On Obama, Lincoln, and Compromise

Emancipation Statue

Emancipation Statue

Saturday’s New York Times had a column by African American novelist Ishmael Reed attacking those leftists that are excoriating President Obama for his willingness to extend the Bush tax cuts in return for a second stimulus package. What particularly galls Reed is that many of these critics refer to themselves as Obama’s base (as in, “Obama is alienating his base”). “All they see is themselves,” Reed says. “They ignore polls showing steadfast support for the president among blacks and Latinos.”

I haven’t followed Reed’s career for many years but I remember having my eyes opened by his 1976 novel Flight from Canada, where he also goes after liberals. There his target is Abraham Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation. The book is set in modern times and begins with the captain of a Canadian-bound airplane proudly announcing to the passengers that they have a fugitive slave on board. (Everyone applauds.) As I recall the book, Reed is upset that Lincoln’s decision to free the slaves was a public relations move to keep England and France from entering the Civil War on the side of the South. To countries suffering from the North’s cotton embargo, “ending slavery” played better than “keeping the union together.” The Emancipation Proclamation was not, as Reed sees it, a principled document but a pragmatic one.

Like a number of black activists in the 1960’s and 1970’s, Reed was upset with paternalistic liberals. The Emancipation Statue, with its benign Lincoln and its grateful slave, would have been exhibit #1. (A song in the 1967 musical Hair refers to Lincoln as “the emanci-mother fuckin’-pator of the slaves.”) I’ve posted in the past on how Malcolm Gladwell has some of these same issues with Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, issues that perhaps can be summed up by the moment at the end of the trial where all the African Americans respectfully rise as Atticus Finch leaves the courtroom. Gladwell criticizes Lee’s novel for sentimentalizing Southern paternalism and failing to acknowledge its impotence against rising segregationists such as George Wallace, who exploited the rage generated by Brown vs. Board of Education.

In 1983 Reed once again went after potential allies when he criticized Alice Walker in The Color Purple for building up black women at the expense of black men. The fight was bitter–Reed talked of black women being emasculating, Walker of black men being sexist–and was one of those arguments where I found myself sympathizing with both sides.  As with Obama and progressives, the real enemy was elsewhere.

Reed’s weekend column is a reminder to white progressives not to assume they are speaking for everyone on the left. In fact, at the moment they are not speaking for me either, dyed-in-the-wool Democrat though I may be. In fact, I would defend Obama against leftist critics in the way I would defend Lincoln against Reed’s novel.

I think that if Lincoln thought he could have ended slavery by signing the Emancipation Proclamation when first coming into office, he would have done so. But he was also concerned with holding the union together and then, even after the Civil War broke out, he was concerned at holding on to as many of the border states as he could. His finessing worked for Maryland, the state where I live, which was a slave society and yet stayed in the union. I don’t know in the end whether Lincoln handled everything correctly, but I think I understand why he did what he did.  By the end of his term in office, official slavery was no more.

I think that Obama wants to have an egalitarian and humane society and that he shares many goals with progressives. As Reed points out, this is a man who has worked with the unemployed in Chicago, and I see no sign of a Willie Stark sellout (an example of which you can see here). Obama’s differences with the left seem more over tactics and tone than substance.

I think Reed has a point when he says that, as a black man, Obama can’t get confrontational or mad. In Reed’s experience, he himself has gotten into trouble every time he’s gotten exercised, and he points to a long history of this being true with others:

Progressives have been urging the president to “man up” in the face of the Republicans. Some want him to be like John Wayne. On horseback. Slapping people left and right.

One progressive commentator played an excerpt from a Harry Truman speech during which Truman screamed about the Republican Party to great applause. He recommended this style to Mr. Obama. If President Obama behaved that way, he’d be dismissed as an angry black militant with a deep hatred of white people. His grade would go from a B- to a D.

What the progressives forget is that black intellectuals have been called “paranoid,” “bitter,” “rowdy,” “angry,” “bullies,” and accused of tirades and diatribes for more than 100 years.

I am no political scientist and don’t know whether or not Obama could have accomplished more in the past two years if he’d done things differently . I’m still amazed that we have a comprehensive health care plan (one, furthermore, that has a shot at controlling long-term health care costs), that we are no longer fighting in Iraq, and that General Motors is still solvent. If somehow Obama manages, miraculously, to get Congress to pass a second stimulus to help us get out of our current economic plight, then I’ll swallow hard and accept an extension of certain tax breaks for people who don’t need them (and that unconscionably add to a deficit Republicans claimed they cared about). In this way I am like Reed’s blacks and Latinos: I’m not used to getting it all and will settle for what I can.

Also, for me as for Reed, the president seems “the coolest man in the room.” For one thing, he comes across as a grown-up.

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