America". Black candidates running for political offices that are not majority-Black districts have unique challenges that their counterparts don't have. They have to represent a diverse group of voters, whose interests might sometimes conflict. So when you get a Carol Moseley Braun, Deval Patrick, Doug Wilder, Harold Ford, Jr. or Barack Obama, they have different electoral constraints that boil down to this: they have to win a majority of white votes to win the seat, while also holding onto a supermajority of African-American votes in those states. There's no way around that brute electoral fact, and as much as we want them to talk explicitly about race or racial inequality, usually that's a guaranteed losing strategy. It might not be one we agree with (I don't actually, but want to play devil's advocate here and also be fair to these candidates), but it's the political reality. But you just used a term that is striking I want to ask you about. What exactly do you mean by "neo-southern" strategy? As I just explained, aren't these signals necessary if he is to have a chance to win the nomination and the White House?

ALVIN TILLERY:  The neo-southern strategy is a modification of the southern strategy, which, as you know, politicians have used to disavow connections to the black community and ignore black interests since Nixon-Kennedy in 1960. Unlike the southern strategy, the neo-southern strategy is where politicians stress how their identities align them with blacks while simultaneously failing to talk about their issues or make promises to them.

As for Obama needing to use this strategy, I must admit that I am sympathetic to the special challenges that black candidates face win trying to win statewide offices. I mean, as you are well aware, it is impossible to be a political scientist and lack awareness of how hard it is for black candidates to win when whites comprise the majority of the electorate. Two factors, however, militate against my sympathy for Obama on this score.

First, I think that Obama has gone overboard with his signaling to white voters in this campaign. Let's go back to something that the black community either missed or decided to give him a pass on earlier in the campaign--the quote about Reagan. Although, he was able to wiggle his way out of trouble about this remark when John Edwards attacked him about it during the debate that preceded the South Carolina primary, I think that it is a telling example of what Obama has been doing all year. In telling the Reno, Nevada Gazette-Journal that he admired Ronald Reagan for his ability to "change the trajectory of America," Obama said that the key to the late president's success was that he came along at a time when the "country was ready for" a response to "all the excesses of the 1960s and 1970s." As you know Dorian, if Reagan were here with us today, he would tell us (probably with great alacrity) that the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and affirmative action programs were the "excesses" that he was most intent on undermining. He would probably also admit that his willingness to attack these issues which were so crucial to blacks getting a foothold in society after the civil rights movement is what won him the allegiance of the so-called "Reagan Democrats" that every Democratic candidate since Bill Clinton has angled to win back to the party fold.

DORIAN WARREN: Wait a second. My take was that Obama was doing two things with those Reagan statements in his interview with the Reno-Gazette Journal. First, he was trying to win the paper's endorsement, and thus pandering unnecessarily, which I found distasteful. But, more importantly, he was offering an analysis of why he thought Reagan was successful as a national politician at that particular moment. You may disagree with his analysis, but he wasn't making a judgment about Reagan's policies. But his point is partly right even if I'd offer a different interpretation: Reagan certainly did tap into "what people were already feeling", and what they felt were the progressive changes that were fought for and sometimes won in this country from the 1930s through the 1960s were too much. But are you suggesting that Obama's professed admiration for Reagan (I didn't hear him say he "admired" him by the way)  is going to turn back the clock on the basic civil rights legislation? Come on now Professor Tillery!

ALVIN TILLERY: No, I am not saying he intends to turn back the clock. (Although, I must admit that I am somewhat concerned about how well he will be able to defend these policies after the speech he gave last week.) On the contrary, I think that Obama really does believe that his success is a product of this period. Unfortunately, I also believe that Obama is, like Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, and Hillary Clinton, not above downplaying his commitment to these issues and black voters when it is politically expedient to court the favor of white voters.

 That leads me to my second problem with the way that Obama has run his campaign. At the same time that he has been sending these signals to white voters, he is engaging the black community in a way that only suits his strategy. Think back to the other speech that he gave that directly addressed black interests in this campaign: his address to the Ebenezer Baptist Church's congregation on the Sunday before Martin Luther King Day. For a guy who has spent the majority of his campaign electrifying audiences with hopeful messages of "change we can believe in," it was appalling that he spent almost the entire time lecturing the audience about how the foibles of our community are holding us back. To add insult to this injury, most of what Obama said about these foibles, as I pointed out in my earlier piece, was just factually inaccurate. I think this speech, which Obama won widespread praise for in the press, for stressing the importance of "personal responsibility" in the black community was also a signal white voters.   

DORIAN WARREN: But Obama is not Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton, nor Hillary Clinton (who all happen to be white last time I checked). So the constraints on him are a bit different. It's not just about being "politically expedient" to attract white voters. He can't win unless he does. Period. That's not expedient, that's the political reality. I don't like that fact but it is what it is. If he had been running for President of Black America, as you and many of our colleagues seem to want him to do, he would never have become the frontrunner or a serious contender for the Democratic nomination. As to your other critique about his earlier speech, here's where I think you are wrong: that speech wasn't just a signal to white voters. It was also a signal to black voters. Remember, as much as we hate to admit it, the vast majority of black Americans actually agree with the "personal responsibility" messages of Barack Obama and Bill Cosby. And I think you'd agree that most surveys of African Americans can support that. So as much as you and I disagree with Obama, Cosby, and the majority of the black community on this one, he is not outside of the mainstream of black public opinion, and in fact, can actually be said to be representing the socially conservative attitudes of black constituents!

DORIAN WARREN: We'll continue this debate tomorrow with discussion of Obama's speech on race from last week.